It must be stressed that there was no noticeable collusion from the majority of the punters, most of whom would have been horrified if they’d been aware of why their soul scene was so bereft of soul brothers. It was a vivid illustration of how easy it was to fall out of step with what was happening in the world beyond what you thought you knew. The London jazz/funk scene was the first manifestation of black and white youngsters being comfortable with each other, in an English-created black milieu that appeared to embrace its wider situation. Kenny likens this nightlife apartheid to the Cotton Club in 1920s’ Harlem – a white audience with black performers – and suggests it had much greater social consequences than might at first seem apparent.
While these suburban white kids would not have been bothered by a multi-culti dancefloor, they had little day-to-day contact with black people. This is at a time when Trevor McDonald was still a sports reporter and Diane Abbott a local councillor, and black people were only visible in a very narrow spectrum. To remove the option for white kids to socialise with their black peers further skews worldviews. On a scene where they’re offering little more than entertainment – ‘We were the turn’, as Steve puts it – Kenny’s Cotton Club analogy holds water. Then if suburban funk fans regularly see black guys turned away at club doors because they are ‘trouble’, it leaves them to imagine how intrinsically dangerous ordinary black people must be.
It would also be ludicrous to assume that the deejays who controlled this scene endorsed such policies. When the scene was still low-key, many had rocked healthily mixed houses in urban environments, genuinely putting the fun into funk. Kenny backs this up:
‘Many of the Soul Mafia were concerned about it – a couple were willing, if things weren’t right, not to play certain clubs or to even pack up their equipment and walk out.’
Steve is slightly more stoic about what might be perceived as tolerance of a particularly nasty state of affairs:
‘It was due to club owners and promoters. The deejays were making a living and they were all there because they loved the music. One thing’s for certain, though, if it hadn’t been them it would have been somebody else. It was always the same, in the Motown era in London there were enough clubs that played pure soul and wouldn’t let black guys in. I can remember clubs that played pure reggae – all that Trojan stuff – and it was all skinheads in there with no black guys getting through the door. It’s why the blues dance scene flourished.
‘I can remember a lot of places where we were playing to an all-white audience with our bredren outside, couldn’t get in, but you can’t really expect us to take responsibility for that. We were young guys making music and trying to make a living out of what we loved to do – it wasn’t a game. I would suspect that a lot of those deejays weren’t strong enough to have done anything about the situation, because then they just wouldn’t have worked.’
Kenny expands on the bands’ position: ‘For us, we were glad of any audience, as those people come and see you because they like your music – they are always welcome. The realisation that there are certain other people who aren’t allowed in or don’t feel comfortable in different areas is hurtful, and you want to play to those people. Sadly, we found that wasn’t always possible. We wanted to play in black areas or venues where we could find a multi-racial crowd, but because not a lot of the promoters of funk and soul were black, they weren’t interested. In certain areas where there were black promoters they would be more interested in bringing over Gregory Isaacs or somebody like that. So it was never that the bands didn’t want to play other gigs there, but those promoters that would take you into those areas weren’t necessarily into the music.
‘There was a big jazz/funk scene in Manchester and Liverpool, and we all found that was where you could get that more multi-racial, cosmopolitan audience. It was up there that everybody could get into your gigs and there was never any trouble.’
Dez Parkes remains highly critical: ‘When that scene started, we were very unassuming – we had our scene and we just wanted to go out and enjoy ourselves. It wasn’t about making a load of money. It was very like the tradition that had been going on since we came from the Caribbean, that here was somewhere to remind ourselves of who we were after a week of trials and tribulations. Like the blues dances, that soul scene was for us that had a passion for that music.
‘What happened when it went so mainstream was people got to see what we took for granted, and saw that there was money to be made. And to make that money, it had to change. Although it was the promoters and the club managements that fixed policies, and I don’t doubt that the deejays loved the music, you have to ask yourself this: In that whole Mafia thing, the only black deejay was Greg Edwards, and he had the Soul Spectrum show on Capital Radio so he had more pull than any of the others. But you have to ask yourself was he the only black deejay in London that was good enough?’
It’s easy to understand how jazz/funk’s suburban demographic affected the scene. What’s less comprehensible is the shift that happened in town. By the end of the 1970s, the underground London funk clubs had disappeared, and the new wave of venues weren’t coming at it from that specialist point of view. Looking for the more recently established higher-spending set, they imported suburban door policies. Suddenly West End clubs were adopting a quota system. To stay on the right side of the Commission for Racial Equality (now the Equality and Human Rights Commission), and to promote a soupçon of cool, door staff would count off the handful of black guys to be allowed in, and after that it was ‘Sorry lads …’ The most notorious culprits were the Lyceum and the WAG Club; the latter had such a severe approach that BBC soul stalwart Trevor Nelson recalls:
‘The WAG was a classic – the first time I was ever allowed in the place was when they phoned me up and asked me to deejay – they’d never ever let me in as a punter. Still makes me laugh.’
