‘As far as promoters like myself went, the GLC going made a vast difference. So many of the shows we’d put on just weren’t viable without them, but they were always very well attended so the people of London must’ve been happy with them. After about 1984 or 1985, it was down to the local authorities and the Arts Council, who started from the point of wanting operations to have self-sufficiency. They’d support you to a certain extent, then when you looked like you were self-sufficient they’d say “Oh, you’re making too much money therefore we can’t really fund you.” They’d withdraw their tranche of money, which would mean suddenly it didn’t add up, so then that crumbled. It became harder and harder to get the public-money support to put things on.
‘This had a knock-on effect in other areas, because the music business wasn’t supporting the development of the acts. We could only self-release so far, and we could only get press coverage so far, but then when we came back for the second round, without the exposure from live work the media and audience moved on to the next thing. It was very hard to build a fanbase. A lot of artists got out of music or went back to Africa.’
TODAY, THE AFRICAN SCENE SURVIVES in London, even if it’s not really thriving. The town hall dances are still there, as are a few local groups; individual artists rather than whole bands come in; Wala’s Limpopo Club is still in existence, if no longer at the Africa Centre; and Debbie’s Outerglobe promotions present regular nights at Notting Hill’s Tabernacle. There’s also a circuit of underground all-night warehouse parties in London that tend to be nation-specific rather than pan-African, a kind of post-rave-culture version of the town hall dances, which usually feature live music and frequently pull in crowds upwards of a thousand.
Wala still believes that African music can gain serious ground in London:
‘I still think it’s going to happen again. There’ll be somebody, another group maybe, and it will take a lot of convincing for these other record companies to jump in. But I believe it can happen like it is in France, where they’ve kind of adopted the African music as their music to export. African music is the music they can sell as French music all around the world, so you get Youssou N’Dour and Salif Keita and they become bigger than all the other African artists, because the French have adopted them and the record companies in France have embraced them. They probably have realised all they have got is Jean-Michel Jarre or Frank Zappa to sell, and then there’s what? The Rolling Stones? So they said “Oh all right, why don’t we go with this one?”
‘That is why the French have moved to reggae in a big way. They are the guys controlling most of the reggae catalogues from before, and touring a lot of the reggae acts. So I think that is just the positive attitude needed over here.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Basslines, Brass Sections and All Things Equals
London gives up the Funk
‘IN 1970, THERE WERE LOTS OF THINGS HAPPENING, worldwide. One of which was the Black Power movement already established from about ‘69 in the States, and that was sort of percolating into the British black scene. People were taking positions – some positions intransigent, as in the case of Michael X and guys like this – but the Equals were caught in the middle of this by virtue of being a mixed band. We’ve never had issues of race with the band, I’ve never had a racial argument with anybody within the band, as a matter of fact there weren’t that many arguments to start with, we seemed to be sorted. But there was this thing in the air that there was going to be a change.’
At the tail end of the 1960s, when Osibisa were retooling African music in Finsbury Park, Eddy Grant, the bleached-blond Afroed leader of the Equals, was a mile or so away at the top of the Holloway Road, and similarly about to shake things up. Eddy was still at Acland Burghley school in Tufnell Park when he formed the group with two local English lads and a pair of Jamaican immigrant twin brothers. He actually straddles several aspects of this book: his dad was a professional trumpeter who played with Russ Henderson among others; Eddy started off in a trad jazz group with schoolmate and future Playaway star Derek Griffiths; he produced London African and reggae acts; and he always strongly supported calypso in the capital. His soul band, though, which played an exuberant Caribbean-flavoured pop soul, had a number one in 1968 – “Baby Come Back” – and several other chart hits. By 1970, a couple of less successful releases had come and gone since they’d livelied up the top ten with “Viva Bobby Joe”, and now Eddie Kassner, boss of President Records, wanted to know how they might change things. Eddy continues the story of the band’s single “Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys”:
‘I said I’ve got this great song, and it will change the way people look at the Equals and it will change the way people will look at music in this country. He asked me to play it. I had it on a demo and gave it to him. He listened and said “What?!?! I’m not going to have anything to do with this! You can’t sing about black anything to middle-class white audiences – they’ll bury you and I’ll be the one they blame when it’s released! I want nothing to do with this record!”
