Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  As a result, London became the place to be for modern African recording. Osibisa were massive in West Africa by now, and bands wanted to catch some of that vibe. So much money was sloshing around the West African recording industry – particularly in oil-rich Nigeria – that whole groups would be flown over just to cut a couple of tracks in costly studios like RAK or Olympic. Such jaunts had the added bonus of London’s clothes shops: many of the vertiginous platform boots and the shirt collars measured in acreage that grace Afro-funk album sleeves were bought in Oxford Street or the King’s Road. Bands like Congo’s Super Mambo 69, Nigeria’s Ofo The Black Company, and Ghana’s Ebo Taylor and CK Mann flitted in and out to record, but many opted for longer-term stays. The Funkees, one of Nigeria’s most popular Afro-funk acts, moved to London en masse in 1973; fellow countrymen BLO and Apostles arrived a little later; South African multi-racial exiles Hawk assembled in the capital in 1974; Kenya’s Matata built quite a career in London; and both Super Combo and Sabanoh 75 came from Sierra Leone on tour and decided to stay.

  Many Nigerian funk bands who came to London to record in the 1970s spent as much time in Kensington Market as they did in the studio.

  Although their recordings were more or less exclusively shipped back home, these groups enjoyed a tremendous amount of interplay with the capital’s West Indian, African and English session players, both on stage and in the studio. Wala Danga remembers this as being as much of an attraction as top studios or alarming wardrobe, and it became a defining factor for making the move:

  ‘It used to work for even the more traditional African bands when they came to London, because whatever they did would have bits of soul and funk in it, and that was every African musician’s journey – to find out where their music had travelled to. American soul was from the same tree as African music, which was easy to see from the cross-fertilisation going on when they arrived here.

  ‘It was common for them to mix it up with West Indians, and easy to make it work. There was something about the music being from the same stem root, as it were, that the West Indian musicians didn’t find it at all difficult to cross over to play it. It was as if they instinctively knew, and it was good for the African musicians to look at what they were doing from another angle. The musicians that came in to work with bands would have listened to music like calypso or funk or reggae at home, and be infusing whatever knowledge they had of those types of music into the African situation. You know, ‘Why don’t we try some of this in it?”, and then find out it works. That was proved in the case of Osibisa, where you had people like Wendell [Richardson, an Antiguan] singing some of the songs and composing some of the songs. Or Spartacus R [Grenadian]. They were very much a part of that sound.

  ‘In live gigs, the audiences in London loved it, because there were elements they could easily identify with – say if a group over here played one particular strand, like fuji, which is a Nigerian kind of deep roots music, many people would probably get lost a bit. I used to have lots of white friends always asking me “where is the one in this music?”, but if you get them playing kind of crossover funk they were quick to find where the beat was and could identify with the music. It made it easier, [he starts chuckling] or more palatable for their ears. Not just English audiences, but the West Indians too.’

  These musicians were building a very progressive and unique brand of funk, as their intrinsic understanding of how a groove worked could probably challenge George Clinton, while they also knew more about polyrhythms than most Americans or Londoners could shake a stick at – or a shaker, for that matter. Just as African acts were employing London-based players, so these musicians were learning another dimension to their music. Conspicuous in Cymande’s work, that’s also noticeable in a great deal of what F.B.I. and Gonzalez did.

  Playing live, the bands that were in London for the long haul had no trouble fitting in and building a following beyond their own national crowds. While most gigged largely in clubs, those that crossed over to venues like the Nashville, the Greyhound or the George Robey acquired fanbases as broad as any London group. Matata, for instance, became entrenched enough in their new funk environment to enjoy huge club hits with “I Feel Funky” and “I Wanna Do My Thing”. Many London fans who bought their 1974 Independence album assumed they were a local band.

