One of the defining bands of the '90s British guitar boom, Dodgy scored big success with singles 'Staying Out For The Summer', 'In a Room', and 'Good Enough', and albums 'Homegrown' and 'Free Peace Sweet'. Now back with seventh set, 'Hello Beautiful', their first album in a decade sees them return to that classic Dodgy sound of summery hits with big harmonies. "I wanted to make an album that sounds like Dodgy", admits singer Nigel Clark, as we sit down for a chat. Talking the new album, why it took so long, their early days and chart success, we caught up with Nigel and drummer Mathew Priest. Staying out for the summer; Eamon O'Neill.
Hi guys, how are you doing today?
Nigel; Yeah, really well, thank you. It's nice and sunny here in west Wales.
Mathew; Really great, thanks!
You're back with your first album and a decade. First off, what took you so long?
Nigel; Well, you have to wait for great things! Plus the fact that we didn't have a record deal, and we've been busy. The problem when you've been in this industry for so long, releasing new records, it goes against because people want to hear the old songs. So, new music - apart from this new album, which is brilliant and we're very proud of this one - in some ways it's a thankless task, because everyone just wants to hear the songs from the '90s, and especially talking about radio.
Mathew; And also the last record, 'What We're Fighting For' [2016] wasn't the most enjoyable process. There were some great times in it and there was some amazing tunes on it, but of all the albums, it was probably the least enjoyable that we recorded, and the whole process. So I think that puts a dampener on it. But you find your enthusiasm again, and this one was so joyous and full of so many great moments, and it was probably one of the best albums we've ever done, so it reignited our love for it again.
This one sounds unmistakably like a Dodgy album; it could have come out in 1997 a couple of years after 'Free Peace Sweet', for example.
Nigel; Yeah, I agree. I mean, I don't think music for bands and song writers has changed that much, really, and for us, especially, I mean, you can get AI to do all your stuff nowadays, but for us, it's like, it's who we are; you know, put all those things together, and the alchemy comes out as Dodgy, as a new Dodgy album. It's just wiser. I feel it's a little bit more, as a record, a little bit behind the beat, whereas Dodgy used to play really pushing it. And I think it's more a more self-assured record.
Touching on a point you made about people wanting the older songs, you've got tracks on this album that are going to slot right in.
Nigel; Yeah, they do live.
Mathew; Yeah, live it's amazing. The new tracks, we've been playing them live. Before, perhaps from the albums that we've made since we took a sabbatical for about eight or nine years, and we came back, and we did 'Stand Upright in a Cool Place' [2012], which was a real departure. It was really acoustic and very cool and woody and so playing those songs mixed in with the other songs, some of them fitted in, and again, the last album that we made as well [What are We Fighting For', 2016], some of them fitted in, but all of these seem to work so well. We really loved doing a lot of harmonies on this one, so we're going back to the harmonies.
It's kind of a trademark really, for Dodgy to have those big harmonies, isn't it? It was part of your defining sound of the '90s.
Nigel; Yeah, definitely. It made us stand apart from the rest of the bands that were going in the early to mid-nineties, really. The harmonies was our infatuation with the West Coast of America, CSNY, and with The Beatles and all that sort of stuff.
On the whole it's quite an upbeat album; what was your mood going into it?
Nigel; I think with the musicality, when Mathew and I get together to do a new album, it's just a process of going through all the ideas in my studio and getting a short list and then breaking it down, and then finally deciding on the ones we want to do, and then magically, finishing those, and then going in the studio and playing them to the guys. So to be fair, over the last fortnight, we've never played these songs before live. There were a couple of them we had played live - 'Hello Beautiful', 'Summer Forever' - but we hadn't played 'It's Not the End', and we hadn't played any of the others until the first gig in Norwich at the start of May, and they fit like a glove.
Nigel; Yeah, really well, thank you. It's nice and sunny here in west Wales.
Mathew; Really great, thanks!
You're back with your first album and a decade. First off, what took you so long?
