Dan Black talks about his sound and who influences him.

For those that haven’t heard you, how would you describe your sound and who would you say your influences were?

I guess I’d say my sound was quite disparate. I could probably list a load of people but that would be quite boring. so the most important things are kind of slightly modern, experimental, kind of hip-hop production, mixed with quite heart felt, English alternative pop, mixed with a film tracky soundtrack sound. To touch on that say Missy Elliot, The Smiths, Sigur Ros.

You’ve been tipped for big things this year. Do you find that that adds pressure for you?

I want that, I want people to like what I’m doing and think I am going to do well. If no one was hearing me it’d be s***. I want people to go “he might do well” or “he will do well”.

I’ve heard you’ve had something of a run in with the Notorious BIG regarding what was going to be the new single ‘Hypntyz’, could you tell us a bit about that?

It’s a long story. Basically I did a song called ‘Hypnotise’ that took varying, crazily difficult to clear samples, and over the top of it I wrote a melody to the song by Notorious BIG, ‘Hypnotise’.  And it was going to be my next single and on the night of the video shoot for the single, day before the single, we suddenly got word from Notorious BIG’s estate, he’s dead now, saying you can’t use the lyrics. Apparently they have a policy, which we didn’t know about, where they flatly refuse any use, and the problem was we thought it was a cover, because I was just using his lyrics. But because I’d written a melody to it, it meant that technically it was an adaptation, which meant that they had the right to veto it, so they veto’d it. But fortunately, I sucked that s*** up and went ‘f*** this’ and went away and quickly wrote brand new lyrics and re-recorded it.

You were saying about ‘Symphonies’, we believe the composition was the drumbeat from Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ and the soundtrack of a film we’ve never heard of.

The film’s called Starman, it’s an 80s sci-fi film.

So is that typical composition for your songs or was that an exception?

When I started doing what I’m doing, I used to be in a band, and I decided to go solo. When I sat down to write, there were lots of bits of music that I was like “I love that, wanna do something like that”, but they seemed to be from very alien worlds. And I’d been making, from DJing, some funny two minute DJ style mash ups anyway, so I thought I’m gonna make these mash ups, take the things I really love and see if I can Frankenstein-ly sew them together and then also sing something else on top. And I did a load of them just as experiments, but a couple of them came out as something in itself, not just a novelty. Anyway, so most of what I did, or 97% of my music is original, or like a similar thing where I’m putting things together, but it was the next step for me, where I wasn’t using samples, I was making my own sounds and putting them together. But yeah, ‘Hypntyz’ was just its own thing really.

Who would be your ideal festival headliner, past or present?

Houdini.

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