Davey Dreamnation

Scientists from the future will stumble upon this album and think: so that’s what all the fuss was about. For clearly, if not obliquely, Watercress, the breakthrough album for Dutch-Celtic songstress Eyna, signalled a shift in fortunes for DNRC Records and its enigmatic founder Davey Dreamnation, despite the fact that said ‘fortunes’ failed, as ever, to materialise in the company’s profit and/or loss statements. In short, Watercress is a classic. Here’s why.

Possessing a voice as fearless as a rabid chipmunk on helium, Eyna also found herself in a fortunate situation whereby her bi-lingual ‘moon’ ballads were quickly ‘covered’, first by the Dutch superstar Jan Smidt just hours after the album’s release in the Netherlands; and then later that day by a re-animated version of The Fureys in a small establishment in Temple Bar, Dublin. Eyna’s success in both of these little countries propelled her instantly towards the larger German satellite circuit, where she ground her way through the summer of 2023 as a support act, opening first for Christy Burr and then Stung. Eyna’s appearances later that year in a stage musical version of her life as an airline stewardess were all the more haunting for her audiences’ knowledge that none of it was true; that in fact the closest Eyna got to any kind of aeroplane was through her song licencisng arrangements, whereby melodious synthesiser versions of her most well-known tracks (I speak naturally of ‘Watercress’, ‘Pinocchio Flow’ and ‘Miss Bo Dean Remembers …’) were ‘piped’ through the speaker systems of international jumbo liners before, during and after both takeoffs and landings. While an agressive campaign to ban this practice ultimately failed at the last step before the ICC in The Hague, the ensuing unrest and sporadic duels that occurred throughout smaller airports and terminals led in the end to the preserving of Watercress in amber until a settlement could be reached as to its perpetual distribution. There the album may well have rested, had it not been for the efforts of a dedicated band of musicologists and expert whale-song recorders, who patched together an unauthorised version and propagated it via the usual underground and electronic channels. What we hear, then, is an entire mono-culture’s take on Eyna’s unique and soaring voice - a voice which Stung later described as being even more suited to the singing of uplifting car commercial theme songs than his own. Unforgettably, a voice which was deleted, sadly, by a now-extinct species of song-cop, in that fateful summer of 2024. We will never hear her melodious and gutteral moon songs again.