Perchance to dream
This month’s forgotten gem in rock’s lost property office: a beauteous Mersey balm for insomnia and Weltschmerz.
The Sand Band All Through The Night DELTASONIC, 2011
BY WINTER 2009, Toxteth-born guitarist David McDonnell had already played in Richard Ashcroft’s live band and deputised for Bill Ryder-Jones in The Coral. But now his world had reduced to a set of haunting songs, a vintage cassette 8-track and a top floor flat with high ceilings and wooden floorboards overlooking Sefton Park in Liverpool. He called the recording space, on Greenbank Drive, ‘The Ether.’
“I remember saying, ‘there’s something brilliant about this room,’” he says today. “Like it was on a ley line or something. I kind of shut myself away, by choice, and recorded mostly at night, when the machinery shuts down and the telephone lines are quiet and the airwaves are free. You think differently in the small hours…” All Through The Night, the one album so far released as The Sand Band, occupies that same rarefied metaphysical hinterland. Hushed, acoustic and largely drum-free, it was created from solitude and interior turmoil – spiritual, emotional and mental – meeting and finding resolution. “I was untethered to anything at that time,” says McDonnell. “It was like building a ship around yourself, to go and do something on your own for the first time.”
With influences including Neil Young, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Richard Hawley, Bert Jansch and Spiritualized’s Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space, the subtly textured, beauteously melodic album draws the listener into an oddly spacious world of illumination and shadows. It immediately strikes a harrowed note with the broken, lovelorn Set Me Free, but as McDonnell cautions, “There was heartbreak, but that’s not all there was. Scott [Marmion, ex- of Peel faves Ella Guru] was writing it with me, and he wasn’t heartbroken.”
Instead, we find the predicaments of existence co-existing with intimations of magic, as when genuine birdsong, heard outside Greenbank Drive one morning, accompanies the Jackson C Frank-esque Song That Sorrow Sings (McDonnell also recalls the room filling with sunlight and an unusual silence while recording it). Glimpses of realities beyond the familiar continue with The Secret Chord’s pursuit of unheard music and Someday The Sky’s riddles of disappearance, while Burn This House and The Gift & The Curse anticipate and ponder retribution.
“Music is an abstract thing and when you’re doing it right it’s all-encompassing,” says McDonnell of the mystery process. “It flows through your body and you’re looking at the other people around you, like, ‘this is incredible.’”
With pedal steel player Marmion lending mellifluous, off-world country flavours, the velvet instrumental title track rises high enough to reveal the curvature of the Earth. Last song If This Is Where It Ends/ Outro achieves closure, as the calming voice of an anonymous American hypnotherapist, discovered during the early noughties boom of online file sharing, persuades the listener to give in to sleep (“I am completely at ease in mind and body. I am serene and tranquil”). For a nocturnal song-suite, which suffers tribulation in its long night of the soul, it’s a perfect ending.
With the merest overdubs in a rehearsal space in Dale Street – Ian Skelly and Jay Sharrock played drums, while guitar was added by Shack’s John Head to Hourglass and the title song – McDonnell finished work in summer 2010. “They were just demos,” he says, “but when I showed it to James [Skelly] from The Coral he said, ‘Do not touch that, that’s done.’”
With The Sand Band signed to the Deltasonic label and a group formed to play the songs live, support from the music press and radio followed All Through
The Night’s January 2011 release. Yet McDonnell, who realised that he did not feel the songs suited a full band playing them, soon withdrew and joined Noel Gallagher’s High-Flying Birds.
“I was scared of showing that much of myself,” says McDonnell. “It was too raw. Then it was, ‘Shit, I’ve got to play the songs and be in this mood all the time.’ I just felt scared. I kind of ran from it. I probably saw joining Noel as an escape, but it didn’t work out.”
A second Sand Band album was mooted in 2012, but apart from a cover of Billie Holiday’s Don’t Explain appearing on BandCamp in 2013, all was silence. In time McDonnell took an office job working in clean energy. “There’s that saying, when the lights go down, leave them down,” he says. “I’d just had an enough of it. I wouldn’t even insult music by putting stuff out in that frame of mind.”
Now, with All Through The Night getting a get a 10-year vinyl reissue for Love Record Stores Day on September 4, McDonnell is planning the band’s belated second album, Leave Some Light Behind, though Marmion, who’s now a tree surgeon, will not be involved.
“Music never leaves you alone,” explains McDonnell. “I’m just really into it again. I’ve come back to the songs and they’re just kind of ready to go, I’m just adding new ones, rearranging… the instrumentation is actually a little different, not so sparse.” He remains happy with All
Through The Night, though, and would be happy to play the songs live.
“I’m out of the space I was in when I made it,” he says, “[but] lots of people have travelled through that space. They still discover it when they need it. There was an honesty to it which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recreate…
I was definitely looking for something, and I found it.”
“I was untethered to anything.” DAVID McDONNELL