Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist, Dan Hopkins, was a finalist in the MusicOz Awards, Blues and Roots, 2010, for his song ‘Golden Girl’. His authentic take on the folk, blues and roots traditions combines skillful playing with emotional honesty.
JC: “How did you get into playing music?”
DH: “I actually had a couple of friends at school who, towards the end of high school, started learning guitar. The closest to me playing guitar before that was air guitar on a tennis racket, because I was a tennis player - I was a very focused, keen, junior tennis player. One of my friends, he said, “I’m going to give this away, because my fingers are too big,” and I said, “Well, can I have your guitar?” So another friend of mine started showing me some chords and, before I knew it, we were in a bedroom band…We were playing Metallica and Slayer covers in my friend’s bedroom, basically. It never made it out of the bedroom, but it taught me how to play basic guitar. I was about eighteen when I started playing and loved it. I sort of just wish I’d actually started playing it earlier, instead of playing tennis.”
JC: “Did you teach yourself to play?”
DH: “Yeah, for a long time, I did. There was a really good mate of mine who jammed with us for a while. He was an excellent guitarist – it just flowed out of his fingers. I used to just watch him play. I’d go around to his place – he had this huge Marshall stack in his bedroom…I’d just turn it up to one and a half. It would just hit you in the chest. I’d memorise what he’d do with his fingers and before I’d forget, I’d rush straight home and try and copy what he did. Then I’d go and do it again. So I learnt a lot by watching.”
“From there, it was just jamming with records and CDs. Back then, I was into rock; I was into metal; I was more of a guitarist; I wasn’t a songwriter, as such, and just wanted to be like my heroes, I suppose. I finally got out of the bedroom with a few other guys and we formed a seventies rock band and started getting a few gigs.”
“I hit a point where I kind of moved away from that kind of music…I felt a little bit up in the air with it…Then I actually started listening to Ben Harper and was blown away by his soulfulness, his melodies; plus his music still had the edge that I really enjoyed from what I was originally influenced by…That opened me up to a whole bunch of new artists that influenced him and now I’m firmly planted in the folk-blues-roots vein…Now I play a fair bit of slide guitar.”
“It’s opened up a whole new chamber, where I need to study. Roots is roots because you go back to where contemporary music came from…I was always aware that the music I originally listened to was based on the blues. Western rock music really comes from the blues. I’m really understanding that, at a deeper level, and going back to 1930s and turn of the twentieth century blues.”
“…I just want my true expression to come out and I’m still on that journey…I go with what needs to be done to get what you want to say across. I believe I’ve got something to say and that’s how I want to express it – through my voice and my words and my fingers.”
JC: “I guess that everything you’ve ever heard feeds into what you say and what you write, even if you don’t know it.”
DH: “Most recently, I’ve got a lot of Southern influence coming through and I’m really in love with the South. I think it’s going to be a study for me for a fair while from here. To be up there playing and a person in the audience can just about hear a train steaming through…I think we’re going that way, but at the same time, I still want to sound contemporary. So there are all these forces pulling on what I’m doing and I just relate to it to all on a song-by-song basis.
“Something I’ve read when I’ve been studying song writing is that each song has a built-in set of rules. And I’m more like a servant to the song. I’m not necessarily in control of it, but I need to take action in bringing it to form…I’m a great believer in it guiding you. There’ll be a song that’s not finished and it’s been months. Then you’ll pick it up and there’ll be an intuitive idea that leads you into where that song should go next until it’s done and something that you might never have expected…That’s what I love about creating music - if you let go of what should happen next in a song and not be so controlling and forceful about how you think it should sound, you really open yourself up to magic.”
JC: “When did your debut EP, Golden Girl, come out?”
DH: “We finished it late last year and launched it at The Vanguard in Newtown. It was something that I did intermittently, over the space of about a year - recording and learning, and fine tuning the songs…I wrote the songs and worked with a producer.”
JC: “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about?”
DH: “There’s a charity we’re committed to and it’s called the Agent Orange Fund, Incorporated. It’s a charity that I’ve created with a friend of mine up on the Central Coast, who’s actually an entertainer and a Vietnam War vet himself, and he was contaminated with Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. He served on two battalions in Vietnam and he has a very committed stand for creating awareness and raising funds for victims. There are literally hundreds of thousands of victim of this, particularly, but not only in Vietnam - also Australian victims - war vet victims and their offspring.
Agent Orange is an herbicide with high levels of dioxin, a very poisonous chemical, and it infiltrates the DNA of the carrier and when they have offspring they pass it on. There have been horrendous, horrendous outcomes. It’s not about blaming the people that did it - what’s done is done - and it’s not about being political; it’s about creating awareness and giving people a voice who’ve been affected and letting them know that justice will prevail through acknowledgement and forgiveness and those sorts of qualities. But at the same time, being a real stand against, not only what happened there, but the ongoing nature of how people can use products that can have a real effect on them…materials that, on paper, work out financially for people to make money, but go ahead when really they shouldn’t. That’s a cause I’m committed to.
We had our first fund raising event last year and we raised over ten thousand dollars. We called it Operation Agent Orange and we’re going to do it again this year – Operation Agent Orange 2.”
Dan Hopkins plays at El Rocco, Sydney, Australia, on Friday, August 12th, 2011, and supports well-known blues artist, Jim Conway, at The Empire, Annandale, Sydney, on Friday, August 26th, 2011.
Jasmine Crittenden - Jasmine Crittenden (B.A.)(Hons.)(First Class) is a writer and editor specialising in music, literature and travel.
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