A bit about Darrell:
Top 5 songs of all time:
- Jackson Browne – Your Bright Baby Blues
- Pink Floyd – Shine On You Crazy Diamond
- Joni Mitchell – Man From Mars… even if it is about her cat
- The Smiths – This Charming Man – the guitar riff to end all riffs
- Marvin Gaye – Let’s Get It On
Top 5 albums of all time
- Neil Young – On The Beach/Tonight’s The Night/Zuma – the all time best trio of consecutive albums by any artist ever…
- Cocteau Twins – Heaven Or Las Vegas/Four-Calendar Café/Milk & Kisses… the all time best trio of consecutive albums by any group ever
- 10,000 Maniacs – In My Tribe – most of my favourite records are ‘down’; this is the best ‘up’ record I own
- Miles Davis – The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions – 5CD version of the moment Miles found perfection
- Aretha Franklin – Spirit In The Dark – the album I want played at my funeral.
Top 5 Films of all time
…bearing in mind most of my favourite films are at least an hour too long and usually have sub-titles
- Betty Blue
- The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
- Paris, Texas
- Almost Famous
- This Is Spinal Tap
Top 5 gigs of all time
… based on an average of 50 a year for the last 38 years
- The Smiths, Nottingham, 1984
- Jan Garbarek, Bristol, 1991
- The Jayhawks, Leeds, 1993
- Kevin Montgomery, Bristol, 2005
- Steven Wilson, London, 2012
Top 5 books of all time
- Raymond Carver – Where I’m Calling From… ‘95% of the story should be beyond the words’
- Charles Bukowski – The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills… ‘the best way to think is not at all’
- Robert M Pirsig – Lila: An Enquiry Into Morals
- J.D. Salinger – Nine Stories
- Haruki Murakami – Kafka On The Shore…“A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.”
Top 5 artists
- Robert Motherwell
- Howard Hodgkin
- Mark Rothko
- Franz Kline
- Nan Frankel – who started painting at the age of 65
Top 5 root vegetables
- Carrots
- Parsnips
- Swede
- Sweet potato
- Yam
Top 5 places to live
…given my nomadic lifestyle, people often ask me where my favourite place to live would be. It would probably be an amalgam of:
- North Devon
- San Diego
- Melbourne
- Iceland
- Kuala Lumpur
If the house was burning down….
…after making sure all the breathing stuff and my notebooks are safely out of the building, the things I’d head back in to save are
- My ’77 Telecaster Custom. I love Telecasters, which probably isn’t a good enough reason to justify owning over twenty of them. Fender quality being what it is, none of them is exactly the same. This is the only one that, from the first moment I picked it up, felt Darrell-shaped.
- My Kif ‘Baby’. I wanted a guitar I could take with me when I’m away from home, so I helped design an acoustic guitar that could be folded and fitted into an overhead compartment. Luthier (best in the UK!) Kif Wood did all the beyond-the-call-of-duty hard work that turned my half-baked ideas into a work of art. The Baby turned out so well, I daren’t take it out of the house for fear that it might somehow get damaged or lose some of its mojo. As such, it’s now the world’s least travelled travel guitar.
- My 1988 Rickenbacker 330. The best way make myself sound vaguely like a proper guitarist is to play through a mile long snake of Boss pedals. And nothing sounds better through a mile of pedals than the unique Ricky twang. I own quite a few, but this one has the lowest, fastest fretboard ever, so as well as sounding killer, it feels like the easiest guitar in the world to play.
