DANI BENNETT SPRAGG

I t’s often said that the best way to learn a process or a skill is to just throw yourself in at the deep end, acquiring and absorbing the knowledge as you go. For Dani Bennett Spragg, the MPG’s Breakthrough Recording Engineer Of 2019 award winner, getting to spend time at London’s legendary Assault & Battery studios at a young age, sitting side by side with the prolific producer Mark ‘Flood’ Ellis, proved to be the perfect education.

Dani’s interest in music began early on in her life: “It took a while, to be honest,” she remembers. “I knew I wanted to be in music when I was young, but I didn’t really know in what capacity. I remember watching a documentary about Joe Meek and the making of Telstar, and that was really the first time I thought about it as a potential job. You tend to hear a lot of producers talking about picking apart songs they loved when they were kids… I never did that. I never really thought about production as a thing until I saw that Joe Meek documentary and that really did trigger my interest in a big way.”

Dani’s fascination with the esoteric recording practices of Joe Meek pushed her to snap up an unlikely opportunity to get to learn alongside one of the most acclaimed and hardest-working producers in the industry: “Until I got into the studio, I didn’t really know if it was what I wanted to do,” Dani remembers. “It was very fortunate, really. When I was 17, my dad, who works in film, was working with a director who was actually Flood’s neighbour. My dad was talking to this director about how I wanted to get into music and he ended up giving me Flood’s email address. I’d actually never heard of Flood at the time.”

THE FLOODGATES ARE OPEN

Dani emailed Flood and enquired about the possibility of spending a week in the studio doing some work experience. “He took about