‘There had always been a migration of reggae artists from Jamaica to the UK, especially London, because they found it was a better way of doing business than in Jamaica. They were more likely to earn some money. But because, back then, there was hardly any communications between the UK and Jamaica – you couldn’t just make a phone call – many found it easier to stay on. Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Johnny Osbourne, Sugar and, to a lesser extent, Freddie McGregor, all wanted to do more slick reggae, but the way it was going in Jamaica was mostly deejays like Yellowman and Eek-a-Mouse. In Jamaica, everybody knew that the British-born kids were very much into the American soul, and when they came up with the lovers’ rock that was perfect, because it was like a bridge between the soul and the reggae.
‘It suited those singers who wanted to cross over with love songs – “Night Nurse”, “Money In My Pocket”, “Love Has Found A Way”. Until they started coming to London they were seen as roots singers, even though they were more into love songs, which is what they could do in London.
‘Sugar, now, had recorded roots material in Jamaica and he was known for that, and it was on that success that he travelled over to London – he went there with roots material. But once he got there, the marketplace was such that in order to be relevant in London he had to start recording lovers’ rock songs. That was what the scene was, and he just rode on that whole lovers’ rock energy. It became him, and he had hit after hit in Jamaica as well as England.’
LIKE ALL REGGAE STYLES since the dawn of JA boogie, sound-system exposure meant constant evolution, and lovers’ rock developed to meet the wider demands of its audience. Dubwise takes on tunes became de rigueur, as lovers’ sound systems competed eagerly for unique cuts of popular riddims, but these never neglected the melodies, and instrumental versions were always very popular. Jamaican horn players such as Dean Fraser, Bobby Ellis and Vin Gordon became popular choices in the London studios, creating sophisticated, jazz-tinged music. Toasting evolved on the lovers’ sound systems, too, as the more tuneful deejays provided breezy commentaries on love and life in the dance. It was this decidedly unportentous toasting that gave rise to what became known as sing-jay in the mid-1980s, as dancehall deejays such as Half Pint, Tenor Saw and Anthony Red Rose rocked the sound systems with their swinging, half sung/half rapped style.
Lovers’ rock also started to commentate on different aspects of the lives of the people who sung it and bought it. Victor’s biggest hits were his observational trilogy about going raving in north London: “Slacks And Sovereigns” (getting ready); “At The Club” (what was going on when he arrived); and “I Need A Girl Tonight” (self-explanatory, really). Then there was the sub-genre known as ‘conscious lovers”, which flew in the face of criticism that lovers’ rock was divorced from realities of being black. The lovers’ industry wasn’t shying away from anything; they simply approached it from their own perspective, which didn’t involve a great deal of Rasta or out-and-out sufferation. Kofi’s album Story of a Black Woman consisted of ten tracks that dealt with her life in London; 15, 16, 17 had a hit with “Black Skin Boy”; and Janet Kay and Carroll Thompson did a tribute song for the victims of the New Cross Fire. One of the biggest and most fondly remembered of all lovers’ songs is Brown Sugar’s “Black Pride”:
‘Black is the colour of my skin
Black is the life that I live
I’m so proud to be the colour God made me
Black pride for all to see …’
Janet still speaks of it as: ‘Such a beautiful song, that addressed the way we felt with the riots and suss laws and so many things going on politically. It meant a lot to a lot of women out there, and a lot of men too, but I guess it got overshadowed by the Aswads and the Steel Pulses.’
As the 1980s progressed, and the initial excitement started to wane, the success that lovers’ rock had achieved proved not quite sufficient to sustain it at the same level of productivity. The ‘informal’ business practices of many small labels meant that disputes between artists and producers over money were commonplace. The singers’ relative youthfulness was a factor in that respect, as many were at the stage in their lives when they needed to be thinking about careers, and if the music wasn’t paying it ceased to be an option. Meanwhile the older women were putting careers on hold to have families, only to discover there wasn’t much of an industry left by the time they came back.
