Dan Duran
Dan Duran (aka tracey exenola) moved to Hamilton in 1987. Ten years later he formed his first band, Sequester, with Rob Murphy.
After leaving that group in early 1998, he joined VHS, a short-lived brit-pop inspired group, that soon gave way to SophieXEnola. Featuring the entire editorial staff (at the time) of the zine Clinton, SophieXEnola specialised in taking 3 minute pop songs and extrapolating them out to fifteen minute one chord freakouts.
After the demise of SophieXEnola, the extremely short-lived Planet Claire project was undertaken in 2000, who practised for two weeks, and broke up on the completion of their one and only gig at the Pavillon Bar, Waikato Uni. The use of a drum machine neatly segued into Dan's next project though - which went under the name luna spark, while he adopted the pseudonym tracey exenola.
In addition to this, in 2002 he re-joined two of his old Sequester bandmates in Big Elephants on bass guitar. This group a year later mutated into Vetox, who broke up in 2004, preceding Dan's move to Auckland.
He continued to write and record under the alias luna spark until 2008, and played bass for disco-punk band Kitty Hawk with other ex-Htowners Kent Briggs, and John Irvine ex-of Malenky Robot through 2006-08.
In 2000, Dan set up the original Hamiltron Yahoogroup email list, way back when email newsgroups were the shiznit, while editing Hamilton Music zine Clinton (2000/2001). Later he re-focused on the internets, helping set up the htown.co.nz website with web-genius drift in 2003, and set up the Htown Wiki in March/April 2006.