Nigel; Well, you have to wait for great things! Plus the fact that we didn't have a record deal, and we've been busy. The problem when you've been in this industry for so long, releasing new records, it goes against because people want to hear the old songs. So, new music - apart from this new album, which is brilliant and we're very proud of this one - in some ways it's a thankless task, because everyone just wants to hear the songs from the '90s, and especially talking about radio.
Mathew; And also the last record, 'What We're Fighting For' [2016] wasn't the most enjoyable process. There were some great times in it and there was some amazing tunes on it, but of all the albums, it was probably the least enjoyable that we recorded, and the whole process. So I think that puts a dampener on it. But you find your enthusiasm again, and this one was so joyous and full of so many great moments, and it was probably one of the best albums we've ever done, so it reignited our love for it again.
This one sounds unmistakably like a Dodgy album; it could have come out in 1997 a couple of years after 'Free Peace Sweet', for example.
Nigel; Yeah, I agree. I mean, I don't think music for bands and song writers has changed that much, really, and for us, especially, I mean, you can get AI to do all your stuff nowadays, but for us, it's like, it's who we are; you know, put all those things together, and the alchemy comes out as Dodgy, as a new Dodgy album. It's just wiser. I feel it's a little bit more, as a record, a little bit behind the beat, whereas Dodgy used to play really pushing it. And I think it's more a more self-assured record.
Touching on a point you made about people wanting the older songs, you've got tracks on this album that are going to slot right in.
Nigel; Yeah, they do live.
Mathew; Yeah, live it's amazing. The new tracks, we've been playing them live. Before, perhaps from the albums that we've made since we took a sabbatical for about eight or nine years, and we came back, and we did 'Stand Upright in a Cool Place' [2012], which was a real departure. It was really acoustic and very cool and woody and so playing those songs mixed in with the other songs, some of them fitted in, and again, the last album that we made as well [What are We Fighting For', 2016], some of them fitted in, but all of these seem to work so well. We really loved doing a lot of harmonies on this one, so we're going back to the harmonies.
It's kind of a trademark really, for Dodgy to have those big harmonies, isn't it? It was part of your defining sound of the '90s.
Nigel; Yeah, definitely. It made us stand apart from the rest of the bands that were going in the early to mid-nineties, really. The harmonies was our infatuation with the West Coast of America, CSNY, and with The Beatles and all that sort of stuff.
On the whole it's quite an upbeat album; what was your mood going into it?
Nigel; I think with the musicality, when Mathew and I get together to do a new album, it's just a process of going through all the ideas in my studio and getting a short list and then breaking it down, and then finally deciding on the ones we want to do, and then magically, finishing those, and then going in the studio and playing them to the guys. So to be fair, over the last fortnight, we've never played these songs before live. There were a couple of them we had played live - 'Hello Beautiful', 'Summer Forever' - but we hadn't played 'It's Not the End', and we hadn't played any of the others until the first gig in Norwich at the start of May, and they fit like a glove.
The album opens with 'Hello Beautiful', and there's a real upbeat vibe over this minor key verse.
Nigel; I think that's the trick is like, you start them off with a minor and then you hit them in the chorus with the with a relative major and it's like; "hey, happy days!"
And of course, you got the horns in there as well.
Nigel; Yeah, that's brilliant.
Mathew; Yeah we're blessed because we had a very good signing a couple of years ago, Graham Mann, who's a multi instrumentalist. He can play everything, but he plays keyboards and trombone with us live, but he can also do string arrangements and horn arrangements. Yeah, he's brilliant, and I remember right at the start of this, the album, I was saying to Nigel; "it would be lovely to get some real strings on this to give it a warmth and a depth", and it really does. Graham fitted in with us really well, and he knows what we're looking for.
Nigel; Yeah, he's great.
Mathew; He does great little things. One thing I do remember is, right back at the start when we were collating songs and coming up with things, and I was going over to Nigel's in west Wales just to see what songs were about, and Nigel was playing in his studio, and he loves to jam a lot of electronic music - he'll get a loop going and then just go for like, seven days, just playing around with loops and adding things and beats and things - and Nigel said; "do fancy doing a new album". And I was like; "okay, is it going to be like this then? Is it going to be electronic, dancey kind of stuff?", and Nigel was really sure, and he went; "No, I want to make a Dodgy album. I want to make an album that sounds like Dodgy".
