3 November 2009

Dhani Harrison (left) talks with Ringo Star, center, and Tom Petty in 2003. (Mark J. Terrill, AP)

There was a bit of disconnect between the sleepy debut album by Dhani Harrison’s band Thenewno2,  “You are Here” (Vagrant), and the galvanizing performance the band put on last summer at Lollapalooza in Grant Park. The album was slow-moving and introspective, tinged by psychedelic textures and electro rhythms, while Harrison’s vocals suggested the unhurried cadences of his late father, the Beatles’ George Harrison. At Grant Park, however, the sound morphed into a forceful, Technicolor swirl that rocked beneath the noon-day sun.

“The first record is like [Thom Yorke’s] ‘The Eraser’ – it’s a laptop record with two people who played everything – and the live show is more like Radiohead. It’s a different feel, a different intent,” Dhani Harrison says. “When we translated that sound into more of a band thing on the road, it became bigger and more powerful. There are moments up there when I feel like Rage Against the Machine, and other moments when you feel you’re in a trip-hop band.”

Harrison, 31, says shifting the feel, sound and personnel in the band was always the intent when he and childhood friend Oli Hecks formed Thenewno2 in Britain. They named their fledgling band after a character in the short-lived but now-classic U.K. sci-fi television series “The Prisoner.” In the show, “Number Two” is dismissed a couple of times in his futile efforts to extract information from the show’s protagonist, a captured spy, and is replaced by a new “Number Two.”

“I do get a lot of criticism because I had a dad who played music,” Harrison says. “So you’d automatically get questions about what type of band I was in, and assumptions about what it might sound like. So Oli and I always aimed to keep things moving, keep changing the band and have fun with it instead of letting it get stuck in one place. There’s always a ‘new Number Two’ with us.”

Harrison says because of his pedigree he initially resisted becoming a musician, even though he was around music all his life.
       
“I was so paranoid about being Dhani Harrison, so I became a bit of an over-achiever, working really hard at school and aiming to become a racing-car designer,” says Harrison, who attended Brown University, where he studied industrial design and physics.
       
But after a stint working with the Formula 1 racing team, he finally turned his attention back to music. He was adept at recording in a studio long before he had a band, in part because he spent so much time watching his father work.
       
“My dad and I were similar people,” he says. “My love of music is rooted in blues, gypsy jazz, Indian classical music, the psychedelic music of the ‘60s. I was in the studio in nappies watching him and Ravi Shankar playing together, and I was versed in tape and then Pro Tools. Getting away from music for a while, it was my way of making sure that I really wanted to do this. I didn’t want to do it blindly. Then I was finishing off some music for my dad’s last album when he died [in 2001], and finally, I just had to face it: I’m a musician. It was obvious.”
       
Harrison initially tried working the band through traditional record-company channels, but is now funneling a lot of songs and videos through the band’s Web site. Thenewno2 initially found an outlet for its music through the then-fledgling video game “Rock Band” a couple years ago. Harrison was hired by the Massachusetts-based Harmonix Music Systems Inc. to help develop the game, and it was a natural platform for his band’s music. A few weeks ago, his father’s old band made its digital debut when “The Beatles Rock Band” was introduced, and sold 600,000 copies in its first month.

Story concludes:

http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2009/11/dhani-harrison-the-son-of-beatle-george-describes-how-he-learned-to-embrace-the-music-and-thenewno2.html

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