Dan Croll Shares His First Times

October 22, 2013, 9:45am

Dan Croll – “From Nowhere.” “The Look,”

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First broken bone:
I used to play rugby all the time. I was playing to a really high level—I played a bit for England—but then I broke my leg when I was 17 and it ended my career. It was really shit. I spent a year in a cast from my toe to my groin. It was a really bad break. Instead of breaking horizontally, so that when you put a cast on the pressure keeps it together, the angle of the break was long, so I couldn’t put any weight on it. I had to wheelchair it. It was pretty gnarly. My bedroom was an attic conversion so they moved me into the dining room and that was where the piano and guitars were. I spent a long time listening to music and playing music and then decided to study music a year later.

The first song Dan ever wrote: “Marion.”

First song you wrote:
The first serious song I wrote was called “Marion.” It’s kind of like a Parisian waltz. I wrote it when I was 18 and I’m only 23 now. I’ve not been doing this long. A few years ago I went Benicàssim Festival in Spain and met a Parisian girl called Marion. We had a nice time, enjoying each other’s company, but there was a hurricane that year, just off the coast, so the festival was evacuated. The stage nearly collapsed on Kings of Leon and these olive fields were on fire because the electricity pylons had fallen. I was young and instead of going with the evacuation, about six of us decided to stay in our tents and see what it was like. It was one of the wildest nights: laying in the tent with Marion while the tent is off the ground, wind everywhere. We lasted till morning, no problem, but it was a weird night and the song is about that evening unfolding.

First masturbation:
Scary. I think every guy’s was. I don’t want to go into it, but if you think about it, it is a little bit weird.

First kiss:
Terrible. I think I was 13 and it was at the school disco. Mine was one of those where you bash teeth. I’m still a terrible kisser. Haha.

First concert:
Craig David with my mum and my nan [grandma] who is now 87. It was in a big circus tent in Liverpool and I was 13 or 14. Terrible kissing, terrible concerts: I was having a whale of a time! My mum was screaming—she was loving it—and I think my nan and I were just wondering why the hell we were there.

First time you made a drunken fool out of yourself:
There was a bar called Zanzibar and I was 14 or 15. Because I was playing rugby and all those guys are big drinkers and they were a lot older than me, they dragged me out. I didn’t know that at Zanzibar it’s pretty much always 2-4-1 drinks. There was a really good-looking girl behind the bar and she smiled at me and so I felt like we had some kind of connection. So I went up to the bar ordered a pint of Strongbow cider. I’ve never touched it since—one of those drinks where the smell of it makes you gag. I’ve been scarred by it. Anyway, she smiled and gave me two pints and only charged me for one. I was like, “Oh she loves me.” Obviously the more I drank, the more I believed that. It was a small circular club with palm trees at the edge and at the end of the night it was me still thinking she loved me and me trying to be really cool while dancing and also being sick into every plant pot around the room.

First time you realized you could sing:
When my dad and I used to jam to Lionel Richie songs in the car on the way to rugby matches. Screaming “Dancing on the Ceiling.”

First time a fan freaked you out:
Now that everyone’s using instagram and I can see people using hashtags with my name. Last month I got tagged in a girl’s photo, clicked on it and there was a girl holding this massive canvas of my face. She was struggling to hold it up. It was her birthday and her mates had bought her this bigger than life-size print of my face! She was crying with joy! Then the next day she put up a picture of it in her house. It was slightly bigger than the wall. Crazy.