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- Zac Laurence
- Spaceward Studios
- Simon Morgan
Danny’s musical life has been shaped by three experiences:
- Taking a course of six piano lessons with professional pianist Zac Laurence aged 11
- My friendship and songwriting collaboration with Simon Morgan during the synthesiser-fuelled days of 1982 – 1984. This was the synthpop era that established the careers of the likes of Depeche Mode, The Human League, Heaven 17; even Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran. We longed for Sequential Circuits Prophet 5s, for Roland Jupiter 6s – and if we could afford it, which we couldn’t, Jupiter 8s. To say this was a sexy era of music technology would be a gross understatement. Anyway, we would write songs in UCS’s ‘crypt’, an underground opportunity for wannabe public school cricketeers to show their wares. So we came up with ’Coming Home’. And Simon’s brother, another Morgan, collaborated with a McVey, who at Matrix Studios, was responsible for another of the great album debuts of all time: the genre-defining Bristol trip-hop’s Massive Attack’s Blue Lines with it’s stunning Unfinished Symphony finale; up there with The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows as an album finale. And Simon helped mix the strings on Unfinished Sympathy to my eternal envy…
- Spaceward Studios. Having composed the soundtrack to my mother’s ‘Snow Magic’ animation film, I was lucky enough to head up to Cambridge where this wonderful studio was based. I did a few sessions as Assistant Tape Op – basically calibrating the 24 track reel to reel tape machine. Just putting sine waves at 1k Hz through the system to make sure that the sound that went in was the same that went out. To say I was a wide-eyed teen would be a gross understatement (but I played it cool; or at least I tried). With the likes of The Stranglers and Julian Cope hanging around, who wouldn’t be. Suddenly my heroes came to life.
