Its been a few years since we last heard a release from The Beautiful Girls, while Mat McHugh has spent some time on a solo jaunt, Danechall Days is the first release from the band since 2010’s Spooks.
With the album taking in influences such as dub, dancehall and reggae we asked McHugh to give us a little run down of some of the albums he was listening to while recording the LP. What follows is in-depth look into what inspired and influenced Dancehall Days.
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Johnny Osbourne – Truth And Rights
1980, Studio One
“My favourite reggae singer. Low and sonorous. This is a pretty rootsy album but he had a couple of Jamaican hits with some digital dancehall in the early 80’s too.
Johnny doesn’t actually strike my so much as a ‘reggae singer’ but more as simply a great singer who chose reggae as his medium. If he picked soul he would be on the level with Otis. ‘We Need Love’ could be my favourite ever song.”
Flying Lotus – Los Angeles
2008, Warp Records
“More and more recently I consider myself as a producer/songwriter above being a singer/instrumentalist.
I love the approach of chopping things up to recontextualise them and then mangling the sound until it is something brand new.
I like the idea of limitless sonic possibilities that today’s technology provides and a leading exponent of that mindset is Flying Lotus. A student of Dilla and a nephew of Alice Coltrance. His work is warped and dirty and crackly and dusty and weird. Pretty much exactly like life.”
Daft Punk – Homework
1997, Virgin
“Masters of the simple, hooky dance groove.
I could have picked a lot of other ‘dance’ music that I truly love but Daft Punk are such a great example of an act that is knowledgable about music and cultural history and have wrapped that up in a palatable fashion for the masses.
It’s smart, interesting, sophisticated pop music that you can dance to. Plus it has the unmistakable French savoir faire. What more could you want?”
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry – Super Ape
1976, Island
“My all time favourite producer and a perfect example of how to get cooler and weirder as you get older.
A lot of my heroes have many laps around the sun. Such things weary most of us but the truly weird and heroic just seem to get bolder. A huge influence on the state of modern music.
If you follow the branches back to the trunk Scratch would be there laughing like we’d just discovered the joke.”
Leonard Cohen – Death Of A Ladies Man
1977, Warner Brothers
“Number one lyrical influence.
I aspire to be as three dimensional and well weighted. At one minute this man can make you laugh out loud while the next cleave your heart in two.
He never makes the mistake of either being over earnest nor flippant. There’s not many words I don’t agree with.”
Miles Davis – Tutu
1986, Warner Brothers
“The story goes that Marcus Miller got Miles into the studio (a hard thing to do at the time) and got him to play a whole bunch of disconnected musical phrases.
Later on he chopped the phrases up and re-arranged them before playing along as if the whole thing had happened in the spur of the moment. The genius behind this would be lost on many.
It’s a masterfully arranged and executed album that influences greatly how we chop up music moments of our own and make them into something else entirely. Original gangster.”
Prince – Sign O’ The Times
1987, Warner Brothers
“I played most of the stuff on Dancehall Days and wrote the songs.Prince does that on his records too.
But that’s where the similarity ends.
The guy has so much natural talent and just the right amount of confidence to know what to leave out.That is the biggest lesson he has given me.”
Roxy Music – Avalon
1982, Warner Brothers
“A benchmark for sparse arrangements and beautiful sounds.
Their songs remind me of cities full of sparkling lights. Shiny and cold and lonely.
The feel of a heartache is easy to overstate in music but to acheive it with ambience and sonics alone is a skill not many possess. They make it seem so easy but, as we know, it never is. ”
Dancehall Days is out now, for more info visit www.matmchughmusic.com