Victor believes that the lack of mainstream success was a factor in turning singers away from the style, as “Silly Games” was the exception rather than the rule:
‘Disillusionment is what happened. Many people found they weren’t making a living out of being singers. Sure, people were always telling you you were really talented and you should go far … but then what? Nothing. And because your songs weren’t being played on mainstream radio you knew you could only get so far. Once in a while somebody would sneak through because they got their tunes onto national radio, like the Cool Notes had a couple of hits, so did the Investigators, then a couple of years later there was Trevor Walters, and Sugar [Minott] had a hit when he lived here, Maxi [Priest] did very well. But ultimately it wasn’t enough to keep you in the business, because you couldn’t survive. A lot of people just drifted away from the music industry – I went back to acting.’
Janet points to a combination of artist naivety and the reluctance of large UK record companies to invest in local black talent:
‘The major record companies in the UK weren’t actually signing any black acts. The majority of the black acts that got through and into the charts were licensed, usually from America but sometimes from Jamaica, so there was no real investment in the artist as all they had to do was put out the record. It meant nothing was long-term, and there was never any nurturing process.
‘Then from the side of the industry we were in we weren’t taught how to do interviews, we weren’t taught how to perform, we weren’t taught how to present ourselves … We weren’t taught anything! Everything that we did was completely organic, completely coming from ourselves. And in terms of knowing what we were entitled to and what we weren’t entitled to, in terms of recording and rights and that, we were not given any information. There were no contracts, no pieces of paper, we were really, really young and green, and just happy to sing a song that people liked – if you got paid a few pounds that was bonus. Remember, I had a job so I was really happy.
‘But really, everything was done by trial and error. And more of it was error, in terms of the artists anyway!’
LOVERS’ ROCK NEVER DIED COMPLETELY. As artists like Peter Hunnigale, Donna Marie and Mike Anthony provided a sound-system alternative to dancehall and ragga, so the mainstream seemed to open itself up a little more. For the ten years from 1986, Maxi Priest, a former singer on the south London sound system Saxon, was never far from the top forty. In waist-length dreadlocks and Paul Smith suits, this charismatic performer was a Top of the Pops regular, delivering lovers’ rock versions of pop classics like “Some Guys Have All The Luck” and “Wild World”, and his own jaunty compositions such as “Close To You” and “Strollin’ On”. Likewise Aswad set aside the roots posturing to cut chart-friendly pop and lovers’ rock reggae, including a number one hit with a cover of Tina Turner’s “Don’t Turn Around”. Then there were actual pop stars doing it. Lily Allen followed the example of Culture Club almost twenty years earlier by installing an album of pure lovers’ pop songs in the charts. That came as no surprise to Dennis:
‘That’s what she likes. Her dad [Keith Allen, the actor/comedian] is a definite reggae lover, a real hardcore collector from back in the day. She would have grown up listening to Keith’s records, so it’s only right that as a young girl wanting to sing she’d do it in a lovers’ rock style.’
The most interesting recent development is the lovers’ rock revival that has been sweeping the UK during the last few years. Original artists from the 1970s and early 1980s are in huge demand on concert packages, and Carroll Thompson even runs a regular L
ondon club night called the Lovers’ Lounge, featuring old skool tunes and live performances for a mixed-age crowd of ravers. Janet is particularly pleased by these developments, as it has given her the chance to interact with the fans she never met thirty years ago:
‘What was amazing was when the lovers’ rock revival started, around the end of the nineties, that was very much a live thing, all about concerts with artists like us and Carroll, Sandra and Peter. That was when we really came face to face with the people, and I got to know what an impact it had been having. At the shows now are the original lovers’ rock fans, who are now middle-aged women, and they can sing every word to every song. It’s incredible. Then talking to them at shows, they’re telling me their experiences and what they were doing when they first heard a song, or how they felt, or what they felt when they saw me on Top of the Pops. Back then, they were falling in love or having their first baby, and our music was the backdrop to all of that, and now the concerts were taking them back in time. It was all very emotional.