Nigel; But you're right, though, because the songs did come from that; they came from the electronic stuff, but I never see it as finished, especially when you've got a band; you don't want to just go with electronics; you want your band to do it. But some of the tempos and the grooves were established on drum machines, but 'Good Enough' was too, so it goes all the way back.
Going back to why it's taken this long to release 'Hello Beautiful', and in the '90s, you released three albums in four years; does that seem like a crazy workload now?
Mathew; Not as crazy as Led Zeppelin who did like, four in eighteen months! But yeah, we can look back and go; "God, we did a lot!", but it's what you want to do. If what you like to do is to go out and rear sheep, it's what you do. But it's a whole different environment now for releasing records, and we don't have a machine behind us that are saying; "right, come on; tour here, we want another record here, we want another single here", which kind of gets your momentum going, but now we decide when we do things. And it was lovely. It was perfect. We just gave ourselves lots and lots of time. I think what we kept saying to ourselves was, no one's screaming out for another Dodgy album, so let's just make it as best as we can and be happy with it. With the last album, suddenly there was a deadline, and we didn't want a deadline; we wanted to be able to do things at our own pace, and that's what we did. And we gave ourselves lots of time, and you can hear it.
Nigel; Yeah, you can hear it, and I feel as well that in those ten years, we've been doing a hell of a lot of gigs, constantly each year - I'd say, between forty and sixty gigs a year - and you become more confident with your stage craft, with your vocals, and knowing what key to write songs in. It's like, you can only learn that when you're actually doing it, so I think the experience is starting to show with this band, finally,
I'm glad you mentioned Led Zeppelin, because the second single, 'It's Not the End' starts off with this real John Bonham beat and sound.
Nigel; Yeah, Nick [Brine]'s brilliant at getting drum sounds, he's fantastic, the engineer, producer. He's brilliant. Over to you, Mathew!
Mathew; Well, the thing is that Bonham 'When the Levee Breaks' is so recognisable, it's so definitive that, no, it's not necessarily what I was going for because that wasn't necessarily the sound. I've said this from when we finally got to the finishing line with that song, but that song told us where to go. The song had its own personality. It was saying; "no, it needs to sound like this", and right up until near the end of the of the recording of it, it wasn't going to start necessarily with drums, but it had such a pace, and such a pulse to it. And [Andy] Miller came up with just such a simple but effective guitar line that goes all the way through it that you've just got to get that pace at the start. I mean, I wasn't thinking of Bonham, but it's more like a metronome, it's more like a more like a drum machine, and Nigel was really insistent that we have no cymbals on that whatsoever, and that it just kept that insistence.
Nigel; I have a philosophy about cymbals, especially because I know about drum machines and stuff like that, and it's weird if you listen to the records that you really love; you could probably count them on one hand how many crash cymbals are on it. What happens when you hit a cymbal? It signifies the end of something and the start of something, and I just didn't want that on 'It's Not the End', so it just started and ended when it should without these big pointy bits in there.
Mathew; And it's got a real mood to it, and I think you can really hear that. It's the moodiest song, and not as in a bad mood; it sets such a mood right from the start. It's got a bit of an '80s vibe to it, I guess, early '80s, maybe.
Nigel; Yeah, Talk Talk, maybe.
Mathew; Yeah, Talk Talk, the Psychedelic Furs, The Cure, even Foreigner. We don't mind that. We don't mind a bit of '80s.
Have you always felt that way about cymbals, Nigel?
Nigel; No. I don't like them, necessarily, because when you're on stage and they're really loud and you can't hear yourself sing, but I did lose a bit of love for them. It's just experience, and then I started going; "oh, that's a thought". and then I started listening to all my favourite records and going; "there's no cymbals on them", which is really weird! And then you've got Mathew on 'In a Room'; I counted, and I think there's 346, cymbal crashes.
