Danny Howells

Website: myspace.com/dannyhowells

Oh, Danny boy

Danny Howells’ name is one synonymous with the London DJ scene, specifically the house genre, and has been for many years, almost twenty in fact. Ask him then what he’d choose to do as a career and a lifetime in nursing was what he’d have told you. However a fortuitous discovery of decks at a birthday party celebrating Prince in 1990 helped him to unleash his hidden talent.

“I’d never actually mixed before but we hired in decks, and from that first night (I actually played on these decks which were really old, belt drive, or even six speed maybe didn’t have controls in them) I found that I was able to mix and I think  that was from doing mix tapes when I was a kid, doing the pause button bar structures and I was able to mix, pretty much straight away.

“I knew then that I wanted this to be my hobby that I wanted to have decks at home, that I wanted to be spending all of my spare time doing mix-tapes for my friends and stuff, but never actually at any stage did I say this is what I want to do.

“I just sort of kept hacking away at it and things sort of really fell into place for me.” He says modestly.

As 2009 comes to a close and 2010 (another decade opens) Howells has seemingly never looked back. His non-acceptance into his chosen career way back when and an uncanny ability for mixing music today see him as a master at his craft.

He’s made a healthy career out of laying down danceable progressive house tunes the inspiration for which can strike at the most ordinary of moments.

I remember I was in the kitchen at home making dinner one night, I was struggling to get the bass-line (for In Black his latest single) and then it hit me, I rushed upstairs and layed it down.”

Howells believes there is no specific formula he follows to arriving at his anthems.

“I’ve found with certain tracks,  that you have an idea for a  sample or a bass-line, or chords or  whatever suddenly you can be just fiddling around on your computer using different sounds and you realize you’ve got a certain track there and where did that come from? 
 
That one came together really quickly actually I was really pleased in the space of one evening, I got the bulk of it together and I was very happy with it. Other times you’ve  got one and you find yourself labouring over it for so long you end up  destroying any sort of spontaneity  any sort of like, you once had, you sort of have to go straight in there and whack it out and um… hope for the best.“
 
Despite this casual approach he can sometimes adopt, he’s very much about pushing boundaries. So much so, bored by continually creating sets that spanned 45 or 90 minutes for festivals and club gigs he pioneered a new concept in gig times - introducing crowds with stamina, to mammoth 12 hour sets. These days the key he feels to maintaining his interest is variety in what you’re doing.

“I just got back from the States – fifteen dates in over two weeks, and I did a real a mixture, I played tiny events, I played one room in San Francisco which held maybe max 180 people mind-blowing and then doing a festival on the same day which was like a love  parade kind of thing and then doing  short set here and doing a really long set in Montreal in Canada  which was 12 hours, keeping it all sort of mixed up for me gets me really excited.

“Not doing the same thing two times in a row,” he muses.

His Australian fan base will have an opportunity to share in this variety when he joins the other top heavyweights of house, at Fuzzy’s Field Day, and SummaFieldDayze as well as a couple of club gigs, for good measure.
 
“I don’t really think you go into festivals thinking oh you know I’m going to create a 12 hour sonic sound-scape you’ve got a lot of different artists on at the same time and then you really  give it your best for sort of like 90 mins or two hours but then you’ve got the bonus,  you finish your set, you can go listen to sound-system or you can go listen to Carl Cox hang out with the crowd. Or you can go and get a burger joint, or whatever, it’s just a different sort of thing.

“When you’ve got a sort of tour like this, when you’ve got a lot of guys doing the festival together you hopefully get that sort of comradery together you have a great time  getting sort of too and from the gigs. “

Catch Danny Howells when he plays at, Field Day in Sydney and SummaFieldDayze at the Gold Coast. Visit fuzzy.com.au for ticket and event info.

Ruth Bailey