Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  As more London players got into the scene, it began to open out creatively rather than simply clone American soul. The original acts therefore found themselves pushed onto the Northern Soul circuit, where they reached enthusiastic audiences in clubs like Manchester’s Twisted Wheel or the Mojo in Sheffield.

  Besides taking on Caribbean influences, soul music in the capital was paying attention to what was happening elsewhere. That made it far more accessible to the mainstream pop world, in much the same way as ‘Trojan Explosion’ reggae. Londoners Joe E Young and the Toniks, who sprinkled their footstompin’ soul music with pop psychedelia, earned a considerable following with their Soul Buster album, before Joe took over from Clem Curtis in the Foundations. Black Velvet, a powerhouse trio led by a deeply funky Hammond organ, and previously known as the Raisins or the Black Raisins, played soul music that was so openly reggaefied it was as much downtown Kingston as downhome Memphis. In demand at both soul clubs and underground ‘happenings’, they supplemented their live work with half a dozen dancefloor hits, including the enduring cult favourite “African Velvet”.

  One significant but oddly overlooked contributor to this sixties scene was the Ferris Wheel, a band who readily embraced the embryonic hippieness of soul music to evolve a London-gutsier, Fifth Dimension-type sound. The band was fronted by singer Diane Ferraz (hence the name), an arrival from Trinidad. Her entry into the music business came in 1965 as half of the duo Diane & Nicky. A curiosity for the time as a black and white pairing, they were also the first act managed by future Wham! svengali Simon Napier-Bell. Diane’s new group, though, bridged the old wave and the emerging pop soul that became part of the rock world. The line-up included George and Dave Sweetnam, the halfbrothers of Emile Ford – saxophonist George, along with Ferris Wheel drummer Barry Reeves, had been in Ford’s backing band The Checkmates – as well, later, as Dennis Elliott, who become Foreigner’s drummer, and Jim Cregan, destined to join Steve Harley’s Cockney Rebel. When Ferraz quit the music business in 1968, her spot in the band was taken over by a pre-Hair Marsha Hunt, who was in turn replaced by Linda Lewis. Although the Ferris Wheel never managed to turn their live success into record sales, their Can’t Break The Habit album remains a Brit Soul gem.

  Another integral part of the transition to an indigenous London soul sound was Root Jackson, who came to the UK from Curacao as a youngster, and settled in Huddersfield before he moved to the capital at the end of the 1960s. Together with his singing cousin, he formed Root and Jenny Jackson, a self-contained band in which Root started as drummer before moving up front to share vocal duties. Big at first on the Northern Soul scene, then causing a stir in the London clubs, they were at one point the highest-paid non-recording band in the country. Despite that, and a few hits after they signed to Beacon Records, trying to establish the notion of a unique UK sound was a constant struggle. Root thinks back to those days as we sit in the Map Café, a funky little spot hidden away behind Kentish Town High Road which thanks to the rehearsal rooms and studio upstairs has a strong connection to London’s black music. Somewhat appropriately, when this big smiling figure first walked in, the “Theme From Shaft” is playing on the music system:

  ‘In the beginning, with Root and Jenny, because we used to do a lot of that duo stuff – like Charlie and Inez Foxx or Ike and Tina – people used to think we were American, so we were always telling them ‘No, we’re from London’. We started doing US covers for the club gigs, because that was what the crowds expected, but we always had a distinct Caribbean flavour going on. I come from a steel pan background – that was my first instrument in the Caribbean – so as the band’s drummer I would always have a kind of Caribbean rhythm underneath everything else that was going on.

  In the beginning we had to compete with the Americans, our first record in 1968 was “Lean On Me” and was very American [this is “Lean On Me” by deep soulster Tony Fox, written by Teddy Vann, not the Bill Withers song]. We had another hit in the Northern Soul clubs with “Save Me” [an Aretha Franklin original], but I was writing from the beginning, our B-sides and album tracks, and that’s where I come from, our experience over here, rather than try to ape the American sound.

