“I’VE PUT PEOPLE BEHIND BARS”
You might think he’s just the nice guy from the world’s biggest djent band, but Dan tompkins’ life before tesseract was a very, very different story
Dan tompkins quit tesseract in 2011, re-joining the proggy tech metallers three years later, but he can still recall the pain of seeing them with a different singer. It was 2013, and Dan’s then-band Skyharbor had been invited to support tesseract in russia. he shelved his pride and played the show, but can remember exactly how he felt, standing in the wings of the stage watching his erstwhile band go onto greater heights with ashe o’hara on vocals.
“It was terrible. I hated it,” he recalls. “It was like someone was taking my baby. When I was watching Deception [Concealing Fate, Pt. II] I had the most overwhelming urge to just run up onstage and start singing because that was my song. I wrote that. Seeing people’s reaction to it, going crazy, my stomach was turning inside out. I felt sick.”
In these kind of situations, all you can do is pick yourself up and get back in the ring, and Dan has been laughing in the face of adversity and confounding expectations his whole life. his childhood was spent in a small town outside of Nottingham, a tight-knit community in which most of his family lived on the same street. Back then, a career in music seemed like a far-off dream, yet today he’s talking to Hammer via Skype from his home vocal studio – physical proof of just how far determination and hard work can take you.
“my horizons were not that broad,” he reveals. “It was such an unrealistic notion that I would ever be in a successful band. Who did that? I’m a kid from the middle of nowhere in this quiet mining town that’s got no connections. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the future. I just knew that I liked to sing. I was painfully shy and I used to suffer with quite a bad stammer. If I had to speak in front of a group of people, I would go purple in the face. But I wouldn’t shy away. I just stood up and did it.”
Dan saw a speech therapist when he was young but it was singing, not the therapy, that brought him slowly out of his shell. “From a young age I knew that I had a natural ability to perform and to sing. Whenever I sang I didn’t stutter, so singing for me was like a release.”
aside from those struggles, Dan had a happy upbringing, raised as an infant by his mother and his grandmother, and his youthful memories have had a wonderful impact on his music. “I had a fantastic childhood,” he says fondly. “every time I start a new album campaign, I drive out to the area and the street I grew up on to get perspective and relive those emotions. I have this vivid memory. I stayed out ’til 10 o’clock at night and we were just running and dancing in the rain, bouncing around under orange street lights and getting absolutely soaking wet. that’s the freest I’ve ever felt and I put it in an old Skyharbor song.”
Dan fell in love with metal in his teens via linkin Park and marilyn manson, and by then he’d realised that, with his larynx-bending voice, he had some serious talent. however, his small-town upbringing meant that his dreams were constrained by social expectations. “I grew up with the mentality of you work hard, you get a job, you have kids and you settle down,” he reveals. “I had a lot of pressure to follow that life.”
as a self-confessed softie, he surprised everyone – including himself – when he joined Nottinghamshire Police aged 18, a time when the city had been tagged by the media as gun capital of the UK. “Being a police officer, you see things that the general public are shielded from on a daily basis,” he says. “I’ve found people hanging from roofs, I’ve put people behind bars. my first job was responding to a lady in an alley. She’d been stabbed multiple times in her breasts and she’d been raped and robbed. I had to grow a serious thick armour. I became very bitter, very cynical, which is why tesseract’s first album [2011’s One] has a lot of heavy, dark topics.”
Dan says all this very matter-of-factly, the result of being thrown into a world of confrontation and having to sink or swim. But behind that veneer, the things he’s seen have taken a mental toll. Still, he’s in the mood to share his own, painful experiences in the hope it might help others.
“I had to see a [police] counsellor for a long time because the things I was seeing affected me so much,” he remembers heavily. “I dealt with a case where a lady was injected with heroin against her will, hit with a baseball bat, burnt and chained to a bed. She had kids who were so neglected they ended up burning the house down and at the end of the day… she went back to him. that was one of the hardest moments of my career as a police officer. that is what April [from One] is all about. People have asked me what that song is about for years.”
Although his time in the police wasn’t always easy, Dan was a high flyer, eventually rising to the top of his pay grade. Yet music proved an irresistible pull. he had discovered tech metal after hearing Sikth on the radio and, soon after, he experienced his first proper foray into the industry as a member of post-rock outfit Piano. “I would do a day shift from 7-4 then drive to london, play a gig, drive back at three in the morning and go to work at 7am because I could not let go of the idea of being in a band,” he reminisces.
“there was something deep inside that was pushing me.”
By the time he joined tesseract, Dan had been a police officer for eight years. When the band were offered a record deal, he went to his employers to request a career break. they refused. “Something snapped in me,” he says. “I took a massive leap of faith and resigned.”
on one hand, quitting the police to go full-time with tesseract made every one of
Dan’s dreams a reality. on the other, he had gone from earning a healthy salary to struggling to make ends meet. additionally, time away on tour was putting strain on his personal relationships. “after the first year, I earned a pittance. I was frantically stressing, ‘how am I going to support my family?’ every time a tour came up, I was the first to say, ‘I’ve got reservations.’ It got to the point where I didn’t want to hold them back. Something had to give. If I remained in tesseract, I may have had to sacrifice the life that I had at home. It was either one or the other.”
While Dan grappled with the decision to leave tesseract, he was asked to join a poprock act who were on the verge of signing a major record deal. all of a sudden, he had an opportunity to make a real living from music. It was a chance he couldn’t turn down and, after quitting tesseract, he once again stepped into the unknown. “I went from being a metal artist, touring around in a tiny little van, to getting flown out to thailand and going into a five-star recording studio,” he explains. “then relationships broke down and we lost all the offers. It was a massive letdown, talk about highs and lows. I was really depressed.”
During his four-year break from tesseract, Dan had to fight relentlessly to regain his place in the music industry. Since 2010 he had been providing vocals for Skyharbor, with guitarist
Keshav Dhar, and over the next five years they transformed the band from a casual, DIY project, to a going concern.
Now he’s a veteran musician, having released multiple albums over the years with bands including experimental pop collective White moth Black Butterfly and the 80s-influenced Zeta.
he returned to tesseract in 2014, but this time he’d taken steps to ensure he’d never have to leave again, developing a vocal coaching business that finally allowed him to sustain a living from music. Smiling fondly, he remembers the first time he walked back onstage with tesseract, in front of 10,000 people at Sonisphere 2014. “We rehearsed once and stepped onstage like nothing had changed. the chemistry was still there, everything. Finally I felt things were coming together again.”
this is shaping up to be tesseract’s biggest year yet, as the band gear up for the release of their fourth album, Sonder. the title is taken from author John Koenig’s online Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows and defined as ‘the realisation that each random passerby is living a life that’s as vivid and complex as your own’.
“Someone tweeted the word ‘sonder’ and it really resonated with me,” Dan explains. “We all live really selfish lives because we live in our own heads, but the reality is we’re quite insignificant. When I started to explore the Dictionary, I realised this guy was literally at the forefront of linguistic progression and I think that really does go alongside the progressive nature of tesseract.”
Now with Dan firmly back in the fold, the band are in a much-needed period of stability. as well as being their most forwardthinking album yet, Sonder marks the first time in the band’s 11-year history that they’ve had the same singer across two consecutive releases. Dan is happy and feeling positive about the future. “I think that time away really did us all good,” he says. “But now we definitely have a long-term plan. like, I’m not going anywhere. We want to be writing together for the rest of our lives.”
Sonder IS OUT NOW VIA KSCOPE
“I SAW THINGS THE PUBLIC ARE SHIELDED FROM” AFTER WITNESSING HORRORS IN HIS JOB, DAN WENT FOR COUNSELLING