Dan Carey’s studio is notoriously hectic at the best of times, but today takes the biscuit. The air is thick with hangovers, the tabletops strewn with empty champagne bottles and Carey’s head has been freshly shaved bald. His new musical project Miss Tiny, a duo with Warmduscher’s Benjamin Romans-Hopcraft, played at Pratts & Payne in Streatham last night, before stumbling the short walk back to the studio with a few select friends in the early hours.
As we retrace those steps back to the venue, Carey rightly strides through this patch of south London as if he has been granted special civic freedoms, such has been his role in establishing it as a hub of alternative music culture over the last decade. In an era when it has been harder for traditional music scenes to solidify, Carey has been the lightning rod for a boom of agitated, prodigious post-punk bands that are bound together not just by time and place, but by an aesthetic that was honed to a significant extent by Carey himself, quietly, behind the production desk.
