‘It was inspiring for a lot of the people getting into bands or setting themselves up as dancers or deejays, because it let you think “I can do that”. It wasn’t as if to make funk music you had to come from across the water, or have gone to the Berkeley School of Music.’
Dez Parkes, who started off as a dancer but became one of the original scene’s most influential deejays, recalls how small it was when it started out, and why it was so important:
‘It’s funny, because at the time people were under the impression it was really heaving with thousands of people – it wasn’t! You could go to several different clubs during the course of a week, but you were seeing the same faces because it was no more than about two or three hundred people. Everyone kind of knew everyone because they would all go to the same places. Columbo’s, Ronnie Scott’s, and Crackers for the clubs and Contempo’s, One Stop or Dobell’s for records – Dobell’s was brilliant, it was run by jazz buff Doug Dobell and was like some sort of speakeasy! It had a grand piano on one level, then you’d go down the circular stairs to these booths left over from the sixties, where you’d listen to the records you’d picked out. It was like a timewarp. The West End was where we got to know each other. It was the only reason a lot of people met their spouses, who were from a different part of town – I met my first missus in Crackers.
‘The thing about this scene was that most of our age group [mid-teens at the start of the 1970s] had come out of the reggae scene, because there hadn’t been much choice. Then when a different type of soul scene came along – with James Brown and with Curtis Mayfield – and as a worldwide people we were moving out of the oppression of the fifties and sixties, where we didn’t really have a voice, we moved into the seventies where we could rejoice. All the tunes that were coming out were deep and meaningful and speaking to us as a people, it was trying to uplift us, and wake us up. Some did get woken up, but some didn’t because a lot of people at the time didn’t quite understand it.
Dez Parkes and friends limber up in Wardour Street for a Friday lunchtime session in Crackers.
‘A lot of people looked at the soul scene as a cop-out or a sell-out, because of the way we dressed and the way we danced, and because it was more Europeanised or upwardly mobile. But those artists that were coming out of America were major speakers for us at the time, while those like Roy Ayers were expressing a message of joy and putting us in a happy place – especially for the future generations to bounce off. It gave us exactly the same voice as the nyah man. That’s why the scene grew so quickly.’
THE SOUL SCENE WAS ALWAYS going to produce its own bands, too. That took a while, because few black youngsters felt part of a pop process that dictated white kids formed bands, whereas black kids were singers or in singing groups. Then the Jackson 5 came along.
Camelle Hinds, bass player with the early jazz/funk outfit TFB (Typical Funk Band) and later Central Line, explains the Jacksons’ impact:
‘The Jackson 5 totally changed everything around. Here, for the first time in my life, I see these young kids that look like me, that had the most talent and they’re in a band. They’re creating music that is so beautiful … for example Jermaine Jackson, the way he was playing bass made me want to play the bass, and those bubblegum basslines were pretty adventurous for a young musician. Maybe he wasn’t playing bass on all of the songs, or playing it at all, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was the idea that we could see them doing the music as well as the singing. Then when we had their cartoon show it gave us a bit of an insight into what it must’ve been like to be in a band – OK, so it was a cartoon show and probably complete fiction, but it showed us how much fun it could be. It was an amazing inspiration for so many of my generation of musicians – most of them will cite the Jackson 5 as the reason why they wanted to form a band.’
David agrees, reckoning that the group was the watershed between old-school soul and new wave funk, and that it was as much the Jacksons’ look and attitude as their music that inspired his peers. Indeed the Jackson 5 made such an impression on him it still resonates nearly forty years later. In 1976, Hi Tension were playing at the Q Club, in Praed Street, Paddington, then London’s most upmarket black-owned club, and a favourite of visiting African-American celebrities. In their audience was Johnny Jackson, drummer for and cousin of the brothers, who were here on tour. Johnnie was so knocked out with their set that he invited the young band to a soundcheck, and introduced them to four of the Five – it was the painfully shy Michael who chose to hang back. That blew the Londoners away:
TFB Mk II in Superfly mode after playing at an upscale Hampstead house party. Left to right: Lipson Francis, Henry Defoe, Steve Salvari, Errol Kennedy, Camelle Hinds.
