Anthology Recordings

Record Label

Anthology Recordings have a number of Artists, this is just one of them:

MARK DANIELS: ANTHOLOGY
The unearthed, unheard classics

You probably won’t know Mark Daniels’ name – but whether in the clubs, in a chilled out bar or on numerous film and TV scores, you’ve heard his music… That of Marden Hill, 45Dip, and The Sugarman, to name but three ‘bands’ created by this reclusive songwriter /producer /Svengali who was the originator of Trip Hop, Acid Jazz, Big Beat, Chill Out and other early subgenres of the broad church we now call Electronica.
And you’ll certainly know Daniels’ many musical collaborators – including Ashley Beadle (Xpress3, Ballistic Brothers), Rui Da Silva (Underground Sound of Lisbon), James Lavelle (Mo Wax), Andrea Oliver (Rip Rig and Panic), JC001, Will Parnell, Brian Auger (Hammond Organ maestro famed for his work with Led Zep, Hendrix and Rod Stewart among many others) and Gorillaz – and they’re just the groove merchant side of things. Other prominent guest artists include names less likely to be heard growling along with seriously blunted beats – such as the late Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band frontman Viv Stanshall, and film star Harry Dean Stanton.
This album is the result of a personal journey… Without much luck, I’ve been trying to track down the elusive Mark Daniels for two years now, because I wanted his blessing for this collection of his music I’m releasing (since the man himself is clearly never going to re-release this stuff, let alone emerge from wherever he’s hiding, I think someone ought to).
Because this is, simply, great music from the many incarnations of a man who never really cared whether anyone heard it or not!
So please, read on – and enjoy the seminal sample tracks I’m enclosing with this press release!
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Always shunning the limelight, Mark Daniels has never done an interview, was very rarely photographed and has virtually zero presence online – which is pretty ironic considering he’s been several steps ahead of the musical game for nigh on three decades! Which is why even I’d never heard of him until it dawned on me that his name appeared in the small print on records by three of my favourite bands: Marden Hill, 45Dip and The Sugarman… Of course none of those outfits enjoyed any significant commercial success – but I think they would have, had they been promoted even a little bit. But nope, seminal tracks that I believe are classics, such as Bardot, Come On, Hijack and Harlem River Drive, were just quietly put out without fuss or fanfare for people to find in their own time. So this is the first time they’ve even been put forward for review!
Ironically, this journey – my search for the elusive Mark Daniels – began on a holiday in the South of France. As is my wont, I was trawling the second-hand vinyl record shops in Avignon when I noticed that a purist vinyl shop graced its window display with a single sacrilegious CD. It was the first Marden Hill album I ever bought – the sublime Acid Jazz classic Blown Away! I asked the store-owner how come just the one CD in his temple to vinyl and his answer blew me away. ‘Because, ’ he said, ‘it’s one of the great records of its time… Almost impossible to find on vinyl so we break the rules just for Marden Hill and for Marden Hill only! ’
He then beckoned me over to the tatty 12” singles under ‘B’ and proudly brandished a single called Stoked by Beamish & Fly, pointing out the co-writing /performing credit: Mark Daniels!

Till then I’d thought I was the only man in the world who loved this stuff. Wrong! Later on, in a backstreet restaurant I found myself listening to a French cover version of another Marden Hill song! I mean, OK, the French do seem to have turned the Acid Jazz groove into a bit of a rut, so no great surprise they’re into Marden Hill – but the deeper I dug around into the web, trying to track Daniels down, the more new, genre-defining music and mental monikers I unearthed.

I managed to exchange a few words with a few of his collaborators… Kevin Saunders, vocalist on Hijack, for example…
‘I’m trying to get an interview with Mark Daniels, ’ I said.
‘Good luck, mate! ’ he laughed.
Others were more forthcoming, and gradually I’ve gleaned the following insights on how a quiet man has been a big noise in terms of influence directly and indirectly on entire genres as well as on many far more well known artists.

Marden Hill went from being the darlings of the beautifully eccentric El Records, making 60s film score music (the first to use spoken word samples from film and TV embedded in tracks in 1982 – long before Big Audio Dynamite) to being first out of the gate with Acid Jazz and a few years later inspiring the term Trip Hop. His first cartoon band 'Beamish and Fly' (described as the Archies on crack) pre-dated Gorillaz by four years and introduced the world to the phenomenon known as Big Beat that was popularized by the likes of Fatboy Slim (It’s also rumoured that Daniels was instrumental in the creation of Gorillaz with Jamie Hewlett).
With 45Dip, he made one classic, era-defining album The Acid Lounge in 2000 before launching The Acid Lounge compilation series on Hedkandi, each release complete with a comic that followed Daniels and his musical partner of the time Chris Bemand's drug-fuelled adventures in space and time (it seems he’s only willing to emerge from behind the scenes in cartoon form! ). With the third of my personal favorite bands, The Sugarman, he and collaborator Andy Wilson started to explore a softer, simpler style of what you might call electro dub that recalls Eric Satie in its maximization of minimalism.
I’ve solved many mysteries on this adventure – such as why Marden Hill’s liltingly mellow Bardot featured on a banging Ministry of Sound compilation and countless other dance CDs… Apparently it’s because, like the Doors’ Riders on the Storm, it was the DJs’ favourite ‘Three Pill’ track! But although I’ve discovered there are only three records he ever listens to these days, I still haven’t found out which ones!

I thought perhaps Daniels was some kind of drug-addled Timothy Leary hippy type – but a report on the manner of settling a dispute about ownership of the Gorillaz concept suggests otherwise – apparently with a Glaswegian kiss for one Jamie Theakston in Damon Albarn’s kitchen and by pissing through Albarn’s letterbox! More accurate, then, would be to describe him as a 20th (now 21st) century Don Quixote, wilfully screwing his career with an almost heroic adherence to his principles, a love of lost causes and a fondness for choosing each day’s creative medium with a roll of the dice.

Too shy for live performance, he turned down a gig at Glastonbury, and after a Billboard article proclaimed Marden Hill as the next British invasion of the US charts, he declined a major US tour… And, according to one of his many record labels, even they couldn’t track him down with the offer of $100, 000 to use one of his songs to advertise a US brand at the Superbowl! They checked the record contract to find his address in order to write to him for permission, only to find that he’d signed it: Monty Albino, Sugarloaf Cottage, Toy Town!
It’s been a nightmare choosing the 12 tracks featured here from the 40 or more I’ve unearthed so far – and rumors suggest I’ve yet to hit the motherlode of unreleased material, scraps of projects that never quite came to fruition and rare recordings from other bands Daniels has been involved with – Spacehopper, Sly and Defoe for starters… Apparently he’s been working on a film score too… But for now, these 12 diamonds in the dust is the best I can do.