![A-Z of Dead Man Singing: M](https://assets.netl.io/media/cover_plus_soundwave_I74DS5t.png)
A-Z of Dead Man Singing: M
229 days ago
M is for Music. Nailing Dave’s sound was important for me: think of a British take on American rock, leaning more to country rock than blues and to melody more than bombast. The best triangulation I managed to find was the Faces or early-70s Who crossed with the Band. Dave is strong on rootsy authenticity and has an inherent mistrust of orchestration and other musical self-indulgences.
Inevitably, Dave’s taste in music has a huge overlap with mine, but they are by no means identical. As a rule of thumb, there’s nothing that Dave likes that I don’t, but there is a lot of music I like which leaves Dave cold. He’s not a fan of Glam Rock, meaning that the likes of Roxy Music and David Bowie don’t loom large in his musical landscape. Dave has a knee-jerk reaction against Punk, which taints his view of much that came after it. I like to think that when his life continues after the events of Dead Man Singing, some artists that he has previously disregarded – Elvis Costello for one, Paul Weller for another – might find him more receptive. Dave was never a Prog Rock fan either, whereas my teenage years were generously soundtracked by the likes of Genesis, Yes, Camel and the Alan Parsons Project. He does have a Wishbone Ash album in his selection of 100 albums which, along with Procol Harum, is as close to Prog as he gets. There’s a dismissive remark about the Electric Light Orchestra in the book too, which is definitely more Dave than me.
As I was curating Dave’s record collection it dawned on me that he is eighteen years older than me (he is 40 at the time of Dead Man Singing; I was 22), meaning that I was ignorant of a lot of the music that would have excited him as a teenager. Although my listening tastes have always been retro – much of Dave’s 70s taste was already in heavy circulation on my own playlist – I knew I had to dig deeper to find Dave’s musical soul. That digging led me to discover a number of bands that I had never seriously checked out: the Byrds and their various spin-offs (Dillard and Clark were a revelation), Buffalo Springfield, and Moby Grape are examples of these: very few of them were unknown to me, but like footballers from previous generations: I knew the names and reputations, but had no direct experience of their playing. Now that I’ve put that right, I think of them as Dave’s gift to me.
What music from ‘before your time’ resonates the most strongly for you?
There are no comments yet, be the first to comment...
Your comment will first need to be approved before it is visible.