  As the 1970s progressed, the keys to the buoyant Afro-funk recording industry were two of black London’s biggest music-business movers and shakers, Eddy Grant and Akie Deen. Following his incapacitation in 1971 due to a heart attack and collapsed lung, Eddy no longer toured and had built a musical empire in Stamford Hill, North London. His state-of-the-art Coach House Studios had top-notch mastering facilities, and he’d even bought his own pressing plant – the first black-owned manufacturing facility in England. He was well known in Africa from his time with the Equals, and now African bands in the capital were seeking him out. Wala remembers what he did for the capital’s Afro-funk:

  ‘Eddy Grant was one of the main people behind the recording in London. I pay my respects to him because he did a lot of groundwork and really got things started. He was always very keen on Africa, especially in his wanting to go back to Africa and play in Africa. He really kept the links between London and Africa.

  ‘He had his Coach House Studios, and a lot of these guys would find their way up there to record in his studio with him. Because then Eddy was most well established as a black musician in London, so really if you wanted to aspire to be successful in London you had to aim to be like Eddy. He had had a number one chart record, “Baby Come Back”, and all those other hits in the sixties, so there was a lot of aura around Eddy even then. So all the musicians were kind of looking up to him – him and Errol Brown from Hot Chocolate – but it was really more Eddy because he stayed with that kind of rootsy sound, fusing the African and the Caribbean sounds together. He gave the groups a lot of help too, he’d reduce the rates if you didn’t have any money and he was always giving advice, which you took because by then he had done it all. It helped them get record deals too, when the companies knew Eddy Grant was behind these bands.’

  Eddy Grant relaxing on the veranda of his Barbados villa.

  Wala is understating Eddy’s role. He operated a hugely benevolent regime at the Coach House, and it was rare for a black band – African or otherwise – not to be able to cut their tune regardless of the state of their finances. As in-house producer he often got involved, giving advice or assistance or even acting as uncredited, de facto producer. He feels it was his duty to assist London’s black music community:

  ‘Help a bro! … I wanted to change England – in a great regard I did – and having the recording studio wasn’t just for me, in fact it was never just for me. It was hoping to change the way black musicians operated. Those days you were getting stuff from Jamaica, you were not making stuff, and if you were you had to compromise all the time. I was forever talking to people, trying to bring them away from the status quo, trying to show them there can be another way. People from every different area of black, I interfaced with them – if it was that they needed studio time then so be it, if they didn’t have any money then so be it. Everything with me was an open-door basis down at Stamford Hill.

  ‘What was important was that we were able to drive the culture through, to create a black presence … a black way … We were able to create history, and that history is now being shown in all sorts of ways as there is now an accommodation made for us in Britain.’

  Not everything produced at the Coach House was Afro-funk, but Eddy created a fertile, style-swapping nursery for London funk, soul and reggae that drove the style’s journey in the capital. The premises became the same kind of musical information exchange that Melodisc had been ten years previously and, as Wala stated, helped many Afro-funk acts to get signed.

  Eddy produced Matata, whose first album was on President, the Equals’ record label. Vernon Cummings and Keni St George took their London-formed, trans-national Afro-funk bands, Dant
e and Ozo – both were considered serious rivals to Osibisa at one point – to the Coach House, and they were signed by Epic and DJM respectively. The supremely funky 32nd Turn Off also released a Coach House-recorded LP on Jay Boy, while the UK’s first black power-blues trio (ie embryonic heavy metal), the Sundae Times, featuring future Osibisa member Wendell Richardson, made an album there for Joy Records, entitled Us Coloured Kids.

  Later in the decade, Sierra Leonean concert promoter and music business entrepreneur Akie Deen came into the business. Having built a name for himself back home by bringing over major American acts to share billing with West Africa’s finest, he came to London because he believed it to be central to developing the international potential of African music. He also reckoned the situation here to be wide open, and followed the Emil Shallit model, utilising the capital’s resources and players but with an eye on both the West African and the expat market. His strictly DIY approach used the network of small studios and disc cutters that were then springing up. Drawing from the capital’s pool of African and Afro players, he started out recording straight-up maringa and highlife, but became better known for mixing these traditional musics with disco, reggae, calypso, samba and rhumba. The results would go out for sale in London through the Oti brothers’ retail network on one of his own labels – Afrodisc, Rokel or Sabanoh Sounds – or be exported or licensed to West Africa.

