After 20 years, garage music legend Daniel Bedingfield is back (Picture: C Brandon/Redferns)
‘I’m waking up in Topanga on a mountain, I can see the ocean and everything’s in bloom. The whole place smells like wild honey.’
When Metro.co.uk joined the call to speak to 2000s superstar Daniel Bedingfield, who’s back touring with old and new music after a staggering 20 years, we never expected the conversation to open in that way.
But it quickly became apparent that the singer is anything but predictable, having spent the past two decades travelling the world, living with his ‘feet in the dirt’, and going through the ‘painful’ process of learning to live in the moment.
In 2002, the musician released his debut album Gotta Get Thru This, featuring tracks including the titular song – a bona fide garage classic – as well as other well-known hits such as If You’re Not the One and Never Gonna Leave Your Side.
The record went on to sell millions of copies around the world, topping the charts and leading to Daniel winning the award for best British male artist at the 2004 Brit Awards.
The artist’s second album, Second First Impression, came out in 2004, the same year that he was involved in a serious car accident in New Zealand that left him with a ‘broken neck’.
The singer’s album, Gotta Get Thru This, came out in 2002 (Picture: Daniel Bedingfield)
Fast-forward to 2024, and Daniel is getting ready to put out ‘20 years of recorded material’, as well as a drum and bass album that he’d like to record with his ‘heroes, and a bunch of new kids’.
So, to kick off our interview, we had to ask him… did he get thru this?
‘I did. I did by going to the ends of the Earth and farming. Farming for myself, chickens and bees and fruit trees. And living with my feet in the dirt and digging and learning languages,’ the 44-year-old responded.
‘Going to Burning Man 15 times, being part of a Burning Man camp setting up in the middle of the desert under crazy conditions. So I’ve lived a lovely 20 years.’
It was during his many times at the Burning Man festival – an event that takes place in the desert in the US that aims to ‘lift the human spirit, address social problems, and inspire a sense of culture, community, and civic engagement’ – that Daniel practised the art of ‘letting go’.
He explained that on the last day of the event, you take something that you’re ‘ready to let go of’ to a temple to burn it.
The artist has had transformative experiences around the world over the past two decades (Picture: Daniel Bedingfield)
Ever eco-conscious, he acknowledged: ‘Now I know that that much wood being burned is not cool for the environment. But at the time, it was a way to have a spiritual experience without the religious trappings. And it was pretty amazing.
‘I’m trying to build a practice of letting go. So now when I have something, I look at it, and I think this could be gone in a few seconds and this is my moment to enjoy it.’
When we pointed out that perhaps not enough people are present in the moment on an everyday basis, he added: ‘I think the moment is pretty painful. The amount of work I’ve done on myself in therapy and doing psychedelics to get to a place where I could actually be present, it’s taken a couple of decades.’
Daniel’s return to the stage coincides with an era of mass resurgence. Last year, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2001 hit Murder on the Dancefloor went viral worldwide after it was featured in the film Saltburn. Daniel’s sister, Natasha Bedingfield, has seen her 2004 song Unwritten sweep social media thanks to its inclusion in the rom-com Anyone But You.
And now, garage and drum and bass music is back on the rise, after originating in the mid-1990s. Enter: Daniel Bedingfield.
‘I felt the music shift and I felt the melodies coming back. I turned on British radio and I liked what I heard,’ Daniel shared, when explaining what spurred him on to want to tour again.
Daniel and his sister Natasha Bedingfield certainly set a high bar for siblings in music (Photo by Simon James/WireImage)
‘Everyone that was six is now 26, so it’s a whole new generation of people that like the music, and their parents are there too. They just started demanding it for the last like five, six years, and I finally was like, ok!’
It ‘means a lot’ to Daniel that these genres of music are back on the rise, as he pointed out that he never had the chance to release any drum and bass music in the past, ‘because it was just so underground by the time garage was big’.
‘Now this gives me a chance,’ he stated.
While Daniel has spent the past two decades travelling the world and getting to know himself on a deeper level, he also has, of course, been making music. And now, he has ‘20 years of recorded material’ ready for his fans.
‘The whole time I was wishing that drum and bass and garage were things that I could release, and now they are. So that’s very exciting to me, because I’ve got a lot of work that I care about tremendously to release over the next five years,’ he shared.
Now that Daniel and Natasha Bedingfield have recently been receiving an increasing amount of attention in the public eye, fans will surely be hoping for a sibling reunion on stage, after they famously performed at the Brits together in 2005.
Of course, we had to ask if that might be a possibility in the near future.
‘We could! I think the time is coming that could make that very easy to do,’ Daniel answered hopefully.
‘It’s scary, singing with your siblings, because there’s a deep love. I’m a massively harsh critic to music and so is she. Working with families is always tricky. I think I’m a bit brash, and so it’s trying to dial down my energy when I’m singing with her to the kindest and sweetest and most chill level possible. Otherwise, I think I kind of scramble her energy sometimes when we’re working together. Not in life, but working together is very serious.’
Hearing about Daniel’s plans for upcoming new music and collaborations, it can be startling to remember that 20 years ago, he had a near-death experience when he was involved in a horrific car accident.
Looking back on that time in his life, he told us: ‘So I was lying in bed with a broken neck with sharp bones that were right next to my spinal cord and the anticonvulsives weren’t working. I turned to my dad and I said, “You realise that these are not working and I could sever my own spinal cord?” And he looked me right in the eyes and said, “Yes.” That was a scary moment.’
Daniel seen performing at T4 On The Beach in 2005, more than a year after his car accident (Picture: Jim Dyson/Getty Images)
Daniel recollected how one day, a ‘bunch of people decided to pray’ for him, coming together in an online chatroom to unite in prayer.
‘There was a 300,000-people capacity to get in there and pray for me together and they crashed the server, there were so many people,’ he shared.
‘So I remember being really high on opiates in my bed, about to die, with my dad sitting next to me for nine days straight, and I saw these beams of light shooting from around the world into me, into my body healing me. Isn’t that weird? It’s amazing. So I really felt those prayers. So that was quite an incredible moment.’
He continued: ‘Then Avid Merrion [a character played by comedian Leigh Francis] told everyone I was dead. So it was a very beautiful and painful time. But I think more than anything, I haven’t had a moment since then where I wasn’t aware that I could die in five seconds.
The If You’re Not The One singer outlined how he treasures every moment (Picture: X/@DanielBedingfld)
‘This moment, this could be my last moment, and so this is a very treasurable moment in this interview, because it might be my last one. That’s so real. It’s so tangible to me that it’s enriched my life dramatically. I think most people who have near-death experiences kind of understand what I’m saying.’
So how does Daniel feel that he’s evolved the most over the past 20 years?
‘I’ve learnt how to be happy, and that was mainly by the least English thing possible – getting rid of a bunch of stuff, and people and energies and just sitting in what feels aligned with what I’d like my life to look like in the next 50 years. So getting rid of things.
‘Learning to be present with pain was quite easy to be present with, but boredom has been the hardest thing as a person on the spectrum. It has been very, very hard to deal with boredom and over stimulus. So I’ve learned to sit in my feet, to live in the ground underneath my feet, to live in my body, and I’ve learned to get rid of things that aren’t giving me life.’
Daniel Bedingfield is on tour with live dates announced for April 2024 celebrating 20 years of his album Gotta Get Thru This. Tickets are on sale here.
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