Gary Clark talks ‘Mary’s Prayer’ and classic debut ‘Meet Danny Wilson’

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danny wilson

Ah, yes, summer 1987. I remember it well.

I came across a review of Meet Danny Wilson in Q magazine which drew comparisons between Gary Clark’s voice and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan’s (spot-on).

That was enough incentive for a massive Steely fan like me to check it out. I wasn’t disappointed. Meet Danny is one of the most arresting, original debut albums of the ’80s, and it stands up extremely well today.

I would annoy my school friends bigging up the album and trying to get it played during art lessons – to no avail. U2, Simple Minds, The The, Fleetwood Mac and INXS couldn’t be usurped. But my enthusiasm was slightly justified when the gorgeous ‘Mary’s Prayer’ was finally a big hit at the third attempt (UK number 3, US number 23).

Danny Wilson shared a love of jazz, the Great American Songbook and Steely Dan with contemporaries Hue and Cry, Swing Out Sister, Sade and various other late-’80s acts, but (fortunately?) Meet Danny Wilson doesn’t sound remotely like any of them.

Gary graciously answered my questions in the middle of a very busy period of travelling, writing and recording. We talked about the inspiration behind the timeless ‘Mary’s Prayer’ single, hanging out with Billy Mackenzie, the golden age of Virgin Records and busking on transatlantic flights…

MP: Could you give a quick summary of how you started making music as Danny Wilson with your brother Kit (keyboards) and Ged Grimes (bass)?

GC: Ged was at school with me and clearly one of the most talented kids so we naturally gravitated towards each other and stayed together from the school band stage all the way through to Danny Wilson. Kit is my younger brother. When Ged and I returned from London we wanted to re-think the band and Kit, in our absence, had grown into a formidable musician, writer and singer so he was a natural choice to bring onboard.

What were the musical influences that went into the pot for Meet Danny Wilson? Any contemporary mid-’80s artists?

Well, I really found my voice as a writer when I stopped trying to sound contemporary. Ged and I spent three years in London living in a squat, gigging and trying to get a record deal and it seemed like the labels wanted us to sound like what was already on the radio at that time. If you can remember radio in 1984/85, everything was super- polished, super-quantised and very synthesised. Even guitars all tended to be layered in multi-effects. I very consciously decided to go in the opposite direction and return to my musical roots; all the music I loved was devastatingly unfashionable at the time. Off the top of my head, the main influences for that album were not contemporary at all: Sinatra, Bacharach and David, Jimmy Webb, Becker and Fagen, Tom Waits, a little bit of Hall and Oates, heavy dollops of the Great American Songbook and a ton of soundtrack records.

Danny Wilson Mary's Prayer vinyl

How did Danny write songs? Were all the tracks co-written or did you provide the blueprints?

I wrote all of the songs on that album and they were all written and mostly demoed prior to recording. The only exception I recall is finishing ‘Five Friendly Aliens’ at the piano in Puk studios after we’d started recording the rest of the album.

How did you come to be signed to Virgin? Were you fans of the label beforehand?

We played a gig in a bar in Edinburgh and a music journalist called Bob Flynn was there. He wrote a review in NME that literally changed our lives. The review was so good and the band were so unknown that the record labels who had systematically rejected us only months before were calling Bob asking how they could get in touch with the band. We had really served our time in the trenches live and in the studio so we were really ready for it when it came. The next gig we did in Edinburgh was packed and half of the audience were A&R and publishers from London. We literally had the choice of every major label and almost signed to Warners. In the end, a mixture of Virgin’s reputation as an artistic label, their sheer passion for the music and their willingness to give us complete artistic control won the day.

Can you remember your inspiration for ‘Mary’s Prayer’ and where you wrote it?

Yes, I wrote it in the squat in London quite a few years before it was released. My friend, the songwriter Ali Thomson, loaned me a Roland Juno 60 synth and I just switched on the first preset and immediately played the verse chords without thinking (they’re all white notes!). The melody and a large chunk of the first verse lyric came to me instantly. I liked it but couldn’t get a chorus that did the verse justice and it took about another year of me coming back to it until I finally hit on the chorus.