‘We were invited to their hotel in Mayfair, had drinks with them, then went to soundcheck. We were chatting with them, they gave us advice – all except Michael, who would only talk to his brothers in this little voice. Can you imagine how much that meant to us as a young black band? This was the biggest young black band on the planet and they’re talking to us!’
Camelle goes on to describe how their wave of bands separated from what had gone before – the F.B.I.s and the Gonzaleses:
‘That time was the cusp of two generations of soul bands. Those earlier funk bands were mature soul bands whose tradition went back to the fifties and who knew the sixties. They came out of a line that went back to rhythm and blues and bands like the Rolling Stones, and who were playing Otis Redding with artists like Geno Washington. We didn’t know any of that, we were kids – we started with the Jackson 5! Even if they were playing funk, their way of looking at things was different to ours.
‘Then there was the generation we were in this country. The previous scene was very much the Afro UK soul scene, because there were so many Ghanaians involved. Our generation were essentially young Caribbeans so we didn’t necessarily know that Afro UK scene. We had different influences.
‘Not that we didn’t cross with those guys or they weren’t inspirational to us as musicians. Henry [Defoe, TFB/Central Line’s guitarist] was tutored by one of the guitarists in the Breakfast Band, and we had Max Middleton out of that band playing on our first single. They used to play at Scorpio Sound Studios, behind Capital Radio in Euston Road, where the engineer was a guy who played with that jazz/funk band Pleasure in America, he produced the Breakfast Band and then he produced Central Line’s first single. That’s how I got my first session. I went down there and I watched them play: Richard Bailey would be on drums, Kuma Harada on bass, Max Middleton …
‘All those guys, they were like prime musicians for us. A complete inspiration, but theirs was a West End scene, that didn’t really disperse until the clubs got rid of the groups and started putting discos in. At that time we weren’t even old enough to go out, let alone get into those clubs – some of us were fourteen or fifteen when we started the groups.’
The new bands like TFB, Hott Waxx (the precursor to Hi Tension) and Midnight Express (Errol Kennedy’s pre-Imagination group) developed locally, where they could always find an audience. They started out at schools, universities, youth clubs, fetes, local carnivals, community centres and the house parties of, according to Camelle, ‘well-off kids who’d seen us at their colleges’. Later they graduated to discos and pubs like the Three Horseshoes in Hampstead (currently stripped of two, to become The Horseshoe), the Green Man in Romford Road or the King’s Arms in Wood Green, premises that were better known for the notorious reggae club Bluesville, and now the site of a police station.
It didn’t really matter what the setting was, as long as there was a crowd. David reckons all they wanted to do was play music:
‘We all had jobs – I worked for London Transport – we lived at home with our mums and dads and used to rehearse and play anywhere we could. In the beginning we were all at school, Aylestone High and Willesden High, and our first gigs were at schools. We had no real thoughts that we could make money out of it.’
Some did, howe
ver, make forays into the big league, with results that weren’t always as successful as Hi Tension’s. Kenny recalls TFB’s Q Club debut:
TFB Mk III prepare themselves for the big time. Left to right: Camelle Hinds, Norman Walker, David Walker, Lipson Francis.
‘The night we were down there, Muhammad Ali and his people were in the house, so it was really buzzing. We were raw, and we knew it, but we were up for anything. I’m sure a couple of us were fifteen and shouldn’t even have been in the club, but we were manning up. We started playing the first number and we were really excited. We got to the second number and noticed people moving from the dancefloor to the bar, third number and there’s only a few people on the dancefloor. On the fourth number, we’re on stage and Count Suckle [the Jamaican former sound-system operator who owned the club] walked right across the stage and whispered “One more, just one more!”
‘Imagine how we felt – in front of Muhammad Ali! And Suckle, it seemed, had a long memory, because for years any club we turned up at that he had something to do with he’d say to us, “Not tonight, guys!” Even if we hadn’t been booked to play!’