While this hurt prospective ravers, the bands’ problems were with the record companies. Although the initial British funk hits looked like the perfect launching pad, big record company wisdom dictated that further progression could only come about by following big record company guidelines. Hi Tension were the first band to get a deal, and the first to be affected. David explains:
‘How we got a deal was Kofi [Ayivor, Osibisa’s percussionist] came to our rehearsals, liked what he heard and took us into a studio. We did a demo with him, “Hi Tension” by Hi Tension, which he took direct to Chris Blackwell at Island, who signed us on the strength of that track. Kofi understood what we were doing, because he understood how the drums and percussion should work on songs like that. It’s that recording that was released, and it was good enough for over 250,000 people to go out and buy. Then when we did our next track, “British Hustle”, we’ve been given this guy to produce us, this Alex Sadkin – we’d never heard of him. He was completely different and he didn’t get it – he took so long to set up the sound in the studio he almost killed the track! But we knew how to play it and keep the excitement up, and it was another 250,000-seller. Because it was a hit he got to do the album.
‘That was so bad. He killed the vibe of the album, totally killed it. We’d been playing live for years, we knew how to get a vibe going and keep it from sounding like it was done in a studio, but this Alex Sadkin would spend all day setting up a drum sound. He’d be in the studio going “dum … dum … dum” [mimes playing a drum], which was costing us money! That studio was £1000 a day, which we couldn’t afford but it was billed to us because that was the system. After that we weren’t going to make any royalties off that album, and to make things worse it just about did sixty thousand. We’d had two singles do a quarter of a million each, but the album wasn’t what people who already liked us wanted.
‘It opened my eyes to how things worked. I would have assumed, naively, if you’re a record company and you saw the style or the sound we were trying to achieve, wouldn’t you go and get some brother from somewhere that understands it? No! We weren’t nurtured at all. Every
body acted like we were going to learn something from this guy, but I learned nothing, other than I was very disappointed with Island Records.’
This ‘we know best’ approach became a template. Central Line had a sympathetic and capable producer in Heatwave’s Roy Carter, and after their debut album Breaking Point established healthy sales in the UK and the US, they wanted to flex their musical muscles. Fully aware of how the jazzier end of things went down, their record of choice was fifty-year-old jazz’n’soul standard “Nature Boy”. Camelle is still smarting:
‘Because I was born in 1957, I remember the Nat King Cole version playing around the house. It was one of my dad’s favourites and he told us “If you can’t make any money off that song, you might as well give up!” Then I heard the version with Jorge Dalto and Ronnie Foster playing keys, and George Benson playing guitar and singing [from George Benson’s In Flight album] and it completely blew me away. By that time then I was listening to Yazoo and Culture Club, looking at the level of the vocals and production, and I wanted to do something with that sensibility but with this jazz record. The record company didn’t see it that way. Acting as gatekeepers, they sat on it for a year because they wanted us to continue as we had been.
‘When it did come out, “Nature Boy” was the biggest hit we ever had – by a long way. It got to number 21, but the one after it barely scraped in to the top fifty. That was because it took so long for “Nature Boy” to come out, the band had lost faith in that particular path, and we reverted to what we’d done before, but our audience had moved on. The record company didn’t seem to care and wouldn’t listen to what we were saying about what we knew would go down well. We were becoming increasingly frustrated because we weren’t being allowed to make that leap. In 1984 we decided it just wasn’t working and we just wanted them to let us go, because we felt they didn’t have a clue what the music was or what to do with us.’
Light Of The World’s first album, Light Of The World, was essentially the stage show they’d been refining for years, and communicated that excitement through the storming semiinstrumental singles “Swingin’” and “Midnight Groovin’”. When it was a big hit, Ensign Records responded by sending this successful London funk band to Los Angeles to record the follow-up, Round Trip, with Californian soft soul producer Augie Johnson, best known for the studio group Side Effect. Also on record company advice, they had acquired a lead vocalist, with the plan being to broaden their appeal. Good as the album was, there was an underlying feeling that by shifting away from their jazz bloodline they were flattening out what had made them special in the first place. The single “London Town” summed this up. The chorus ‘I wanna party in London town!’ became an anthemic badge of identification on dancefloors across the southeast, and it reached number 41 in the charts, but while it was about London, it somehow wasn’t of London. It sounded like an American’s take on the city, which, according to Kenny, is pretty much what it was:
‘The idea came from Augie. He said that we hadn’t got a song about London on the album, and he had this idea kicking around in his head. He said to Tubbs ‘Play this’ and [Kenny sings a slowed-down “London Town” bassline] and we built the track from that. The rest of us had about half an hour in another room to come up with the lyrics. There’s nothing wrong with it – we loved it – but I’ve got all the parts transferred to audio files and there’s all sorts of alternate brass parts to it. [He plays a brass-heavy remix that sound a lot more like Light Of The World.]