Mathew; 347, actually.
Nigel; Oh, is it? Sorry!
'In a Room' has one of the best drum fills of the entire '90s.
Mathew; It was done on a stinking Guinness hangover, so that's what Guinness can do for you. But yeah, it's a funny story. Hugh Jones, the wonderful producer from the album, he's produced so many amazing records, from Echo and the Bunny Men, The Damned, Thin Lizzy, Icicle Works, and he says; "of all the records I produced, what do you think people come up to me the most about?", and he says; "that fucking drum fill in 'In a Room"! I go; "I'm sorry, mate!"
Nigel; I think that's the trick is like, you start them off with a minor and then you hit them in the chorus with the with a relative major and it's like; "hey, happy days!"
And of course, you got the horns in there as well.
Nigel; Yeah, that's brilliant.
Mathew; Yeah we're blessed because we had a very good signing a couple of years ago, Graham Mann, who's a multi instrumentalist. He can play everything, but he plays keyboards and trombone with us live, but he can also do string arrangements and horn arrangements. Yeah, he's brilliant, and I remember right at the start of this, the album, I was saying to Nigel; "it would be lovely to get some real strings on this to give it a warmth and a depth", and it really does. Graham fitted in with us really well, and he knows what we're looking for.
Nigel; Yeah, he's great.
Mathew; He does great little things. One thing I do remember is, right back at the start when we were collating songs and coming up with things, and I was going over to Nigel's in west Wales just to see what songs were about, and Nigel was playing in his studio, and he loves to jam a lot of electronic music - he'll get a loop going and then just go for like, seven days, just playing around with loops and adding things and beats and things - and Nigel said; "do fancy doing a new album". And I was like; "okay, is it going to be like this then? Is it going to be electronic, dancey kind of stuff?", and Nigel was really sure, and he went; "No, I want to make a Dodgy album. I want to make an album that sounds like Dodgy".
Nigel; But you're right, though, because the songs did come from that; they came from the electronic stuff, but I never see it as finished, especially when you've got a band; you don't want to just go with electronics; you want your band to do it. But some of the tempos and the grooves were established on drum machines, but 'Good Enough' was too, so it goes all the way back.
Going back to why it's taken this long to release 'Hello Beautiful', and in the '90s, you released three albums in four years; does that seem like a crazy workload now?
Mathew; Not as crazy as Led Zeppelin who did like, four in eighteen months! But yeah, we can look back and go; "God, we did a lot!", but it's what you want to do. If what you like to do is to go out and rear sheep, it's what you do. But it's a whole different environment now for releasing records, and we don't have a machine behind us that are saying; "right, come on; tour here, we want another record here, we want another single here", which kind of gets your momentum going, but now we decide when we do things. And it was lovely. It was perfect. We just gave ourselves lots and lots of time. I think what we kept saying to ourselves was, no one's screaming out for another Dodgy album, so let's just make it as best as we can and be happy with it. With the last album, suddenly there was a deadline, and we didn't want a deadline; we wanted to be able to do things at our own pace, and that's what we did. And we gave ourselves lots of time, and you can hear it.
Nigel; Yeah, you can hear it, and I feel as well that in those ten years, we've been doing a hell of a lot of gigs, constantly each year - I'd say, between forty and sixty gigs a year - and you become more confident with your stage craft, with your vocals, and knowing what key to write songs in. It's like, you can only learn that when you're actually doing it, so I think the experience is starting to show with this band, finally,
I'm glad you mentioned Led Zeppelin, because the second single, 'It's Not the End' starts off with this real John Bonham beat and sound.
Nigel; Yeah, Nick [Brine]'s brilliant at getting drum sounds, he's fantastic, the engineer, producer. He's brilliant. Over to you, Mathew!