Camelle remembers their first brush with the proper music business, and how little had changed since Teddy Osei’s generation in terms of deliberate artist misrepresentation:
‘This was in 1973, and we’d won this talent competition at the Roundhouse, put on by West Indian World newspaper. The judges should never have given it to us, because this reggae group, the Equators, were far better than us, but we had all this exciting gear on and we were jumping about, wanting to put on a show, so they gave it to us. We won five hundred quid and a publishing deal with these two guys who had an office up in Savile Row, real cigar-smoking, boardroom types.
‘This was our first taste of the record companies and we were so excited – I think I was only seventeen – and they told us they had got us an out-of-town gig. Brilliant, except it wasn’t as TFB! They had another band, the Chequers [a largely white pop/soul group] who had a hit at the time [the stringsed-up reggae “Rudi’s In Love”] and they’d been booked for a gig in Carlisle but they couldn’t do it. So we had to go up and pretend to be the Chequers, we didn’t even know their hit and had to busk it!’
All of this allowed this wave of young players to find their musical feet well removed from outside interference. Plugging in to the music coming in through Contempo and One Stop, they switched from pop-soul and reggae to focus on funk, jazz and jazz/funk, using American models of astonishing sophistication, lyrical intelligence and downright funkiness. By now the US scene was such that 1974 alone produced Keep On Steppin’, The Payback, Change Up The Groove, Breakin’ Bread, Stepping Into Tomorrow, Skin Tight, Love From the Sun, Light Of Worlds, Winter In America, Sweet Exorcist, Sun Goddess and Do It ‘Til You’re Satisfied. Camelle recalls the effort they put in as they soaked this music up:
‘We’d go and see any funk or jazz/funk act that came over from America … the Bros Johnson: we’d be there … War: we’d be there … Crown Heights Affair, the Blackbyrds, Stevie Wonder … we were there. Of course we bought records at Contempo, but also Cheapo’s, where we knew from word of mouth we could get the rare records coming over from the States – Philip Catherine and Larry Coryell or Lenny White.
‘Dez Parkes was crucial because he was so authoritative on that stuff, we used to go round his house to sift out all these rare musics, Michel Colombier … people that nobody would know of. We’d be looking at the musicians on there and we’d start tracking them on other albums. Somebody like Ted Taylor performing a cover version of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Be Ever Wonderful”. We were studying all the different connections – who’s the engineer on that record? Oh, George Massenburg who put out his own gear and he engineered for Earth, Wind & Fire and also Ramsey Lewis. And who is that drummer playing on there? Oh he used to play with … I’m sure we knew more about them than they knew about themselves! But that was our study, and it pushed us to try and get better as musicians.’
Kenny believes the music’s lineage was important to the formation of their sound:
‘We were connected with the previous generation, but in doing so we were connected to stuff that went back much further than that. Take a guy like Joe Harriott, the sax player who came over from Jamaica in the 1950s, he was bebop but he had the Caribbean in his playing – it wasn’t pure Charlie Parker. Then you look at who’s playing with him and you see percussionist Frank Holder, whose brother, Herschell Holder was in Root Jackson’s F.B.I., who we knew. Then musicians he used to associate with were involved, in the early days, with the bands we were in – sax player Lloyd Smith, a trombone player called Pat Daniels, and Freddie Wall, the trumpet player who gave me my first lessons. These guys were connected with the jazz and the Caribbean, both of which they loved, and they loved funk, so they were passing that on to us.
‘In the same way it’s like listening to Kool & The Gang and their trumpeter Spike Mickens, and you’re listening to Clifford Brown who was a big influence on Spike. OK, so it’s one stage removed, but it sends you in search of Clifford Brown – a bit back to front, but it becomes an interesting way of learning. I was lucky to have met Donald Byrd and he said we should listen to Stravinsky as well what we were already listening to and it became like a quest for me – Stravinsky, he’s the one! But when you realise when you’re listening to Donald Byrd you’re listening to Stravinsky in a roundabout way, it opens up your mind.
