​THE DACHA BAND
Authentic Music and Artistry
​
Time for Difference Stuart Maye-Banbury, songwriter and music producer tells the Dacha Band story.
​
"Some time around the summer of 2006, I began thinking about music again after a long lay off, and about the hundreds of songs I had written, but never managed to record, during my years in a series of spectacularly unsuccessful indie bands, all through the eighties and nineties. I began to realise that I had held back these songs chiefly because I didn’t want to hear them recorded by the sort of band I was in and that I had a particular sound in my head all along. I also realised that I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had managed to recreate that sound and that, suddenly, a chance had presented itself to achieve this ambition. The log cabin that became known as ‘The Dacha,’ was originally constructed as an office for my wife, Angela. But, when she decided to resume her career in academia, it was bequeathed to me. I had recently acquired a small portable recorder and a Roland keyboard that contained a pretty decent Rhodes piano function, and it became apparent that, with a trio, I could begin to make home made albums, in a manner that suited me."
"I was extremely lucky that a group of incredibly talented people just happened to be at hand. My brother Steve and I had played together for years and I knew that there was no more solid drummer, willing to improvise, around. My friend Ken Snodin was just beginning to get into Digital art and was so versatile and talented an artist, that anything I threw at him, however obscure, he seemed able to interpret visually in moments. That only left a vacancy on the keyboards. Once again, luck was on my side. When I had gone into the local music shop to buy my Roland keyboard, I had asked the salesman to give me a demo of the Rhodes function. The stuff he played was so fluid and inventive that I immediately asked him if he would like to do some session work. The salesman was Lee Spreadbury, at that time still playing with the noted Leicester band, ‘The Dirty Back Beats,’ and just about the best piano player in the city."
The Dacha Band Story
Jel Nixon
"The key to the Dacha Band sound was improvisation. Although the songs would be written formally and the albums themed, the arrangements would be verging on the spontaneous. Lack of time and money dictated this to some degree. But it also seemed an antidote to the overproduced, homogenised music that surrounded us. I have always hated the phrase, ‘low-fi,’ what we were after was simply the true sound of three people sitting down in a room and playing, first thought, natural, uncluttered by technology. With occasional variants along the way, that was what we got. Overdubs were kept to a minimum. There were never more than four mics at any session. Most tracks were run through once and then recorded, first take. It means that the Dacha Band albums can occasionally sound hurried, there are duff notes here and there, sometimes tracks just don’t work. But, like a diary, they are a true record of the sound we made, good and bad. It is music in the real world. We are all human, sometimes we err, sometimes we soar. Five years and twenty odd albums later, we found ourselves with a body of work that may not have been to every body's taste, but was always interesting and, more importantly, our own. We never set out to make ‘commercial’ music. We had no intention of launching a career on this work. It was essentially private, the fulfilling of thoughts trapped inside. Money did not enter into it. It was always music for its own sake. Creativity as diversion and pleasure."
"What follows represents am audiovisual selection of the work on the Dacha over that five year period. I have written these notes, first thought, very much in the spirit of the music. If my memory strays, I apologise. The sessions we recorded during those five years often seemed to blend into one another in my mind, never less than enjoyable, often wonderful."
​
Stuart Maye-Banbury, September 2010