Mathew; Well, the thing is that Bonham 'When the Levee Breaks' is so recognisable, it's so definitive that, no, it's not necessarily what I was going for because that wasn't necessarily the sound. I've said this from when we finally got to the finishing line with that song, but that song told us where to go. The song had its own personality. It was saying; "no, it needs to sound like this", and right up until near the end of the of the recording of it, it wasn't going to start necessarily with drums, but it had such a pace, and such a pulse to it. And [Andy] Miller came up with just such a simple but effective guitar line that goes all the way through it that you've just got to get that pace at the start. I mean, I wasn't thinking of Bonham, but it's more like a metronome, it's more like a more like a drum machine, and Nigel was really insistent that we have no cymbals on that whatsoever, and that it just kept that insistence.
Nigel; I have a philosophy about cymbals, especially because I know about drum machines and stuff like that, and it's weird if you listen to the records that you really love; you could probably count them on one hand how many crash cymbals are on it. What happens when you hit a cymbal? It signifies the end of something and the start of something, and I just didn't want that on 'It's Not the End', so it just started and ended when it should without these big pointy bits in there.
Mathew; And it's got a real mood to it, and I think you can really hear that. It's the moodiest song, and not as in a bad mood; it sets such a mood right from the start. It's got a bit of an '80s vibe to it, I guess, early '80s, maybe.
Nigel; Yeah, Talk Talk, maybe.
Mathew; Yeah, Talk Talk, the Psychedelic Furs, The Cure, even Foreigner. We don't mind that. We don't mind a bit of '80s.
Have you always felt that way about cymbals, Nigel?
Nigel; No. I don't like them, necessarily, because when you're on stage and they're really loud and you can't hear yourself sing, but I did lose a bit of love for them. It's just experience, and then I started going; "oh, that's a thought". and then I started listening to all my favourite records and going; "there's no cymbals on them", which is really weird! And then you've got Mathew on 'In a Room'; I counted, and I think there's 346, cymbal crashes.
Mathew; 347, actually.
Nigel; Oh, is it? Sorry!
'In a Room' has one of the best drum fills of the entire '90s.
Mathew; It was done on a stinking Guinness hangover, so that's what Guinness can do for you. But yeah, it's a funny story. Hugh Jones, the wonderful producer from the album, he's produced so many amazing records, from Echo and the Bunny Men, The Damned, Thin Lizzy, Icicle Works, and he says; "of all the records I produced, what do you think people come up to me the most about?", and he says; "that fucking drum fill in 'In a Room"! I go; "I'm sorry, mate!"
On the other end of the scale, I really love 'Call it What You Want', with its acoustic picking and harmonies; it has sort of a Creedence vibe.
Nigel; Not many people know this, but for years and years I've been a big Bert Jansch fan, and we got Bert Jansch to support Dodgy once. I was into Bert and Nick Drake, and I really like folk music, acoustic folk; Townes Van Zant, Blaze Foley, American country folk, and there's a guy called Jackson C Frank who wrote a song called 'Blues Runs the Game', and he was what they were all into. So, Nick Drake, his first demo he sent to a record company, it was three covers of Jackson C Frank songs, and the story of Jackson C Frank is amazing; it was him and Paul Simon that came over into England in 1961, '62 that started that whole Folk Blues explosion in the early sixties from American side of things. So, yeah, it's a nod towards that old sort of style, really, the finger picking thing.
Mathew; In turn, weren't they coming because they loved David Graham and all that?
Nigel; Jansch, loved David Graham.
You mentioned 'Summer Forever' earlier, and it's classic Dodgy single material. Is that what you were going for; the vibe of 'Good Enough', 'Staying Out for the Summer' etc?
Nigel; The story that song really, is I had the lyrics for that song, or most of the lyrics for twenty years, and one day last October, I just woke up and went; "you need to finish that song now, for this album". I'm one of those people that leaves everything to the last minute anyway, and I just went; "don't reinvent the wheel. What's your favourite chords off a Dodgy song that you're playing live?" And we do this song called 'Waiting for the Sun', and it goes down so well live. People don't know it, and I get everyone to sing along to it, and I just thought; "use those chords". So obviously I didn't use them in the same sort of order, but I use that key, those shapes, and literally, it was the last song we did on the album. It took no time all to write because it was already written. You just have to put it together, really. And yes, it does sound like a classic Dodgy song, but it's a perfect radio song. Coming in at 2mins 58secs, it's perfect.
