​THE DACHA BAND

‘One Fair Day’ was never supposed to be released as an album. Essentially, it is a shout of grief, a catharsis of sorts, conducted a few days after my Mother’s funeral. The majority of the songs had been written in a few hours, shortly after her death one Sunday morning in April 2008. Lead by ‘Cold, Cold, Cold,’ the set is uniformly downbeat and even those songs written earlier, such as ‘Dead House,’ that were included, are dressed in black.

 

The one session for the album was conducted in a strange silent atmosphere with the three of us sitting in the round, close together, hunkered down. Lee played piano beautifully, Steve played brushes with a sort of belligerent lightness and I played acoustic guitar (which I subsequently edited out) without much regard for the chords. For a time after the session, we considered adding bass, organ and the rest, but the more that I listened to the songs, the more I realised that absolute truth was the only way to go. Therefore what you hear on the album is exactly what we played that day, with all its faults left in. There is no reverb or effect, save that which I had on my voice during the session. The result is something that is hard to listen to, close to gospel at times and fairly devastating for those involved. Its impact was still reverberating several years later. Indeed, when Lee came to leave for a new life in Brighton, I asked him which of the photographs of the band, hung in the studio, he would like to take with him. He chose the picture taken by Ken that occupies the inner of the CD cover, recalling the atmosphere of the session still as something special.