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[title]Last month, I found myself in a darkened cinema in Homerton, listening to Steely Dan’s landmark 1977 album ‘Aja’. I was surrounded by dads accompanied by their thirtysomething graphic-designer kids, but also a significant number of people who definitely weren’t born when these cheesy-listening pioneers released their last great record, 1980’s ‘Gaucho’. The event was Pitchback Playback, which airs classic albums to eyemask-wearing audiences so they can shut off all their other senses and fully appreciate every dimension of production magic. More fascinating than all that, though, is that this wasn’t the only Steely Dan-dedicated event to have happened in London lately. Far from it.
Despite it being more than 50 years since the release of the band’s debut album – and the fact that Walter Becker, half of Steely Dan’s core duo completed by Donald Fagen, died in 2017 – London seems to be currently gripped in a bout of extreme Dan-mania. Once thought of as being too naff to make it into the hearts of the cool kids, the slick and intricate act are now all the rage. A covers band, The Royal Scammers, just completed a week-long January residency at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho, while Nearly Dan play Camden’s Jazz Cafe this month. There’s also still time to catch Stanley Dee, a third (third!!) Steely Dan tribute act, who play Nell’s in Kensington at the end of February.
That’s not all. Turn on deeply influential and zeitgeist-capturing independent radio station NTS and you’re more than likely to hear a Steely Dan track, especially if you tune into breakfast show hosts Flo Dill or Zakia Sewell, who are both extremely fond of starting the day at the Dalston studio with a dose of Dan. Elsewhere, Reading-born, London-based DJ and banger-machine SG Lewis revealed that ‘Lifetime’ – the lead single from his recently released new album – was deeply inspired by Steely Dan’s brand of hyper-intelligent yacht rock. London rockers The Family Dog have also cited their parents’ Steely Dan record collection as a key influence, while London-raised, Bristol-based experimental act Park Motive is in thrall to the ‘bizarre seediness’ of Donald Fagen.
There was always something a little off-kilter about Steely Dan, not least in the fact they took their name from a dildo
Look further afield than the capital, and Etsy is awash with knock-off Steely Dan T-shirts. On TikTok you’ll find cheerful teens dancing to the band’s iconic single ‘Peg’, a song that has ‘no right going off that hard’, according to one shimmying new fan. Even Netflix is in on the trend. Its recent ‘Knives Out’ murder mystery ‘Glass Onion’ contains a host of Steely Dan Easter eggs, from a massive tour poster to a Cuban Breeze cocktail – a reference to a lyric from Donald Fagen’s solo album ‘The Nightfly’ – and an assistant called Peg. Director Rian Johnson is, evidently, a huge fan. On Grammys night, notoriously grumpy music industry veteran Steve Albini took to Twitter to dump on the band, writing ‘I will always be the kind of punk that shits on Steely Dan’. Pretty soon the band’s name started trending, and a host of artists and fans jumped to their defence, including musicians Jenny Lewis and St Vincent, who wrote ‘For the record – I fucking love Steely Dan’.
So why all the Steely Dan love, and why now?
How the ’Dan got their capital cool back
To find answers, we went to Flo Dill, who has officially played the most Steely Dan records of any DJ on NTS.
‘As I get older I’m less and less concerned with having “cool” music taste,’ she explains of her own personal love for the band. ‘Also, Steely Dan are interesting. It’s complex pop music and incredibly well recorded and amazingly mixed and produced.’ It’s that timelessness and sheer craft, then – as well as a lack of embarrassment about liking a band who might lack the obvious sexiness and edge of many of their 1970s contemporaries – which have made Steely Dan the hottest sound of 2023.
‘Whenever I play them on the show people in the chatroom love it,’ adds Dill. ‘And if you’re a Steely Dan fan and you hear someone else play Steely Dan, you’re going to make yourself known! They’re not an acquired taste, but they are cheesy in many ways and it’s definitely more acceptable to be a Dan fan than it used to be.’
Ben Gomori, who runs the Pitchblack Playback events, agrees: ‘My theory is that we’ve now reached a point in time and cultural history where anything that is of quality, or acclaimed in its time – and this goes for fashion as well – as long as you wear it or live it authentically and convincingly and cohesively, people don’t look down their nose at you anymore’.