How long did you spend recording the album, and where did you do it ?
Nigel; The whole thing's been recorded in Wales. I did some of my acoustics and vocals at home here in west Wales and then the rest of it was done down near Merthyr Tydfil, at Nick Brine's studio, at Flip Flop records' studio, We started it in July of 2024. We did one session then, then we went back again in the new year of 2025, and we did five songs. So literally, it's taken us about, I'd say, to record it, twenty days, to mix it, another twenty days maybe.
Mathew; But spread out. And we went to a studio called Red Card studios. It was near Brecon Carnarvon in mid to south Wales, and yeah, we really liked the idea that it was all done in Wales. It's been infused with the magic and the wildness of Wales.
Nigel; Yeah, and the release date was May the first, which is a very important date in Wales. So we stuck to our guns on it, really. We didn't have to go to London and release it when they said it was; we had May the first pencilled in for ages.
I wanted to touch on some Dodgy past, going right back to your debut 'The Dodgy Album' in 1993; how was it working with Ian Broudie as a producer?
Mathew; I think we didn't really know what sound we really wanted until we got to 'Homegrown' [1994]. We also didn't really have the confidence. We were cocky, and we were very ambitious, and we could certainly play and write songs, but the styles were all over the place a little bit. I mean, listen to the first three independent singles we released; one's a dance track, one's a blissed out track, one's a rock track, one's got a bit of reggae in it; we were taking from everywhere. We went into the studio and Broudie was like; "right, I need to make it a little bit more compressed and compress the sound of what you're going to sound like, so we can't have the reggae bits, we can't have this bit here". He did the right thing by making a bit more of a unified sound than it being all over the place. I think that's what Broudie did. It was great to work with him, and he's such a fascinating, interesting bloke, and he's very good at making decisions. He's very good at saying; "no, it's got to be like this, and it's got to be like that".
Nigel; Even if they're wrong,
Mathew; Yeah! But by 'Homegrown', again, what Nigel says about going out on the road, it infuses you with confidence; you can make better decisions, and we also knew what we wanted to sound like a bit more.
Nigel; I also think Matt, with the first album there was a lot of things going in; from the Atari Cuebase [recording software] that Simon [Rogers, keyboards] was doing, and sort of fakey, that would only fit in 1993 for me. 'Homegrown', I knew, personally, what I didn't want; I didn't want those sounds because they dated it. The idea for 'Homegrown' was that it would never sound dated because it was using instruments that had been around forever, and that's why it stands up, really.
Mathew; Yeah, absolutely, it's more of a classic sounding record. But yeah, we loved recording with Ian Broudie, loved recording with Hugh Jones, but as I said, I think we were more aware of what we wanted. We were really on a roll by the time we got to 'Homegrown' and 'Free Peace Sweet'.
You came out at the time when Britpop was exploding, but I never thought of Dodgy as a Britpop band; was that a help or a hindrance?
Nigel; It's one of those things, isn't it, with the Britpop thing; it was like a media thing, and then there was a uniform for it, which was Adidas trainers, and we never really went down that route. So I just think we were a little bit before it really. I wouldn't have minded the success of some of the Britpop bands. I think we just were, at the time, quite sort of like militant.
Mathew; If you look at Elvis Costello in the post punk time, he was happy to be wrapped up and swept along and all that, but listen to Elvis Costello songs, and that's not really post punk. It might be a bit angular and stuff, or a bit angry, but it's that kind of thing where there was a great movement in the '90s, and it was the last great time before the internet came along and homogenised stuff. It was a good time to be around, definitely.
You mentioned success there, and if you look at 'Good Enough', it's had at the time of the interview, 29.5 million plays on Spotify!
Nigel; That is success, yeah, that's good.
