DANNY HYDE

Danny is an engineer, remix artist, and long time secret member of Coil. From the 1980s-2000s he worked with Nine Inch Nails, Psychic TV, Depeche Mode, and many others, in part pioneering what became post-industrial and dark ambient music.

 

In the beginning, Danny was a tea boy at Point Break Studio. He would spend all the dead time- after sessions or during Christmas- experimenting with the instruments musicians would leave behind. As is often a tea boy’s dream, one day someone didn’t show up for work and he was promoted. He remembers his first project as assistant engineer was recording psycho strings- running lengths of tape for every track, supported by mic stands, in giant loops around the room.

 

In one of his after hours sessions in 1982, Danny was playing with his friends, Savage Progress. Via a keenly eavesdropping secretary, word made its way to Richard Branson and they were quickly signed to Virgin 10. Their first single “My Soul Unwraps Tonight” became an instant hit in Germany, selling 350,000 copies. In 1984 they did sound support for Tina Turner, toured with the Thompson Twins on their “Into the Gap” tour, and toured Austria, Germany, and Switzerland to capitalize on the single’s success. Hyde reflects fondly on his naïveté, when he happily accepted 600 quid for a £70,000 deal: “When you’re young you don’t care, you’re just happy you get to keep doing what you want to do.”

 

At 21, Hyde was hired as a full time engineer at Paradise Studio after voluntarily managing another band that was wasting time. Paradise was Europe’s first all-digital studio. There, he worked intensively with some of the first digital sampling systems (Fairlight, Waveterm, EMU, owned one of the very first AkaiS1000), and met Coil. Danny hit it off with the band, especially Peter Christopherson, with whom he’d have a creative relationship for 20 years. Peter- talented, humble, and honest- was a rare ally to Danny in the rave scene, full of “overly flamboyant, oversoft liggers who [he] wouldn’t trust with 5 pence”.  Hyde wrote, produced, and mixed many albums with Coil, as well as doing their live sound at shows including the Barbican in London in 2002. 

 

His most recent major project was Electric Sewer Age, Danny’s last work with Peter before his unexpected death in 2010. Danny completed Contemplating Nothingness and Bad White Corpuscle posthumously, as an ode to Peter. They were released with Old Europa Cafe and Hallow Ground. 

 

Danny Hyde lives amongst stacks of vinyl in a little house with a garden and a studio in Surrey, England.