‘Although I was unaware of so much that was happening at the time, now I’m very proud to be part of something that was quite revolutionary for black people in this country. We all are.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Living for the Weekender
BritFunk chanting down the discos
AT THE SAME TIME AS LOVERS’ ROCK was in the ascendant, a vibrant London soul scene became established in much the same way as its reggae counterpart, via sound systems and low-profile clubs. While it didn’t tick enough boxes to trouble a mainstream music business then fixated on prog rock, glam rock and punk rock, this provided the other great musical expression for those second-generation Commonwealth immigrants who saw no problem in taking America as their cultural touchstone. While the music of black America has influenced black Britons ever since its earliest days, during this era its films, TV and literature were being eagerly absorbed in a Britain that was also constantly regaled with news footage of a very glamorous-looking social and cultural revolution. Given that London schools still had pretty decent music programmes, black churches had bands, and popular organisations like the Boys Brigade and the Cadet services’ marching bands provided access to brass instruments, it didn’t take long for the scene to start producing its own groups. Budding musicians who were immersed in American funk, but determined to show that they weren’t American.
Kenny Wellington played trumpet for two of the scene’s best-loved bands, Light Of The World and Beggar & Co. Still active on the jazz circuit and as a music teacher, he is sitting in the music room of his canal-side east London flat, occasionally tootling on his trumpet as he recalls those times:
‘Although we took as our models the self-contained groups like Kool & The Gang and the Blackbyrds, the thing we did from the outset is we never spoke with American accents. That was always important – we didn’t sing with American accents, and we didn’t talk on the stage with American accents. A lot of bands before us used to go up on stage, and even if they were from just down the road here, because they were playing soul they’d feel obligated to talk to the audience with fake American accents. We were happy to say that we love the music, but we’re from London.
‘We were the first of a generation of youths of colour from England, that the man on the ground – not just people of colour, but white people as well – could look at and say “Well OK, this is the generation that are actually from here, that speak the same language that we do, in that our accent and our syntax is essentially the same.” Not only a linguistic syntax but a musical syntax as well, so people knew we’d listened to the same things they had, and enough of them thought “Oh well I can do that too!” That was very important at that time, because it meant younger people could believe in what they actually were instead of looking for something else. It’s why the scene took off so rapidly.’
Although this offered a viable alternative to large numbers of black youngsters who were never fully committed to reggae, it would be wrong to think there was any real animosity between the musical tribes. Such was the paucity of black icons back then that nobody could afford to discriminate, and everybody grabbed hold of the same things: the Temptations and the Pioneers on Top of the Pops; Brazil’s football team; West Indies cricket; I Spy; Derek Griffiths; Angela Davis’s afro; The Harder They Come; Clyde Best … Funk deejays saw lovers’ rock as an integral part of couples-dancing time, just as a lovers’ sound system would throw a few Philly tunes into its mix. Heck, Blues & Soul magazine even had a column called The Buzz on Reggae.
The original TFB (Typical Funk Band) in the back garden of their Cable Street rehearsal premises. Left to right: Lipson Francis, David Walker, Kenny Wellington, Camelle Hinds, Earl Okai, Norman Walker, Henry Defoe; kneeling in front, Errol Kennedy.
David Joseph, singer and keyboard player in Hi Tension, the first of this wave of funk bands to get a record deal, remembers:
‘We always spread ourselves. In fact in the beginning, we probably played more reggae – we never said we were a total jazz/funk band, we’d say we were a black music band, because there were all sorts of different tastes going on within our lives and the lives of our audiences. We were more together as a community then, so we played our music, and that was soul, reggae and calypso – not just Caribbean calypso either but calypso from West Africa too – because that was how it reflected us and where we were growing up. London people connected to that.’
BEFORE THE BANDS, this scene was all about records, American import records, available from a few ultra-specialist outlets that carried US imports within days of their American release dates. These West End shops were the scene’s entry level, where people accessed the music, got their faces known and found out where the cool clubs were. The rule seemed to be that if you were cool enough to be there, then you were cool enough to be included in conversations. However, it was unlikely you’d just stumble across the shops; this was such a word-of-mouth experience that not only did you have to know where to go, but what time to get there.