Mathew; There's another version of 'Good Enough' on there as well from a different album; It's from the best of and it's got several million plays as well. That song really crossed over, and it keeps generating more and more plays, and people keep coming back to Dodgy, and it's great. Long may it sail!
Did the did the fact that it was featured in the movie and 'Sliding Doors' give it more exposure?
Mathew; It wasn't a massive movie. I mean, yeah, it was nice it was in there, and it featured quite prominently, but it wasn't exactly Avengers [laughs]!
As well as the new album, you have a tour celebrating 30 years of 'Free Peace Sweet' coming up; are you looking forward to that?
Mathew; There's some songs on a 'Free Peace Sweet' that we wouldn't normally play live in festival sets or even in little fan club sets and I'm really looking forward to playing those songs. Songs like 'One of Those Rivers', 'Prey for Drinking', 'Jack the Lad'; there's some great songs on there that that we wouldn't play, and that was the joy when we did it live a few years ago, in full. It was incredible that the audience and band alike were like; "wow". What a great feeling.
What's next for Dodgy?
Nigel; I think we're just going to take it one step at a time, really. I think that's probably the best way to do it, because I don't want to plan too far ahead. I just want to enjoy it, rather than trying to get over the year and get to the end of it. I just want to enjoy every day, really.
Dodgy's 'Hey Beautiful' is available now.
Nigel; Not many people know this, but for years and years I've been a big Bert Jansch fan, and we got Bert Jansch to support Dodgy once. I was into Bert and Nick Drake, and I really like folk music, acoustic folk; Townes Van Zant, Blaze Foley, American country folk, and there's a guy called Jackson C Frank who wrote a song called 'Blues Runs the Game', and he was what they were all into. So, Nick Drake, his first demo he sent to a record company, it was three covers of Jackson C Frank songs, and the story of Jackson C Frank is amazing; it was him and Paul Simon that came over into England in 1961, '62 that started that whole Folk Blues explosion in the early sixties from American side of things. So, yeah, it's a nod towards that old sort of style, really, the finger picking thing.
Mathew; In turn, weren't they coming because they loved David Graham and all that?
Nigel; Jansch, loved David Graham.
You mentioned 'Summer Forever' earlier, and it's classic Dodgy single material. Is that what you were going for; the vibe of 'Good Enough', 'Staying Out for the Summer' etc?
Nigel; The story that song really, is I had the lyrics for that song, or most of the lyrics for twenty years, and one day last October, I just woke up and went; "you need to finish that song now, for this album". I'm one of those people that leaves everything to the last minute anyway, and I just went; "don't reinvent the wheel. What's your favourite chords off a Dodgy song that you're playing live?" And we do this song called 'Waiting for the Sun', and it goes down so well live. People don't know it, and I get everyone to sing along to it, and I just thought; "use those chords". So obviously I didn't use them in the same sort of order, but I use that key, those shapes, and literally, it was the last song we did on the album. It took no time all to write because it was already written. You just have to put it together, really. And yes, it does sound like a classic Dodgy song, but it's a perfect radio song. Coming in at 2mins 58secs, it's perfect.
How long did you spend recording the album, and where did you do it ?
Nigel; The whole thing's been recorded in Wales. I did some of my acoustics and vocals at home here in west Wales and then the rest of it was done down near Merthyr Tydfil, at Nick Brine's studio, at Flip Flop records' studio, We started it in July of 2024. We did one session then, then we went back again in the new year of 2025, and we did five songs. So literally, it's taken us about, I'd say, to record it, twenty days, to mix it, another twenty days maybe.
Mathew; But spread out. And we went to a studio called Red Card studios. It was near Brecon Carnarvon in mid to south Wales, and yeah, we really liked the idea that it was all done in Wales. It's been infused with the magic and the wildness of Wales.
Nigel; Yeah, and the release date was May the first, which is a very important date in Wales. So we stuck to our guns on it, really. We didn't have to go to London and release it when they said it was; we had May the first pencilled in for ages.
I wanted to touch on some Dodgy past, going right back to your debut 'The Dodgy Album' in 1993; how was it working with Ian Broudie as a producer?
