Many bands are born of a defining event—an epic studio session, an inspiring shared event, a prescient record producer. Night Dials almost went down the road of predictable narratives. Almost. The band recorded their first song ‘I’ve Done More Things’ under the direction of Liam Watson at his legendary Toe Rag Studios.
His studio, decked out with pre-1969 equipment, is where Night Dials got their brains humming with the jangle and crackle of decades past. But the five-piece band realized they had no money, had to stop recording at the studio, and crawled into the shadows, back where they belong.
That’s when Night Dials truly coalesced, ditching studio sophistication for a dingy cellar in a London pub. A horrendous looking joint in a nicer part of town, the sort of place at which British royalty slept with escorts in a bygone era. There, Night Dials continued the British tradition of squalid revelry. In the literal underground of London, they perfected their nascent freak recipe of rock, equal parts garage and psychedelic. The band didn’t have the fancy studio equipment Watson’s studio boasted, but they had rattling wine bottles and kegs aplenty, all lining the walls of their shadowy music laboratory. The recordings that followed combined the primitive beats and pop hooks of the early Stones with the tripped out vibrations of the West Coast psychedelic scene… all drenched in an old school reverb reminiscent of anything found on a Pebbles compilation. ?And so, amid the dingy bottles and barrels, Night Dials began a DIY makeover of ‘60s pop.
Historical connections and corrections coagulate in their recordings, creating something undeniably new but utterly familiar. The tangled past presses through the London minds of these cunning pop mavens, who twist all the sounds of yesteryear with an ear to the future and the forbidden.
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