‘Plus we’re Londoners, so we’re adding all of what we know from London. We were adding all sort of bits we’re hearing from the radio or the lovers’ rock dances, we’ve got bits of calypso in there. Although there was a lot of jazz, it wasn’t with the same musical syntax as the originals, and when we’d learn our things off records it was always our own interpretation. We weren’t aiming to have anything to do with the charts – our ambition was to be on the cover of Blues & Soul and to play at Hammersmith Odeon, because that was our circle. So we didn’t feel under pressure to do things a certain way. We’d be in a room and Breeze (McKrieth, guitarist) or Tubbs (Williams, bass) would play a riff, somebody would say “OK then, what goes with that?” and I’d come up with something [he plays a couple of runs on his trumpet], then they’d say “I can work with that.” And we’d get going.
Central Line in the early 1980s. Danny Cummings, Camelle Hinds, Jake LeMesurier, Henry Defoe, Linton Beckles, Lipson Francis. Amazingly, nobody has any idea who the cheerful-looking bearded chap second from the right is, but he was not a member of the group!
‘A lot of people liked the energy that doing it like that brought about, but really all we wanted to say was “We are going to sound like us, however that might turn out.”
By the second half of the 1970s, a tidal wave of talent was about to break on London. Best friends Camelle and Kenny, together with Henry Defoe, Lipson Francis, and Norman and David Walker, were part of an east London scene that produced TFB, then Central Line and Light Of The World, Imagination, Incognito and Beggar & Co. Roy Carter, who became bass player with multi-million selling disco-soul band Heatwave, was from this east London pool. So too was Errol Kennedy, Imagination’s drummer, who joined the posse from Woolwich after Camelle and Kenny crossed the river to practice Jackson 5 songs with his sister Grace, who would go on to win Opportunity Knocks and star in her own BBC TV series. Up from Balham to play drums on Central Line’s first album was Mel Gaynor, later of Simple Minds. Singing background vocals on this set was one Diane Sealey, who had yet to reinvent herself as D.C. Lee and sing with Wham! and the Style Council before going solo. Light Of The World’s first drummer, Everton McCalla, was also a founder member of Freeez in 1981, the group that had LOTW/Incognito guitarist Bluey playing on their first single. Steve’s Headquarters were from north London, and so was Linx, David Grant’s first band, which included bassist Sketch Martin, formerly in Headquarters and later of 23 Skidoo, as well as Junior Giscombe as a backing singer. The Harlesden/Willesden/Cricklewood axis, centred on Aylestone High a
nd Harlesden High schools, gave us Hott Waxx, Hi Tension, Kandidate, Atmosfear and Phil Fearon, who became the mainstay of disco-soul band Galaxy.
TFB at the Sands disco in Luton, mid-1970s. Left to right: Henry Defoe, Errol Kennedy, Camelle Hinds, Lipson Francis; Steve Salvari is out of shot.
As the decade progressed, it became standard for the London groups to open for US acts on tour in the UK. Steve Salvari, keyboard player with Headquarters and later with TFB and Central Line, remembers this as proving the bands had a future:
‘We’d get gigs opening for the Players Association or the Ohio Players, because promoters were expected to put another act on but weren’t going to pay for two separate bands to come over. Sometimes we’d get picked up to back a singer that came over on tour too. Although those gigs didn’t happen all the time, they were always good because it meant we’d be on a big stage in front of big crowds who were always very good to us – their own. There was hardly any snobbishness about being local boys, and crowds connected with the music we were playing. Then the more they got to know us we started getting bigger followings because we were British.’
The music business didn’t seem to get this last point, as Steve continues:
‘Between about 1974 and 1978, any black artists in Britain were being moulded on the notion that all anybody wanted from a soul act was Tamla Motown. Acts like Billy Ocean and Hot Chocolate, really brilliant artists, being forced into that template. Music business managements at that time had been in place for donkeys’ years, and they had no notion of a black act representing something British – if they weren’t singing reggae then it had to sound American, which meant Tamla Motown. Which, in turn, was pushed to the record companies, as it was the reference they understood.
Sounds Like London Page 24