‘As a group we paid for the making of our records – that’s how the business is structured – but this time he wasn’t even going to forward the money to make the record. OK, I’ll do it! The making of the record was totally in my hands at this time – I wanted to compete, I wanted to have the sound that I wanted to have. I decided we were going to record sixteen track, which we’d never done before, the most we’d done before was either two four tracks or eight track, so I booked the studios and paid for it. I got a couple of my friends in – Gasper Lawal played bongos.
‘This record was really significant in terms of the Equals’ future – that’s when I burned the wig and cut off the hair, as much as I could without going bald [as well as his white afro, Eddy sometimes wore a blond wig]. I got a friend in to help promote the record, because it needed promotion as it was a total change in the image of the Equals, much more aggressive. We travelled up and down the country, to everywhere they would listen to us – or, in particular, listen to me – talking about it. I went out with a whole new political concept, a whole different political attitude.’
The Equals, left to right: Pat Lloyd, Dervan Gordon, John Hall, Lincoln Gordon; Eddy is the shadowy figure lurking at the back.
The gamble paid off. The label’s fears proved groundless, and the pop-music audience bought the record to such an extent that “Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys” was a top ten hit. More than that, Eddy believes, they also bought into it, further confounding corporate assumptions:
‘I think Eddie Kassner was behaving like any other record executive would have behaved at the time, because there was not a political plethora of those records coming out. That didn’t happen for quite some time thereafter. You have to remember, my good friend Stevie Wonder, for example, who’s become a massive campaigner for all sorts of things, was still writing ‘Baby I love you’. So the question is whether Eddie Kassner was even qualified to judge a record like “Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys” …’
Interestingly, Eddy and the group had previous in this area, with the rather self-explanatory “Police On My Back” as a track on their first album – a song that the Clash deemed worthy of a cover a decade or so later. But did he think they underestimated the British public?
‘There was a little of that. At that time the British public were, through the medium of radio and television, getting certain messages from the street, and that allowed a record like that to go through. Don’t get me wrong, it was a really hard sell, but people seem to buy what they innately may not have wanted to buy! [Eddy laughs] I think generally, with good music people become blind, they don’t become deaf, but I suppose by encountering whatever it is the ears are hearing the eyes become blind and the sensibilities tend to change. I mean why did the British public buy “Living On The Frontline”? I don’t know? [He laughs again, hard] I mean why did the British public even buy “Gimme Hope Jo’anna”, when England, under the Thatcher government, was not supportive of anti-apart
heid? I don’t know. Nor do I know if anybody else could’ve got away with it!’
In 1970? Probably not. Or not as far as the music industry and media were concerned. Over forty years later, “Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys” may not seem like the most incendiary political statement, but this was before sociopolitical awareness became an expected facet of black music anywhere. James Brown had “Say It Loud I’m Black And I’m Proud” in 1968, and there had been a flurry of Civil-Rights-related sounds in the mid-1960s – “Keep On Pushin’”, “Respect”, “Mississippi Goddam”, “Alabama”, and so on. In the UK soul music wore matching suits and worried more about precision than protest; reggae was, beyond the sound systems, a stringsed up pop party; and the closest thing to political statement was Blue Mink’s “Melting Pot”. A white pop group with a black girl singer, Blue Mink had a huge hit in 1969 with this hymn to racial harmony, the lyrics of which, even in those dark days before political correctness, astonished many listeners by speaking of ‘Red Indian boys’, and rhymed ‘Latin kinkies’ with ‘yellow chinkies’. However, the public themselves deserve some credit.