  ‘The thing was, the Caribbean sound did well, even if people didn’t acknowledge what it was – Black Velvet were on Beacon Records same as Root and Jenny, and they were very Caribbean; and Eddy Grant’s sound was too, “Baby Come Back” had a very Caribbean sound to it. But back then people associated soul music so strongly with Americans.’

  During the 1960s, another aspect of the Caribbean was having a far more noticeable effect on London’s music, and indeed London in general. Recalling, with considerable relish, a remarkably patronising incident backstage in a south London pub, Eddy Grant explains:

  ‘At that time, England was a pretty dark place … the English environment was extremely dark, musically and in every other wise. I remember there being really only two colours in England – brown and cream – all the houses were painted like that. In fact they actually brought that tradition to the Caribbean, where everything was brown and cream for a time! But it was the West Indians that basically changed England; the Greeks had a hand, the Indians had a hand, but ostensibly it was the West Indians, because it was the West Indians that were fighting. And they are the ones who bought colour to England.

  ‘Take the Equals, they personified the Caribbean in dress. People talk about Bowie and Marc Bolan as having changed the dress code and dress mode of then-current popular music and culture, but the Equals really were the first. The Shadows wore suits, and everybody else, even the Beatles wore suits … and they were all dark suits. I remember playing the Witchdoctor in Catford with a group that was Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, who everybody likes to say brought colour to the music business – total rubbish! We were dressing in lime greens and pinks and blues and yellows, things that were unheard of on the stage in England in pop music, and they were wearing – for the record – brown corduroy jackets! When they saw us in our brightly coloured uniforms they laughed, it was [Eddy affects cockney accent] “Oh look at that lot, look at that lot, poor chaps!” They didn’t know what really was happening. There really was going to be a change and a massive change in the way people looked at black people from there on.

  ‘All of that Carnaby Street issue too, I don’t know if Colin Wilde is still alive, but it was on the Equals he tried out all his odd materials and whatever. I would go in there and have him draw whatever it is, and we’d wear it.’

  Wilde, who died in 1988, was the co-founder of one of the first tailor/boutiques on Carnaby Street, the Carnaby Cavern. Its clientele was to include Jimi Hendrix, the Kinks and Alvin Stardust, as well, strangely, as Benny Hill. Eddy continues:

  ‘You know the history with the Bay City Rollers and those trousers? Those trousers were mine! [He chuckles] If you look back into the history there’s enough Top of the Popses there with me wearing Bay City Rollers trousers!

  ‘This is one of the reasons why there wasn’t a wave of London black music that came through after the Equals. There were many great bands, some even better than the Equals, but pop music requires a certain bravado, a certain upfront in-your-face kind of attitude, and the Equals had that. We showed it straight off in how we dressed, and from a cultural standpoint there’s never been anything like the Equals.’

  AS THE SIXTIES BECAME THE SEVENTIES, London’s soul scene made a dramatic shift. With funk now the way forward, it was no longer influenced by American soul alone, and began to incorporate elements from English prog rock. That turn of events allowed much more of a London flavour to come through, according to Root:

  ‘We had just come back from Europe and the mood was very progressive, and it was general for people to take a bit more interest in music. The bands were not just taking the American sound but creating something that was distinctly British … using the influences from Africa and the Caribbean as well as the States. I remember doing a gig as Root and Jenny in the West En
d, at the Valbonne, a very hip place at the time – it had a swimming pool in the middle of it. Spartacus was down there, he’s related to Jenny [Spartacus R was Osibisa’s first bass player]. He told us about this new band he had, and then Osibisa burst on the scene, and then came Cymande, and we were taking what we were doing into F.B.I., a much more progressive situation [F.B.I. were a nine-piece, horn-heavy, very modern funk outfit].