Mathew; I think we didn't really know what sound we really wanted until we got to 'Homegrown' [1994]. We also didn't really have the confidence. We were cocky, and we were very ambitious, and we could certainly play and write songs, but the styles were all over the place a little bit. I mean, listen to the first three independent singles we released; one's a dance track, one's a blissed out track, one's a rock track, one's got a bit of reggae in it; we were taking from everywhere. We went into the studio and Broudie was like; "right, I need to make it a little bit more compressed and compress the sound of what you're going to sound like, so we can't have the reggae bits, we can't have this bit here". He did the right thing by making a bit more of a unified sound than it being all over the place. I think that's what Broudie did. It was great to work with him, and he's such a fascinating, interesting bloke, and he's very good at making decisions. He's very good at saying; "no, it's got to be like this, and it's got to be like that".
Nigel; Even if they're wrong,
Mathew; Yeah! But by 'Homegrown', again, what Nigel says about going out on the road, it infuses you with confidence; you can make better decisions, and we also knew what we wanted to sound like a bit more.
Nigel; I also think Matt, with the first album there was a lot of things going in; from the Atari Cuebase [recording software] that Simon [Rogers, keyboards] was doing, and sort of fakey, that would only fit in 1993 for me. 'Homegrown', I knew, personally, what I didn't want; I didn't want those sounds because they dated it. The idea for 'Homegrown' was that it would never sound dated because it was using instruments that had been around forever, and that's why it stands up, really.
Mathew; Yeah, absolutely, it's more of a classic sounding record. But yeah, we loved recording with Ian Broudie, loved recording with Hugh Jones, but as I said, I think we were more aware of what we wanted. We were really on a roll by the time we got to 'Homegrown' and 'Free Peace Sweet'.
You came out at the time when Britpop was exploding, but I never thought of Dodgy as a Britpop band; was that a help or a hindrance?
Nigel; It's one of those things, isn't it, with the Britpop thing; it was like a media thing, and then there was a uniform for it, which was Adidas trainers, and we never really went down that route. So I just think we were a little bit before it really. I wouldn't have minded the success of some of the Britpop bands. I think we just were, at the time, quite sort of like militant.
Mathew; If you look at Elvis Costello in the post punk time, he was happy to be wrapped up and swept along and all that, but listen to Elvis Costello songs, and that's not really post punk. It might be a bit angular and stuff, or a bit angry, but it's that kind of thing where there was a great movement in the '90s, and it was the last great time before the internet came along and homogenised stuff. It was a good time to be around, definitely.
You mentioned success there, and if you look at 'Good Enough', it's had at the time of the interview, 29.5 million plays on Spotify!
Nigel; That is success, yeah, that's good.
Mathew; There's another version of 'Good Enough' on there as well from a different album; It's from the best of and it's got several million plays as well. That song really crossed over, and it keeps generating more and more plays, and people keep coming back to Dodgy, and it's great. Long may it sail!
Did the did the fact that it was featured in the movie and 'Sliding Doors' give it more exposure?
Mathew; It wasn't a massive movie. I mean, yeah, it was nice it was in there, and it featured quite prominently, but it wasn't exactly Avengers [laughs]!
As well as the new album, you have a tour celebrating 30 years of 'Free Peace Sweet' coming up; are you looking forward to that?
Mathew; There's some songs on a 'Free Peace Sweet' that we wouldn't normally play live in festival sets or even in little fan club sets and I'm really looking forward to playing those songs. Songs like 'One of Those Rivers', 'Prey for Drinking', 'Jack the Lad'; there's some great songs on there that that we wouldn't play, and that was the joy when we did it live a few years ago, in full. It was incredible that the audience and band alike were like; "wow". What a great feeling.
What's next for Dodgy?
Nigel; I think we're just going to take it one step at a time, really. I think that's probably the best way to do it, because I don't want to plan too far ahead. I just want to enjoy it, rather than trying to get over the year and get to the end of it. I just want to enjoy every day, really.
Dodgy's 'Hey Beautiful' is available now.
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