Race relations in London at the time of “Melting Pot” were being defined by the trial of the Mangrove Nine, a deliberate attempt by the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police to undermine black community organisation. The Mangrove Restaurant in All Saints Road, Ladbroke Grove, was a Caribbean hangout where the area’s black residents mingled with left-wingers of every stripe, from the arts world in particular – Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Neville were regulars. It was also the base from which the local community newspaper The Hustler was published. Concerned that the restaurant was fostering the sort of black political subversion that had so altered America’s social landscape, the authorities launched a campaign of coordinated harassment that brought a dozen heavy-handed police raids between January 1969 and July 1970. Coordinated by Special Branch’s recently appointed, if not officially acknowledged, ‘Black Power Desk’, each invasion was looking for drugs, although no evidence was ever found and the Mangrove’s owner, Trinidadian former musician Frank Crichlow, was very anti-drugs. In August 1970 a couple of hundred local black residents taking part in a march to protest the raids were met by nearly four times as many police officers. Confrontation was inevitable, and nine demonstrators, including Crichlow and Darcus Howe, were arrested on charges including incitement to riot.
To drive home his point that the Equals weren’t a regular funk band, Eddy Grant (right) would often sport a blond wig on top of his blond afro.
During the high-profile Old Bailey court case that followed, several of the nine defended themselves. Unsuccessfully demanding an all-black jury, they centred their case on politically motivated police harassment and allegedly fabricated police statements. The authorities’ campaign was intended, as Home Office documents would later reveal, to ‘decapitate’ any black organisation. They even discussed deporting Crichlow, a twenty-year UK resident and former Commonwealth citizen, but couldn’t quite make the legal justification. The event was used to discredit black radicalism as being inherently felonious, and the Mangrove described as a haven for ‘criminals, ponces and prostitutes’.
The magistrate threw the charges out after discarding substantial portions of certain police statements. Outraged, the Director of Public Prosecutions opted to have the nine charged with the same offences once again, and had them re-arrested in a series of aggressive dawn raids. The second trial went ahead, and hinged entirely on whether the jury believed the police statements. They didn’t. The nine were acquitted of all charges, and the Metropolitan Police tried to get the judge’s closing statement, which referred to racism within the organisation, withdrawn. It wasn’t.
Rather than whip up public condemnation of black self-help, the trials highlighted police misbehaviour, and elicited sympathy from the majority of ordinary British people towards their black counterparts. Not long after the success of the Equals’ “Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys”, Bob (Andy) & Marcia (Griffiths) reached number five with their reggae version of Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted And Black”.
The Mangrove Nine was a landmark case in the UK, revealing the establishment as demonizing a large group of British citizens purely on the basis of what they looked like. The Equals’ single was even more notable. “Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys” was the first recognisably black British statement – a song that saw itself as being of this country in both words and music, and announced that London’s indigenous black soul music was entirely self-sufficient. And it had become a mainstream success beyond music industry control.
LONDON HAD WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED a soul scene from the first half of the 1960s onwards. However, it said virtually nothing about the city itself, and barely left a footprint. Primarily a live phenomenon, its initial wave dovetailed with the emergence of the capital’s beat groups, and grew out of the musical legacy of the mod movement, which presented US soul music to the UK as a legitimate, mainstream-friendly pop music – in the case of Dusty Springfield and the Ready Steady Go! special The Motown Sound, quite literally so. As the generation of British R&B players spawned by mod had migrated to new-style rock, the youth themselves never evolved their own soul groups. To a large degree that was left to the record industry itself, which, with a stupefying lack of imagination, figured that the future of British soul must, in fact, be American.
With the licensed-in sounds of Detroit and Memphis all over the British charts, a club scene built up in London. It catered especially to American servicemen stationed around the capital, who expected a funky live group as part of their evening’s entertainment. Before long, these same servicemen actually became said funky live groups – many first took to the stage while on weekend passes, and later made a go of it on demob. Among the best known was former GI Herbie Goins, who arrived in London to sing in front of the Nightimers, a band that included Mick Eve and Speedy Acquaye, formerly of Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, and Barbadian trumpeter Harry Beckett, who went on to join Brotherhood Of Breath. Goins took over the spot from another demobbed US serviceman, Ronnie Jones, who had previously fronted Blues Incorporated and continued to work solo in London clubs. While Goins enjoyed little recorded success – a single and an album that set nothing alight – he became a top draw at venues like Whisky’s, the Flamingo, the Telegraph or the Dome at the Boston Arms. The undisputed king of this club circuit was Geno Washington, formerly of the US Air Force. Washington and his all-English Ram Jam Band were the most exciting live act in London – even the Rolling Stones were said to have thought twice about trying to follow Geno.
