The Bands Timothy Hassall Timothy Hassall - Profile Interview
Timothy Hassall - Profile Interview |
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Here’s a profile interview of Tim Hassall with Dubai Lime. How long you been playing music? I have been playing music since I was 6 years old. I started on recorder, moved onto sax, guitar, banjo, ukulele, singing and have just been playing harmonica the last couple months. Luckily my parents were both very supportive of my music and really helped to nurture my artistic abilities. Where you from? I moved around a lot growing up. I was born in Watford, UK, but by the time I was 13, I had lived in Papua New Guinea, Brunei, New Zealand and Ras Al Khaimah. At 15 my family moved to Dubai, I started attending Dubai College and immediately formed bands. Then when I finished at school I moved to London to study History and Politics before being awarded a year abroad scholarship to pursue music and theatre training in San Diego, California. After the year abroad I returned to London and finished my degree, via a short musical diversion to Nashville and New York. Currently I am back home in Dubai crafting new songs while trying to promote my own music. Can you remember the first time you picked up a guitar or any musical instrument? What's it like? The first time I picked up a musical instrument was probably a recorder. I had recorder lessons as a young child, which looking back on it was probably the most helpful and embarrassing thing I’ve ever studied musically. I’ll never forget those lessons because my teacher was very stern and scared the life out of me. She conned my parents into making me join a recorder orchestra in this tiny town in New Zealand when I was 10 years old – looking back on it, it was all pretty weird, like a cult minus the bad haircuts, Gatorade and sneakers. However my recorder skills did help me land the lead role for my school’s production of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamlin’. Then when I was 8 I was given a saxophone and a mini guitar with tiny little frets for Christmas – after that things got better.
I started writing songs when I was 13 when I became more serious about playing guitar. I remember getting a disc-man for Christmas and going on this long family holiday around NZ, and listening obsessively to Radiohead’s “The Bends”, Counting Crow’s “August and Everything After” and U2’s “Joshua Tree” – the first albums I owned. From then on I started tentatively writing my own songs, finding a quiet part of the house, or the garden and putting my first clumsy lyrics together. They say that your first love never dies, and when I hear a song off one of these albums as well as Cat Steven’s “Greatest Hits”, and The Cranberries’s “No Need To Argue” I am still transported back to long drives on winding country roads. From that starting point I have branched out into many different branches of music, including rock, acoustic, metal, jazz, experimental, country, electronic, folk, soul and blues. At the moment I am really into creating textures and colours with my music, while grounding my lyrics in personal experiences. In this way quite a lot of my song-writing is a lot more abstract than the standard “he said”, “she said”, “I’m falling down” type songs that seem so popular on the radio. Generally I find these songs depressingly pedestrian, formulaic and unimaginative. Consequently my ambition musically is not to be classed as “easy-listening”, but to get a reaction out of my audience. The biggest thing I’m scared of is my music gaining “background/elevator music” status. Is there a particular genre in your music? Any bands or artists that influence your music?
I class my music as a mixture of the guitar style of folk and blues, mixed with a soul/ reggae singing style, and a harmonica that tries to echo the rusty country sound of the early 60s. Regarding artists that really influence my music in particular, I would have to say Michael Franti of Spearhead, Devendra Banhart, Ryan Adams, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Jackie Green, Guy Clark, John Butler, The Pixies, Dave Van Ronk, Dylanbowiejagggermarley and Jeffrey Lewis. When you write your songs or create your music, what are your inspirations? Consequently I try to go to as many shows (dance, theatre, film, burlesque, circus, comedy) museums (art, history, culture), and read as wide a variety of literature as possible to take inspiration from as many sources as possible – because the possibility of art in my humble opinion is really very unlimited once the artist has achieved technical proficiency (what is often limited is the boundaries of the artist’s imagination).