Gomori cites the popularity of a recent Pitchblack Playback session he hosted for 1996’s ‘Travelling Without Moving’ by Jamiroquai – a band who have had their fair share of flak for being the antithesis of cool. ‘You’re allowed to like what you like, and nothing is beyond the pale,’ he says. ‘There's less snobbery, particularly as new audiences come through, who’ve grown up with less genre restrictions.’ He’s also keen to give a nod to the scene-setting approach of London’s favourite indie station, who this summer are hosting their first-ever music festival in Burgess Park. ‘Don’t underestimate the power of NTS – it can be extremely influential!’
Steely Dan: a history
The idea that younger listeners are less jaded rings true. There’s a whole generation out there who don’t care if something’s supposed to be trendy and just care if something’s good. And no matter what your opinion on the band’s output, it’s impossible to deny Steely Dan’s musical prowess.
For those not yet in the throes of a full-blown Steely Dan obsession, here’s a quick primer. The band was founded in New York by college friends Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. The pair moved to Los Angeles to record their 1972 debut ‘Can’t Buy A Thrill’. A platinum-selling hit, the singles are still instantly familiar half a century later: ‘Do It Again’, ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ and ‘Dirty Work’. Their personal distaste for flashy US mainstream rock belied their success and also their sound. Sasha Geffen’s 2019 review of the album for Pitchfork sums them up perfectly: ‘They wrote songs every bit as charming and delectable to the ear as the peers they claimed to despise.’ They sold albums by the truckload, but there was always something a little off-kilter about Steely Dan, not least in the fact they took their name from a dildo in William Burroughs’s 1959 novel ‘The Naked Lunch’.
Becker and Fagen spent the 1970s releasing acclaimed album after acclaimed album, before disbanding in 1981. Becker moved to Hawaii where he got off drugs and got on avocado farming, while Fagen worked on solo material. The pair reunited in the early 1990s. Though Becker died of oesophagal cancer in 2017, Steely Dan have continued to tour. Last summer, Fagen and the band played a run of 42 shows across the US, including a night at Los Angeles’s Hollywood Bowl. I was there and it was heroic. Did I swing dance on the steps of the legendary venue with a man that could have been my dodgy uncle to the sweet, smooth sounds of ‘Kid Charlemagne’? I sure did.
Also in the audience at January’s Pitchback Playback event was Hackney-based musician and DJ Lou Hayter. Steely Dan have long been her favourite band. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to one of those things, and “Aja” was the perfect album to hear in that environment,’ she says of the experience. ‘I played that album to death so it’s the one I play most sparingly these days, but I heard loads of detail I’ve never heard before, and was completely blown away all over again. They’re very visual, almost cinematic. I felt like I’d been transported to LA and back.’
Hayter got into Steely Dan in her teens after hearing jazz and soul DJ Patrick Forge play ‘Peg’ on the radio and recognising the sample from De La Soul’s hip hop classic, ‘Eye Know’ – which has just hit streaming platforms for the first time ever, bringing the sound of Steely Dan to even more ears. ‘I fell in love with it and went out and bought all their records, but I didn’t know anyone else that was into them. It was one of those things that I just listened to on my own.’ Slowly, that started to change. One of the first fellow Steely Dan fans Hayter met was Mark Ronson, discovering their mutual love of the band touring together when Hayter was in nu-rave act New Young Pony Club. Superfan Ronson can be seen wearing not one, but two different Steely Dan shirts in his 2021 Apple TV music doc ‘Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson’, and he recently referred to Fagen as ‘our lord of irony-imbued superjams’ on Twitter while wishing him a happy birthday.
A superior smoothness
As well as London shaking off the shackles of music snobbery, after a rough few years in the capital, the current Steely Dan renaissance could also be chalked up to the fact that we all just want to hear something smooth, something that whisks us away to a sunny Californian beach with a tequila cocktail never far away from our fingers. Something to think about the next time you see someone in Cafe Oto wearing Becker and Fagen’s faces on a rip-off of that classic Sonic Youth ‘Goo’ T-shirt.
Continuing to spread the good word about Steely Dan, Hayter is currently compiling a mixtape of the band’s affiliated acts, from Texan singer and model Rosie Vela to Merseyside new wave band China Crisis. She chalks up the current Steely Dan revival to the resurgence of soul music as well as the impact of our parents’ record collections.
‘There’s a warmth and soulfulness in those songs,’ she says, ‘but I actually listened to Donald Fagen talk about this himself, and he wondered if it’s because millennials’ parents were listening to Steely Dan, so it’s all about familiarity for them. But they’re also just the best band ever, so of course people are going to listen to them!’