LOOSE 18th October 2024
Danny has reinvented his direction with confidence a few times, resulting in this; another new feel to his music, yet still distinctively his own personal Americana and featuring stalwart sidement, like the prominent pedal steel of Henry Senior. When I first stumbled across Danny Wilson’s music, he’d just set up solo out of the much-loved cult band Grand Drive, which he’d started with his brother. At that time he was the Essex Bruce Springsteen, full of vim and melancholy, singing about cars and girls. Working with a band full of soul, the street feel was warm and heartfelt.
Half a dozen albums later and six years since the excellent ‘Brilliant Light’, this is almost the same band and definitely the same songwriting voice, but a quite different feel. This is much less punchy and drum-driven, more expansive and paced. Personal songs are nothing new for Danny but these are full of space and a gently melancholic reflection on life and past events. The sound is big on pedal steel, deeply murmuring bass, with limpid guitar lines casting the sort of beauty you might admire on a late period Roxy Music album or a long slow Pink Floyd track from the eighties.
It’s a thoughtful collection, lingering over lovely sounds or lyrical reflections. Saxophone adds colour and helps redefine the sound to be almost AOR, if it weren’t for the very real sense of truth that inheres in Wilson’s lyrics. Snatches of radio and telephone calls are a departure, creating a concept album (even more AOR feels…). From the weather report at the outset leading to ‘Talking A Good Game’, about going through the motions expertly, into testing feelings in ‘Kicking Tyres’. The frustration of a holding message at a call centre marks the passing of the day and the wandering thoughts of ‘The Robot Cries’ or the memories of ‘I’m In Love’. ‘Future Past’ tells us “I used to be so sure but I’m not so sure any more”. “The love that’s round the corner cannot be photographed and placed into an album called the future past”.
The set ends on ‘Sooner Or later’, where Danny resolves actions that might happen – or maybe the day will repeat, stuck in a groove worn by time. It’s a record for the middle-aged man, someone looking up and saying, “what am I doing and why”? ‘Sooner Or Later’ is a big singalong, and I can imagine a live crowd singing “sooner or later we get found out”, hymning human fallibilities, frustrations in love and life, the joy and pain in life and the wise calm that settles as Wilson accepts himself and the people he’s been.
Danny says, “There’s nostalgia in there, and there’s regret. These aren’t huge epiphanies. They’re little things that you’ve suddenly realised about yourself, about life and the weirdest thing is that by singing about not trying to be universal, these are possibly the most universal things I’ve ever written.”
Other reviews of Danny & the Champions of the World
Danny and the Champions Of The World – A reet champion Yorkshire gig