This style of “collage” song-writing pioneered by new artists such as Devendra Banhart, Coco Rosie and Animal Collective, although it is probably grounded in the music of Talking Heads, Bowie, Laurie Anderson and The Velvet Underground. However, in saying that I will always have a soft spot for a “well-crafted and tightly penned” story that reveals a certain truth that everyone can connect to. The sort of thing that afterwards, as a listener you just want to go up to the artist and say “you nailed it man! I was right there with you in that song. I know exactly how that feels, I’ve been there.” Those kinds of songs will never go out of fashion and that’s why some folk songs have been with us for 600 years and will probably be with us for 600 more if we get that far. At high school I was placed 3rd in the individual section of Young Musician of the Gulf Competition in Bahrain (2002) and won the ensemble section in the consecutive years of 2001 and 2002. I was also the only local Dubai performer to play on the main stage of Dubai Jazz Festival in 2003 playing alto saxophone with the Antonella Consollo big band, on the same stage as Stanley Jordan and Billy Cobham. In 2005-06 I wrote, recorded, engineered and produced an EP entitled "Lions in the Shade" with the help of my close friend and talented musician Jesse Smith of The Pheromones (www.pheromonesmusic.com). It has so far sold 500 copies. “Nu-folk legend” Devendra Banhart invited me onstage, gave me his guitar and let me play one of my own songs when I went to his show at the Vanguard in Hollywood, LA (2005). During the last year I have regularly gigged on the open mic scene in London, highlights include playing the Caravan Club in central, the Whisper Sessions in Wimbledon, and live at the Grey Horse Kingston. Furthermore this year I ran the successful X-Lands Unplugged Open Mic night at Royal Holloway University of London. What are you up to these days? Any upcoming events or gigs and perhaps an album or EP?-:) Gig wise I try to play the Dubai Lime open mics at Central Perk Jumeirah and Café Ceramic. I play regularly at Wafi’s Peanut Butter Jam on a Friday. I am working on a new EP – all the material is written and ready, I’m just trying to put together a plan to get it recorded and out to the public and press. My previous EP can be picked up off me at one of my shows, and hopefully through Dubai Lime in the near future, it’s 25 DHS. Do you have any plans on taking your music to the next level?
I’m hoping to just keep gigging writing and rocking gigs. I have an ultimate plan, it involves £20,000, the dictator of a small West African nation, a shipment of Chilean avocados, a crate of fine Papaya juice and one small luxury jet. If I told you any more I’d have to kill you. I have called Dubai my home for the last 8 years. The Dubai music scene has been traditionally very cover band orientated, and this has resulted in a pretty stagnant situation where its been really hard for local people to find a stage to play their original music. However because of the hard work of local underground communities such as phride.com and dubailime.com, this music has risen in prominence to a level that makes it a really interesting time to be an original musician writing in Dubai. There’s the feeling amongst fellow performers that in the next 5 or 10 years, a local artist or band might just make it playing their own music. I think that it’s only a matter of time. However, I hope that this will be on the back of hard work, talent and real local support, not a flash in the pan advertising campaign with manufactured hype. Like Dubai would stoop to these marketing strategies? Never. What do you do besides music? Any hidden talent?
I surf, play a bit of rugby and get involved in theatre when I can. I can bend the chassis of a Nissan patrol…with my eyes.
It isn’t so far away – what you want, your dreams; aren’t so far away. But don’t just dream – act, seize the day. Nihil Boni Sine Labore – nothing achieved without hard labour. When interviewed most artists I love say the secret to their success was not sleeping for 10 years. I still sleep quite regularly, but I’m trying to take positive steps to get to where I want to be musically. Also to just go out and meet your heroes, dispel your mythology of them and humanise and rationalise how they got to where they are. Listen to them, what makes them tick. This year I met some really inspirational musicians, artists, actors and just shared what I have and tried to listen and learn as much as I could. Thanks so much for giving us a space to play, keep up the legendary work. You’re helping to keep local music living and breathing. Things can only get better.
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Timothy Hassall is Dubai Lime’s artist of the month for December 2007. Tim had played regularly on Dubai Lime’s open mic since the event resume after Ramadan and had capture the community’s attention with his different kind of music. | Next > |
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