Away from the military, PP Arnold came to the UK with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue in 1966, and stayed on after Mick Jagger recommended her to the newly formed post-Mod Immediate label. She took over Ronnie Jones’s backing group the BlueJays, when Jones was spending increasing time in Europe, and her big, blues-drenched voice made her a sensation on stage, which translated to the recording studio. Arnold’s original take on “First Cut Is The Deepest” was a top twenty hit, and she was the first artist in the UK to have a hit with “Angel of the Morning”.
The most serious contender for Geno’s crown was Jimmy James, who wasn’t American but certainly wasn’t English either. Having come over from Jamaica in 1964 with his group the Vagabonds – which included the later-to-be-legendary Count Prince Miller – he recorded ska and rock steady, and even had a chart hit with a reggaefied version of Neil Diamond’s “Red Red Wine”, before Tony Tribe. However, the group worked out that they could make more money by sounding American and playing soul music, and did so to great effect both as headliners in London clubs and opening acts for the likes of the Who, the Faces and the Stones. Another West Indian on the circuit was Guyanese Ram John Holder. Now better known as an actor, he came to London in 1962 as an accomplished musician, and built a considerable following in the blues and R&B clubs. His Black London Blues album centred on the immigrant experience in London. While most of its self-penned numbers are tales of social injustice,
racial prejudice and hard times – “Brixton Blues”, “Wimpy Bar Blues”, “Notting Hill Eviction Blues” and so on – it still finds room for the hilarious “Pub Crawling Blues”, which does little other than name-check apparently random alehouses. Holder was something of a rarity in London’s clubland, post-calypso, in that he sounded distinctly Caribbean, but this may be because he started out as a folk singer, and was part of the Greenwich Village scene before coming to London.
Record companies had long found it convenient to more or less to clone US acts. Earlier in the decade, both St Lucian former doo-wopper Emile Ford and South African soulster Danny Williams were funnelled into Johnny Mathis impressions, to the extent that the latter was even billed as ‘Britain’s Johnny Mathis’. A few years later. PP Arnold was Tina Turner 2.0, while the Foundations, a horn-heavy multi-racial group formed a couple of years after the Equals, perfected the classic Motown sound with hits like “Build Me Up, Buttercup” and “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You”. This sort of lack of control did much to hamper the development of any unique British soul scene, as once acts had become caught up in someone else’s trajectory, there was nowhere for them to go when trends changed. The arrival of the beat groups confined Ford and Williams to cabaret; PP Arnold moved into musical theatre, where a big voice is a huge asset; and the Foundations were packed off to the US and Motown to open for the Temptations. Having failed to make any impact, they came back to find their audience was moving on from a sound which had been dated from the very beginning.
Only a minority of black London soul acts actually had recording contracts; in an echo of the chitlin’ circuit in the US, quite a few actually chose not to. Perhaps not surprisingly, many performers preferred the direct approach of getting paid cash in hand by a club owner to dealing with a white record company via a white manager. In those days, before big advances and transparent(ish) accounting, the better bands could earn a great deal more doing ten gigs a week on the road. Geno Washington was a vivid example: he resisted the overtures of record companies and persuasive friends alike, believing that he knew what his strengths were and he’d do best to stick to them. He wasn’t wrong, either; when he did finally sign a deal, it was for a live album, Hand Clappin’, Foot Stompin’, Funky-Butt… Live!, which was released in December 1966 and still in the top forty in July of the next year.
Sounds Like London Page 16