Fyfe Dangerfield – solo artist and former frontperson of noughties indie darlings Guillemots – is sat on a psychedelic couch in his creative space: an old Turkish Delight factory that he’s decorated to bear a striking resemblance to Jimi Hendrix’s bedroom.
“The walls were brown so the first thing I did was cover them with all these different coloured curtains,” he says of his kaleidoscopic decor. “The space you’re in is important. This definitely feels like me.”
We’re chatting with Dangerfield as he releases a new eight-minute track “Shook”. Self-produced and released as a singular, standalone project, the song showcases the limitlessness of Dangerfield’s work. Unfettered by genre or structure, he’s created a dreamlike song that meanders through the songbooks of his past, collecting little flourishes along the way.
For Dangerfield’s Nine Songs selections, we are on a similar journey. Rather than choose music that signposted pivotal moments in his life, he’s drawn to form; to sonic simplicity, to the use of characters in music and the interpolation of mood – most specifically irreverence – into some of the last century’s greatest pop songs.
With his Channels May Change label, and the multi-disciplinary work it produces, he’s interested in the same qualities. Whether on his recent Birdwatcher series of broadcasts, which melded sonic collages and original songs with character work to create a sort of slightly wonky radio show or on “Shook”, we’re reminded that experimentation has always been at Dangerfield’s core.
“There are hundreds of songs I could have chosen,” he says now of the designated task. “These are not the nine most important songs in my life. I think any day I did the list, it would have been different.”
