Magic Dave

Last update: 2005-09-04 00:33:07

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The past few days, celebrity and friend of Mikeynet "Magic" Dave Magic has been creating his debut album, Your Home Is At Risk. Mikeynet caught up with him as he put the finishing touches to his magnum opus...

Mikeynet knocks on the door of 114 Tennyson Street, the family home immortalised in Magic House. Magic Dave's Mum comes and lets us in. She offers Mikeynet a cup of tea; we decline as she leads us up into the attic bedroom which since 1998 has doubled as the polymath genius's centre of operations.

Gold records from his brief time in boyband "Soul Intention" and plans from his short-lived architectural career line the walls. "Alright?" mumbles the genius, holding a packet of biscuits, "Digestive?"

The news that Magic Dave was working on a debut album sent shockwaves throughout the city - EMI's share price doubled overnight and Elvis briefly came back to life. That one man's return could provoke such a reaction is surely testament to the enduring charisma of this enigma. I put this to him; "I just do what I do, you know. If people like it, yeah," he shrugs.

Magic Dave speaks much like you'd imagine him to - quietly and thoughtfully, with suddent bursts of colour. For someone so popular, he rarely swears.

So, Dave, how are you?
Yeah, I'm alright, thanks. I've been in Guatamala the past few months, teaching kids how to swim. You know, it takes 4 weeks wages per lesson over there, yet it also has the highest rate of infant death by drowning in Central America?

Why did you decide to return to the UK?
Well, if you give a man a fish, he can feed his family for a day. Give a man a net, he can provide food for his whole family. I realised I was simply providing fish, what was needed was a net. And so I provided a net.

Before you went to Guatamala, you were a regular in magazines like Heat and Closer. Do you miss that lifestyle?
You know what? I don't. I don't because it was false. That wasn't the real me, chasing women and staying out all night. I had a kind of spiritual awakening - I remember something Bono once said. He said, well I can't remember what he said, but it was really profound, y'know?

Spiritual awakenings have been a part of Magic Dave's life since an early age. Born into a family of Buddhist circus performers, Dave "always had a sense that there was something more to life." After running away from home aged 14, Dave spent time moving between various subgroups of society before falling in with the "Gene-Hack Men", a hippy commune of genetic scientists. It was here that Dave found a cure for scrofula. He spent some time genetically engineering vaccines, before forming "Soul Intention" at the age of 17.

Do you ever feel like returning to genetic engineering?
Sometimes. But then, sometimes not. I mean, I feel that music ultimately touches people in far more profound way than curing illnesses ever will, so to be honest I don't think I ever will return. So no, no I won't.

Do you keep in contact with Jack [Grant, Nobel prize-winning colleague] and the others at the commune?
I don't. And you know why? Dave leans forward. They don't understand... this. Music. Finding cures is their life, y'know. I, I dunno. There's more to it than that. That's one of the themes that runs through this album.

What themes run through the album?
Well, I hesitate to call it a concept album, but it is in a sense. It's about modern living, and the futility of providing fish and no nets. I mean, Bush is always on about aid, but it's all just a stop-gap. I hate it when pop stars talk about politics, sorry. he grins. I'm a pop star.

More soon!

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