  Deen didn’t limit his recordings to London musicians either. It became more or less obligatory for any popular African act touring or even stopping off in the UK to detour into one of Deen’s sessions and cut a few sides for him. He could also afford to bring groups over specifically to record. In 1976, he started running songwriting competitions in Sierra Leone, with a first prize being a trip to London and a recording session. Such was the status of this contest that when the first winner, Big Fayia, came over to cut his winning number “Blackpool” (about a Freetown football team), he was accompanied by Sierra Leone’s biggest band, Afro National. Often, presumably to get around contractual obligations, Deen would record visiting bands under different names.

  Deen’s London productions blended musicians and styles for something he called ‘discocalypso’, putting highlife, juju and maringa into an irresistible soundscape of thumping disco beats and super-slick production, and then stirring in liberal splashes of reggae, soca and funk. It made such an impact that you could barely go to any club or party in West Africa, or any decent disco in London, between, say, 1978 and 1982, without hearing a plethora of Akie Deen productions. His artists included Teddy Davis; Super Combo; Miatta Fahnbulleh, a Liberian R&B and jazz diva, who had narrowly missed success in the US; Sabanoh 75 (who also called themselves Sabanoh International and Wagadu Gu, and were really Afro National after they had moved to the capital); Jimmy Senyah (whose professional name was an anagram of his real name, Haynes); Afro Akino (in reality, famously, the Ghanaian stars Nana Ampadu & the African Brothers); the conservatory-trained Martha Ulaeto; and Emmanuel Rentzos.

  Super Combo were one of many West African funk bands that took up residency in London during the 1970s, to earn a good living on the club circuit.

  Deen reached a personal peak with Bunny Mack’s “Let Me Love You”, a calypso-ish/highlife-ish disco track that became a worldwide dancefloor smash, making a massive impression in West Africa, North and South America, and the UK. His big mainstream hit came a couple of years later when he produced Odyssey, formerly of New York but relocated to London. Giving them the Lamont Dozier song “Going Back To My Roots”, and adding his trademark rhythms, he correctly calculated the African market would love the sentiments. The tune was huge there, a number four in the UK, and gave the group their first US club hit for several years.

  Many purist guardians of the African music flame chose to discount Deen’s achievements as ‘not real African music’ – that word ‘authentic’ cropped up frequently, usually coupled with ‘not’. The truth is, he was a businessman and a music lover who reacted to what Africans all over the world let him know they wanted, rather than attempting to sell them what he might have figured was best for them.

  The music that came out of England during the five years from 1977 – not just Deen’s productions – was so influential in Africa itself that the period became known, completely without prejudice, as ‘the London era’. It also seems relevant that “Let Me Love You” was voted Record of the Year in several African countries, won gold discs, still figures on compilation albums, and has its hooks sampled on a regular basis. At the time of writing, Akie Deen was Sierra Leone’s Trade Commissioner for the United Kingdom.

  WHILE THIS AFRICAN FUNK INVASION was going on under the radar, the British bands had been finding ways into larger UK labels. Just like Osibisa before them, this was down to their live performances, more a matter of individuals’ enthusiasm than A&R policy, and usually involved overseas rather than domestic deals. Cymande were a case in point: long-time British pop producer John Schroeder (he co-wrote “Walking Back To Happiness” for Helen Shapiro in 1961) happened across them rehearsing in Soho when he was looking for a rock band that he was supposed to meet. He was so impressed that he did a deal with them, recorded a single, “The Message”, and on the strength of that got them signed to the US label Janus. When the tune was an American hit, that convinced Pye, who had a licensing deal with Janus, to put out their first album in the UK.