  ‘F.B.I. was a band that, at first, was a backing band for Americans when they came over and couldn’t bring their own bands – the first tour we did was with Eddie Floyd, we did Percy Sledge, Jimmy Helms, Ben E King. You step up a gear for that kind of gig because they’d come in one day and you’re on the road the next – one rehearsal and bang you’re ready to go. Soul … blues … funk … all of that, you really had to know your shit to get the feel right, because they weren’t going to take any old stuff. But there was discipline involved, so when we were doing our own stuff we couldn’t fail to keep it tight. That meant we could experiment more, be more progressive, and it meant our own influences could come in. Not only our Caribbean influences, but telling our own story of being in this country – we’d been here since the sixties, from the street, fighting with the Teddy Boys, and all that came through the music.

  ‘This was at the very end of the 1960s, and we’d taken a lead from what was going in the rock world. Now it was all about playing. We were kind of showing off, because it was all about competition, but in a nice way! It was a real change from the singer-and-backing-band situation. Us, Kokomo, Cymande, we were groups who had singers, but it was led by the musicians who used to practise so much. You’d spend hours just jamming and swapping licks – that was the jazz element coming out – so you’d really be able to cut it, in any situation. We always had a good show, we knew we had to compete with anything that came in from America when we started opening for them. Then when you’d be in the studio you’d record live, and you could do it, that’s why those albums still stand up today because they have that energy about them.’

  The timing was just right for such musical adventures. In London at the start of the 1970s, the pub rock scene was getting going in boozers like the Hope & Anchor in Islington, the Red Lion in Fulham, the Dublin Castle in Camden Town, the Half Moon in Herne Hill and the Torrington in North Finchley. In the beginning, they carried over from the largely London Irish and calypsonian tradition of music on a Sunday lunchtime or a Friday night, or in the case of Kentish Town’s Tally Ho moved from a jazz-only policy. Then this circuit became augmented by enterprising landlords who liked a bit of music themselves. A couple of years into the 1970s, this no-frills, usually R&B/rock’n’roll-based antithesis to glam rock was a fully fledged movement.

  It was pub rock, via groups like Kilburn & The High Roads (Ian Dury’s first band), Dr Feelgood, Bees Make Honey and Squeeze (featuring Jools Holland on piano), that laid the back-to-basics, DIY groundwork for punk. It opened up small informal venues once again, stimulating live music to such a degree that for a while it seemed the only way to sell drinks was to have a band on in the back room. Audiences weren’t necessarily too fussed about what the band was, provided they could play and never strayed into self-indulgence. Crowds wanted easily accessible drinking music that might well facilitate a bit of a dance, and London’s new wave of funk bands fit the bill perfectly. The circuit of established clubs like the Q, the Marquee or the Country Club was now supplemented with big, or sometimes not-sobig, pubs. Root continues:

  ‘You could earn decent money from those gigs, because there were so many of them, then there was Dingwalls, and even bigger places like the Roundhouse was still having regular bands. You’d complement that with the university gigs, because the university circuit was kicking for musicians at that time, as they had the budgets and they used to book bands on a regular basis. There was nowhere without a band.

  ‘We had a large, I’d call it, underground following. Everywhere we played, us and a lot of other London bands on that scene, was packed, people were hanging from the ceiling, and the sweat and energy was something else. It helped us all grow as bands, being able to play to audiences like that without the pressure of having to always look for the wider appeal.’

  Root is spot-on in this respect. These audiences and their expectations played a huge part in shaping London funk. Although above all they wanted it tight, with plenty of playing, the clue is in the name ‘pub rock’ – crowds were usually inebriated enough to accept all sorts of ideas and accents. Developing with far greater freedom than much of the US equivalent, these funk groups were closer in spirit to Funkadelic or Rufus than the more conventional outfits. The heaviest and most black radical of them all was Noir; Kokomo, possibly the capital’s best-ever white funk band, were jazzy; Gonzalez, who had evolved out of guitarist Bobby Tench’s Gass and featured the ubiquitous Mick Eve, had a vivid Latin tinge to their rock-y funk; and as for Root’s F.B.I. (it stood for Funky Business Incorporated), think Tower of Power after a very long holiday in the Caribbean.