‘The thing is, Light Of The World was supposed to be a blend of sounds, and with all respect to those guys, it was never about having a band where one or two people stand out there and sing. It was a collective, like, say, Earth, Wind & Fire, where those guys can sing but most of the time they’re not and they’re another part of the band. The record company didn’t understand that. Going to LA with Augie Johnson was an opportunity and we loved the idea of the sophistication – like “Pete’s Crusade” – but some of us weren’t happy getting into the ballads and the singing. It was fine to have a couple of tracks like that on an album, but we were being asked to do more and more. That was the whole thing about Beggar & Co, we wanted to remain true to what our vision ever was, which was “Somebody Help Me Out”, with all the chanting and the woah-woahs.
‘Myself, Baps and Breeze had written that song for the whole of Light Of The World as what we should be doing, but some of the guys didn’t want to do it because we’d been getting in the charts with the other stuff. The record company didn’t want to do it either, they said we shouldn’t be going back to that after doing Round Trip. So we recorded it anyway, and put it out as Beggar & Co, the three of us. It sold twice as many as any Light Of The World record, and should’ve been the biggest record Light Of The World ever had.’
Once again, the group themselves were right about what ought to be required of them. “Somebody Help Me Out” was in the charts for over two months, peaking at number 15; their follow-up, the equally raucous “Mule (Chant No. 2)” also outsold every LOTW single; and in between the trio provided the horns and chant vocals for Spandau Ballet’s top-five hit “Chant No. 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On)”.
Much of this record-company interference was with one eye on American success. As Camelle remembers, that missed the point of their music being Made in Britain:
‘They thought the best way to sell us in America was to turn us into Americans – they tried to turn us into Cameo, Light Of The World they saw as Kool & The Gang, Hi Tension were Earth, Wind & Fire … But the irony was we’d actually done well there as ourselves, as the American black radio and club crowds really appreciated the fact that we took a different stance from American funk. They saw it as unique, and would go mad for the occasional thing – Junior’s “Mama Used To Say”, Light Of The World’s first album … our first album and “Walking Into Sunshine” and “You’ve Said Enough” were big hits.
‘What Americans didn’t want was us sounding American – they already had enough Americans, they wanted something different. The record companies didn’t see that or didn’t have the confidence to go with it.’
What finished the bands off was being squeezed by the legacy they had done much to create. Former jazz/funk scenesters were by now forming their own bands – Haircut One Hundred, Wham!, Animal Nightlife, Spandau Ballet, ABC, the Style Council and so on – often helped out by jazz/funk players. With these developments, the record companies’ repositioning of jazz/funk as just another pop style was complete, effectively slamming the door on the original bands. Camelle explains:
‘Look at the bands that came after the first wave of new romantics – Duran Duran, Haircut One Hundred, Spandau. They were all soul boys, but they were mostly white and they were mainstream. The record companies recognised them – they saw them as part of pop music, but they just saw us as black bands [he makes quote marks with his fingers]. That’s where the real frustration set in, because same as those other bands we were influenced by everything that was going on around us and in the charts. Of course we wanted to be in the limelight and played on Radio One. What happened was we started appearing on Top of the Pops as musicians or backing vocalists to white groups, which was just a hundred-quid session fee. There was no stability in it for us.’
Steve is less equitable about what he saw happening at record companies:
‘It all seemed to be progressing nicely, then Level 42 got signed to Polydor and the whole dynamic changed. I can remember around 1980 when they were supporting Light Of The World, and Camelle and Tubbs [LOTW’s bass player] were slapping long time before Mark [King, Level 42’s bass player] and doing it very well. But while our groups might have got ten grand for an advance, suddenly Level 42 were getting two or three times that because they were a white band. It’s been going on as long as the music business: as soon as you got white bands that could make black music, they got the priority and had more money spent on them. We had to deal with that on a daily basis. It was dispiriting, to say the least.
’
This allusion to such apparently institutionalised racism in London’s record companies is not without foundation. As Dennis Bovell touched on in the preceding chapter, there was little corporate empathy with any black music that wasn’t Bob Marley or Bob Marley-ish. After the Tuff Gong died in 1981, and before rap took over, black acts were viewed as either The New Bob Marley – songs of sufferation, dreadlocks, promotable to the rock audience – or Not The New Bob Marley – fairly cheerful, Jheri-curled, lacking ‘credibility’, and thus commercially worthless, not economically viable. Black audiences weren’t even subdivided to that degree, but looked on as one homogenous downtrodden mass, partial to any black act that gave voice to their wretchedness.
These lazy stereotypes were afforded so much traction because so few black people were employed in any aspect of the mainstream soul music industry. which obscured just how diverse black tastes could be. More worrying still was the extent to which casually racist language was used in offices when discussing black bands. While it was probably no more than in life in general, it would often shock music journalists as it coming from the people responsible for a significant part of black British culture.
Steve maintains it was impossible to do anything about it:
‘When white groups stood up for themselves, they were being strong-minded and were admired for it. When we stood up for ourselves, it was because we had chips on our shoulders. And that would affect how other black groups got treated, because according to them we were all the same.
Beggar & Co at BritFunk’s 30th Anniversary in 2011, Kenny is second from the left.
Sounds Like London Page 26