In the early 1970s, if you wanted seven-inch singles you’d head for Hanway Street, behind Tottenham Court Road, where John Abbey, the proprietor of Blues & Soul magazine, owned the Contempo shop. Actually, to call Contempo a ‘shop’ is to flatter it – it was a tiny room above a bar called Bradley’s (no relation!), reached by a creaky, windy staircase that, today, would be some sort of health and safety cup final. Inside, there was a counter across the middle, with a booming sound system beneath it and shelves stocked with funk behind it. Friday afternoon was when the new music arrived, and punters could spend hours anxiously hanging about while the guys who ran the place took phone calls and tried to reassure the packed room: ‘The boxes have just cleared customs, they should be here in an hour or so’. Hardly anyone was going back to work.
Extended cuts or lesser-known tunes meant buying albums – twelve-inch singles were not yet commercially available – for which the shop of choice was One Stop at the Oxford Street end of Dean Street. Specialising in soul and jazz, it held comfortable listening booths and a hugely knowledgeable staff. Even if it might not have had every US album on the day it came out, the racks were a treasure-trove of back catalogue – it really didn’t matter if something wasn’t actually new, so long as it was new in Wood Green.
Other shops worth checking included Ray’s Jazz in Shaftesbury Avenue, Cheapo Cheapo in the Rupert Street end of Berwick Street Market, City Sounds in High Holborn, and Dobell’s in Charing Cross Road, but One Stop and Contempo were the cornerstones, with Groove Music taking over later. Further afield there were such black music emporiums as Sunshine Records in Turnpike Lane, Moondogs in Manor Park, and Record Corner in Balham, but although they became hubs of local scenes, they were little more than satellites of what went on ‘up West’. Dobell’s, incidentally, was owned by Doug Dobell, whose record label 77 (the street number of the shop) released records by the South African and modern jazzers described in chapter three.
Because the scene revolv
ed around American imports, the UK industry was not involved, and the British music media never plugged into it. Of the specialist press, Black Music & Jazz Review came out monthly, and thus couldn’t stay on top of weekly singles schedules, while the weekly newspaper Black Echoes didn’t launch until 1976. Press coverage therefore rarely went beyond lists of US record releases cut from Blues & Soul, and taped to the wall in Contempo. Thus, in the same way that Stern’s served as the hub of London’s African music community, these shops were vital to the cohesion of the funk scene, probably more so than the clubs. Soho, which had previously hosted the old R&B scene, was the centre of the clubbing circuit, with places like Upstairs at Ronnie’s (the first-floor room above Ronnie Scott’s jazz club), Columbo’s (formerly the Roaring Twenties) in Carnaby Street), and Whisky’s (previously the Whisky-A-Go-Go, later the WAG in Wardour Street – W.A.G., geddit?), supplemented by Hunters in West Kensington or the Birds Nests in Paddington, Waterloo and West Hampstead. The shops, however, were more accessible, conducive to conversation and focussed entirely on the music. Kenny remembers the part they played:
‘If you wanted to be part of that scene you had to go to those places, there was no press coverage. Because we formed bands locally there were bands like ours all over London. It was only because we all met in the West End that we got to know about each other, and realised there was something going on beyond the end of our roads.
‘I’d check Contempo Records, and I’d meet people. It would be like this person’s in that band, or there would be David Grant who, I think, was a journalist at the time, or Leee John who goes to the clubs I do but also other places like Maunkberry’s and the Embassy. Or that guy in the corner is Dez Parkes, I know him from Forest Gate, and he’s got a massive record collection, he’s a walking encyclopaedia of music. But he’s with other guys, his friends who are Noel Vaughn and Trevor Shakes, they’re all fantastic dancers and move all over the scene. So then we find out about some new clubs or places we might get a gig, and you could check out all the tunes by the groups like Ohio Players or the J.B.’s.
Sounds Like London Page 23