  The most remarkable band of all, though, was Cymande. These eight musicians were to West Indian music what Osibisa were to West African sounds; they created the perfect fusion of Caribbean and funk structures, with a nod to contemporary rock, but did it from a deeply spiritual Rasta perspective. That could only have happened in London – all the players lived here, but were from assorted West Indian backgrounds – and it came before roots reggae had become remotely fashionable. Their first album, Cymande, was an astonishing and astonishingly London funky take on the smoky Jamaican jazz of Cedric Im Brooks or Count Ossie.

  At a time when it was still considered cool to have a live band as part of the clubbing experience, these groups were a valuable component of London’s funk scene. Alongside them on the capital’s small stages – less innovative, perhaps, but never stinting on the driving rhythm – was a funky result of the spate of contemporary independences in West Africa.

  London Caribbean/African funk group Cymande, whose 1972 album Cymande was one of the earliest musical examples of Rastafari in the capital.

  HEAVYWEIGHT AMERICAN SOUL STARS had been taking their revues to West Africa since the mid-1960s. This was prompted as much by the desire to send cultural envoys to satisfy the newly independent nations’ thirst for self-assured black expression as by the opportunity to open up lucrative new markets. These acts, and their subsequently imported records, made a deep impression on local highlife, and arrangements started to incorporate western ideas such as horn riffs and big bass guitars. The 1966 Nigerian album Super Afro Soul, in which Orlando Julius & His Modern Aces created a supremely funky blend of highlife, Sam & Dave, James Brown’s Famous Flames and jazzy brass tinges, is probably the earliest prominent example. Through the rest of the decade, the continent’s love of soul music grew. James Brown set a concert attendance record in Lagos in 1970, while the Soul To Soul Festival in Ghana the next year, organized by Maya Angelou, brought together Wilson Pickett, Ike & Tina, Roberta Flack and the Staple Singers with native Ghanaians Guy Warren, ET Mensah and the Damas Choir, for a 14-hour concert in Black Star Square, Accra. A documentary of the event is available on DVD.

  By the start of the 1970s, legions of groups had become so consumed by this music as to be virtually James Brown or Otis Redding tribute bands. Yet more studied the American riffs and arrangements to recreate soul songs, but then put African lyrics on top. Ghanaian star George Darko coined the term ‘funky highlife’ around this point, and a great deal of the very best can be found on compilations like Strut Records’ Nigeria 70, Superfly Records’ Afrofunk Expressway and Harmless Records’ Africafunk: Return To The Original Sound Of 1970s Funky Africa. These albums show off a level of soul sophistication that could have given groups like Mandrill or the Bar-Kays a run for their money. Acts like Shina Williams, Orlando Julius & The Afro Sounders, Tony Sarfo, Afro Cult Foundation, Ebo Taylor, the Sahara All Stars and Monomono were local heroes, and provided serious competition for the more enduring Gasper Lawal, Tony All
en and Sunny Ade.

  EMI Nigeria latched onto this music, and with remarkable appreciation for its value in 1971 the company brought Fela, the undisputed king of what he called ‘Afrobeat’, over to London to record. As a mark of how highly he was regarded, they installed him and his band in Abbey Road studios. While here, Fela hung out with Ginger Baker, and gigged in clubs like the Four Aces in Dalston, the Q Club and the 100 Club. It was in these jumping, capital-city sweatboxes that he soaked up London’s unique multi-national black funk vibes before recording Fela’s London Scene, which many believe, with good reason, to be the greatest Afro-funk album ever made. Arguably precipitated by the album, London came to play a huge part in that music during the 1970s.

  Although most West African countries had well-equipped recording industries, releases were often sent to London for final mixing and mastering, particularly when multinationals like EMI, Phonogram or Decca were involved. Another trend, reminiscent of how Jamaican reggae was ‘stringsed up’, was for string section overdubs or extra orchestration to be added to Afro-funk in London. This was especially prevalent among Nigerian producers, whose desire for sophistication gave their funk a kind of Philly-Sound flavour.