Dan Hegarty digs deep to find great music for a book of Buried Treasure

Dan Hegarty has canvassed expert opinions for another ‘Buried Treasure’ book, writes Jonathan deBurca Butler

THE morning after the launch and publication of his first Buried Treasure, Dan Hegarty woke up with a bit of a sore head. But he also, already, had ideas for a second.

“There was so much stuff that I’d left out,” says the 2FM DJ. “When you do something like this you realise how little you know. I’m only scratching the surface.”

The concept, of what is now a series, is simple. Get in touch with the great and the good of the music world and ask them for their Buried Treasure, that secret album that they love but which remains conspicuous by its absence from the accepted lists of all time greats.

“The first one had more Irish reference points to it,” says Hegarty. “There’s plenty of that in this too but I was probably a little more adventurous this time around in that the people I interviewed for it are more international, and I think this book covers more diverse styles of music.”

Though Hegarty is careful to stress that he doesn’t want to lecture people, his way of talking about music shows his passion for it. He may not know it himself but he has a message to convey, albeit a subtle one.

“I think there’s a perception that if you haven’t heard an album or it’s not well known that somehow, it’s not good. That’s garbage. There’s so much out there that for whatever reason never commercially got the credit it deserved. For example, The Grand Parade from the Frank & Walters is a fantastic album. It’s a fantastic body of work as a cohesive piece of work and there’s lots of music out there like that. It’s just a question of finding it.”

Hegarty’s Buried Treasure is a fine place to start.

FIVE OF THE BEST FROM BURIED TREASURE 2

G Love and Special Sauce (self-titled, 1994)

The first G Love & Special Sauce album was a really important album for me and my pals. His vocals were rapping, but he was doing it through an old ribbon mic, and playing country steel top guitar with a funkjazz two-piece rhythm section. They recorded it pretty much like some of the old Blue Note recordings: a mic in the room, with a few overdubs. From start to finish, it’s a joy: it’s the sound of three mates having a good time.

- Guy Garvey of Elbow

Goodbye Jumbo: Karl Wallinger (1990)

In 1990, Karl Wallinger released his pop masterpiece Goodbye Jumbo, an album filled with hooky, gorgeous Beatlesesque melodies and allusive yet timely lyrics about world climate change, religion, self-examination and love. It should have been a massive hit, and even made many ‘best of’ lists that year, but somehow managed to fall between the cracks. Why? Probably due to bad timing in what was happening in popular music. Looking back now, in 1990 the culture was in a transition from the ’80s to the ’90s. The album came out in 1990, right before Nirvana and Pearl Jam broke. I don’t think that the album fitted in at the time: it seemed like rock music was in a holding pattern, waiting for something fresh.

- Butch Vig (producer of Nirvana, etc)

The Left Banke: Walk Away Renée/Pretty Ballerina (1967)

I was introduced to it by my good friend Thomas Walsh (aka Pugwash, and one half of the Duckworth Lewis Method). The first time that I actually listened to it was in my car. I remember going, “Oh no, I’ve spent the last 20 years unaware that this existed when I should have been listening to it”.

It has excellent songwriting, but wonderfully thrown together recordings as well, in a very 60s, almost garage style. In among the mid-1960s beatgroup sound, you find these lovely string sections or vocal harmonies that could often be extremely dissonant, and not what you would expect at all from that period.

- Neil Hannon (Divine Comedy/Duckworth Lewis Method)

Paul Brady: Spirits Colliding (1995)

I must have been about 21 when I first heard Spirits Colliding. A bunch of us songwriters jumped in a car one day in August and headed from Dublin to Cape Clear in West Cork. Someone put on the album, and it subtly pulled me in. At the time, Paul Brady wasn’t on my radar. Spirits Colliding didn’t hit me over the head when first I heard it, but I found myself listening to it more and more,enjoying the atmosphere it created in the room. It seems like a simple thing, but it’s quite rare to enjoy an entire album.

- Gemma Hayes (Singer/songwriter)

Skip James: The Greatest of the Delta Blues Singers (1965)

Believe it or not, I used to live on Hawley Street in Sheffield. My upstairs neighbour was a guy called Dean Bargh. He played me this Skip James record one day. It was one guy with his guitar, and this voice that would go up to this insane falsetto, and it just ripped my head off. It was like he was completely and utterly in his own psychodrama, or his own world. When you hear this music it haunts you, and it certainly isn’t something that you would put on before you go on a banging night out. I call it life music, because it takes you to a place inside yourself that, without the aid of this music, you would need a plane and passport to get to — a place inside your soul.

- Richard Hawley (singer/songwriter)

THREE OF HEGARTY’S IRISH SELECTIONS

Interference: Interference

The starting point for the new book was Interference. It never sat well with me that that album wasn’t in the first book. So the first person I contacted was the late Fergus O’Farrell. He had done a session for me down in the Cork studio a year previously. So I emailed him explaining what I’d done with the first book and asking him would he talk to me a little about his album. And he did and he was brilliant and really enthusiastic. Fergus O’Farrell’s vocal is like that of no other person I have heard. The timbre and diction that his vocals hold are as individual as a fingerprint.

Something Happens: Been There, Seen That, Done That

The album captured a young band in that magical moment where they realised that they had an opportunity to make music that could really mean something to people. Where countless others failed, they succeeded, and in doing so managed to etch their name into the annals of music history.

Frank and Walters: The Grand Parade

I was at Electric Picnic last year and I bumped into Ashley Keating from the Frank and Walters and I asked him about the Grand Parade. I wanted to include it here and luckily he gave it the thumbs up. By the time it was released, five years had passed since their debut album. There is no question that, as an album, this second record is superior when compared to their first — which is why its lack of impact commercially was at the time (and still is) baffling.