  The Olympic Runners, in 1974, were an equally happy accident, courtesy of veteran English blues producer and label boss Mike Vernon. The group members were all session regulars at Olympic Studios in Barnes, where Vernon was using them to back a blues artist. Waiting for said singer when he was late for a recording, the players messed about with some funk grooves. Vernon recognised quality when he heard it, and recorded it as “Put Your Music Where Your Mouth Is”. Signed to London Records in the US, it became an instant club hit, and eventually brought the band to the attention of the UK side of the company.

  Perhaps the most fortuitous of all were Root’s F.B.I., who owe their recording contract to a north London pub, a children’s TV show and someone who did rather well out of Woodstock. Root explains:

  ‘We were playing the Hope and Anchor, and the producer of this kids’ TV programme, Magpie, was in the audience. He really liked us and came down again to see us, and after that put us on the show. When we did Magpie a friend of mine saw us on it, Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, the blues group from the era before. I knew him because we used to share the same agent up north, from back when I was in Root and Jenny, and we’d become friends. He phoned me up and ended up becoming our manager.

  ‘Alvin had made a lot of money from Ten Years After and Woodstock and all of that [the group played at the festival and were featured in the film and on the soundtrack album], and had invested in this studio complex near Henley, [Hook Manor] on acres and acres of land. It was beautiful, and he invited us down to record there, to make the F.B.I.’s album in what was the perfect creative environment.

  ‘Alvin totally understood what we were about, and he’d got us an English producer. We were dead against an American producer because we didn’t want that sound, we wanted to remain true British, but he’d come up with this guy Chris Kimsey. He was only 21 but already he’d been working with Pete Frampton, Humble Pie and those bands from Alvin Lee’s era – he went on to produce the Rolling Stones. He got it straight away, he was full of energy and he wasn’t afraid, nor was he intimidated by us as a band. We were really lucky to get him because he knew how to record live music properly, which not every producer did. He knew we knew what we were doing, so he’d put stuff down, and when he’d had enough he’d say “Oh, fuck off!” and go off into the snooker room and leave me to it. When he’d come back, he’d balance it up perfectly.’

  The result is the F.B.I. album, probably the finest example of London’s take on classic funk, a storming set of brass-laden songs that never let you forget they’re from the Caribbean. It spawned several club hits and quickly become a cult albu
m that, to this day, is usually available on somebody’s catalogue.

  Even if strong live followings and dancefloor hits were enough to sustain London’s funkateers until the middle of the decade, however, they weren’t nearly sufficent to get them through what came next – disco. By taking the accent firmly off playing, disco reversed the ideals of this generation of bands, and virtually killed London’s live funk scene. It now made far more commercial sense for venues to employ deejays rather than book bands. As relatively little disco was made in England during the genre’s early years, UK record companies relished the notion of licensing in from abroad, instead of dealing with irksome bands and their managers – something that would become a trend (as the next few chapters will show). Although the perpetually optimistic Root roars with laughter when he talks about ‘the time when everybody had a band on, and although they had a deejay, that deejay knew his place’ he still splutters when he talks about what happened next:

  Post-F.B.I., Root Jackson was never less than dynamic as a solo artist.

  ‘I thought it was a great insult to music, when you’ve got venues that were making good money taking their stages out. The music was being made instantly, and nobody was helping anybody to develop a career. It all became short term, as the record companies started seeing it as records, not artists, or singles not albums – nothing like it used to be.’

  Really, the problems with the record labels lay with their never properly knowing what to do with black British acts, as so few people within those companies had got their heads around the notion of black people or black music being anything other than foreign. It was no coincidence that so many of this chapter’s bands were signed to US or International departments or smaller labels – F.B.I. were on Good Earth, the label owned by Tony Visconti, who produced the first Osibisa album. Now, with disco, the business thought it had a neat pigeonhole for these bands. This served further to infuriate Root Jackson: