Dale playing live (Photo Credit, Mark Kenyon - Editor)
TEJ: Have you thought of a title for your next album?
DN: No is the answer to that question. I’ve had some ideas in and out of my mind.
TEJ: What inspired you to write this current album that you’ve been working on?
DN: Being alive... You know. I get ideas and it’s just a case of whether I take the time to pick up a guitar or hit a keyboard and make the sound and record it.
I can’t stop getting the ideas.
TEJ: Have you used any of the musicians that guested on Cubed, on this project?
DN: Keith Blundell's played drums on a couple of songs, but it would be wrong to refer to this as an album or anything like that, because after Cubed I probably won’t do another album, per say, because it takes money to do that.
TEJ: And, obviously, as you’re not signed to a record label…
DN: Yeah, nobody’s interested in me, is a more blunt way of putting it.
The reason why I did Cubed was ‘cos I happened to have enough money around at the time and because the band offered to allow me to list it on the Genesis website.
It was generally thought that enough Genesis fans would buy it out of interest, loyalty and stroke, whatever would recoup my investment.
DN: That was the tangible reason.
The intangible reason for doing Cubed was like I said, I had enough money to do it at the time, but I could do it and I felt for once in my life I should do a CD properly.
Cathy, who was the original website designer, offered to do the artwork and she encouraged me to go for it.
Other people (I’m not going to name names), said “it sounds great, you should it”.
TEJ: Regarding your back catalogue, 'The Eyes Have It' and 'The Little Things That Matter'...are they out of print now?
DN:Well, I wish somebody would get them because there must be boxes of them somewhere.
I never sold more than a box or two.
Helmut Janisch at Decision Products, that’s who you need to get in touch with Helmut, is a guy from IT (A German Genesis Fanzine).
TEJ: When you supported The Musical Box, what did you play and how did it feel?
DN: I would have played; ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’, ‘Anyway’ and ‘Ice Cream Soldier’. I can’t think of the others. It was educational.
This is why I need to do another CD, because by doing those gigs, I discovered that I couldn’t play my own songs. I knew that anyway,
but I had no reins on me in the studio. I could do whatever I wanted because I wasn’t playing them live.
I didn’t have any expectation of playing them live.
DN: I had a quite unrealistic dream that some band somewhere would pick ‘em up and play them live, so I could get away with doing anything...
...but then when I actually got a gig I realised that I couldn’t play for several reasons. One of which, was that I’d never actually played them before.
They were put together like building blocks and the guitar was certainly not the central instrument on a lot of them.
I couldn’t go off on these long instrumental passages, because it’s just me and a guitar and so I learned two lessons.
One, was that the songs wouldn’t just stand up on an acoustic guitar, ‘cos I couldn’t play it, so I had to re-arrange ‘em,
and the other lesson was that if I did re-arrange them the songs did stand up and they did work. So it had an immediate effect on my writing.
I immediately started writing in a manner that I could reproduce live. It just came naturally.
I had the experience of a few gigs, but I had that behind me which affects the way you do things.
TEJ: How did you come to opening for The Musical Box?
DN: Er... because they’re very anal about Genesis! I say that with a smile on my face guys!
I think originally they probably sent me some questions, like these guys do... about which fuzz tone was used on the middle guitar part in some song in 1974.
Somebody was in contact with Peter Gabriel, probably their manager, Serge, and I got an e-mail, either from the office or Peter, or copied to both of us,
but Peter expressed some interest in aiding them to do The Lamb show.
The Lamb show was the first tour I worked on.
DN: I’m the only one around here who goes back that far, so I was sort of vaguely aware of what was happening from that and then
Tony Smith was here one day and was lamenting that The Lamb had never been filmed or anything like that…"too bad we don’t have the slideshow".
I just said, “Well, but we do” he looked at me and said,
“What do you mean?”.
I said, “Well, we have the slides”. and he said
“Well I’ve been looking for those for years” and I said “Well, you asked the wrong person”,
‘cos you know we have buildings full of stuff here and I just happened to know where the slides were and nobody had ever said to me “do you know where The Lamb slides are?”,
and so from that we did a deal with those guys so that they could use the slides to make copies of, and that gave it authenticity for them. And they helped us by putting it in the right order, ‘cos nobody here would sit down and do that.
DN: I got to know them via e-mail that way, through a couple of intermediaries.
And then when they were rehearsing at Chid Club, they invited me down, and so as a gesture of goodwill I mentioned it to Mike,
“Why don’t you come down with me for five minutes and say Hello? What do you think?”. He went “Yeah”, so we went down
They’re nice guys, I get on with them quite well. I think they do as good a job as anybody can. I let ‘em see the studio, just because of their interest in Genesis, and then the next thing I knew, Serge e-mailed me, some time later...
”What’re you up to?” and I said “Well, I’ve started playing live” and they said “Well, we’ve got a couple of gigs in the UK, do you want to open for us?” and so I opened for them. It’s that simple.
TEJ: Were the gigs recorded?
DN: Yes. I have a very good DVD of Montreal.
TEJ: Any plans to release this in the future?
DN: Somebody else would have to organise that. The problem with playing solo live is that by about the fourth song, you need a something just to lift it up a little bit and unless you’re Bob Dylan singing all those songs, although the audience was great, I fell a little bit flat on the fourth, fifth and sixth songs, just because I had nowhere further to go. I have videos of most of the gigs I’ve done which is only about four or five but the later gigs I made backing tracks to the newer songs which are more bandy sounding. I have backing tracks of just the bass, drums and string parts. And that works. That’s all I need. It takes it up to that next step and gives the audience something to listen to.
TEJ: And obviously you enjoyed that thoroughly?
DN: Yeah.
TEJ: Would you do it again?
DN: Yeah.
TEJ: The Musical Box are touring in England in April this year, aren’t they?
DN: Yeah, well, I’ve been waiting for the phone to ring...
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