How did you come to include Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy on the album? Definitely not an obvious choice of special guests! Weren’t they signed to Virgin at the time?

They were signed to ECM. The Virgin connection came later through us. Howard Gray (later of Apollo 440) was producing the first half of our album at Puk. They had an incredible system in there and we liked to blast records on the big speakers at the start of the day and at the end of the night with some fine Elephant beers for refreshment. Digital was in its infancy and ECM were making some of the first records that could be legally labelled ‘DDD’ which meant ‘recorded, mixed and mastered without leaving the digital domain’. Howard played us Lester’s ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ one of those nights as an example of how great this process could sound and we all fell instantly head over heels in love. By sheer mind-bending coincidence, we saw that Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy were playing Copenhagen when we were still in Denmark. We went to the gig, one of the greatest live shows I have ever seen, and accosted Lester afterwards. It’s a little-known fact that because of budget restrictions, Ged, Kit and I busked our fare on a very early Virgin Atlantic flight to New York so we could be there for the sessions! Pre-9/11, of course… But we actually got free flights for entertaining the passengers in mid-air.

Your amazing vocal on ‘You Remain An Angel’ always reminded me of The Associates’ Billy Mackenzie – were you a fan and did you know him at all?

Well, thank you. I’m a huge fan of Billy’s work but I can honestly say that The Associates were nowhere near my mind when we did that song. There is a B-side called ‘Living To Learn‘ that has a huge Associates influence. Billy and I are from the same home town, Dundee in Scotland, and I got to know him a little. We would all hang out at a place called Fat Sam’s cocktail bar where they played great music and had great live acts passing through. We saw some amazing bands in their infancy back then. Billy was always so wonderful, charming and encouraging to me.

Meet Danny Wilson has a really pleasing mix of acoustic instrumentation and late-’80s technology – was there any pressure to be ‘produced’ and make a very modern-sounding record? I have a B-side version of ‘Aberdeen’ that was subtitled something like ‘The Way It Should Have Been‘…

No. Virgin were great like that. I think they understood that we had just as much chance commercially by being true to ourselves as we would have had conforming to some blueprint of what radio sounds like. I wish that vision was more prevalent in the music business today. I will say that although we used the most up-to-date technology available at the time, we didn’t use it to sound modern but to get what was in our heads onto the recording. On ‘Aberdeen’, for instance, we used a Fairlight to get the trumpet and string sounds but the production is probably more ’60s in tone than ’80s. That B-side was an interesting one; we had made a very early stripped back Portastudio demo of that song before the album and it had a certain beatboxy charm that we all kind of harked back to. The tape was lost so that B-side was our attempt to recreate that vibe. Never a great idea!

How do you feel about Meet Danny Wilson and its place in the 1980s musical landscape now?

I feel pretty much the same as at the time. It’s very me, very honest, very heartfelt and, just like me, doesn’t fit in anywhere. Exactly what we were going for, I suppose.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m always writing and recording with other artists. That’s what I do these days and have a whole heap of stuff in the pipeline but aside from that I’ve just written the music with John Carney (Once, Begin Again) for his next movie (‘Sing Street’) which I’m very, very excited about. As it happens, he got in touch with me because Meet Danny Wilson was a record his brother had turned him onto as a young kid growing up in Dublin in the ’80s. That neatly brings this interview to a lovely, rounded conclusion so I’d better shut up now!

Many thanks for your time, Gary.

Stanley Clarke: Rocks, Pebbles And Sand

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In 1979, Stanley recorded the sprawling double I Wanna Play For You which had some brilliant moments but also veered uncomfortably towards disco.

It also featured some outrageous live recordings which suggested he was going in a more ‘rock’ direction, mainly thanks to the sonic possibilities opened up by putting his Piccolo bass (tuned a fifth higher than a standard bass, A to C rather than E to G) through various effects pedals (see correction in the comments section below).

But how would Stanley start off the ’80s? On Rocks, Pebbles and Sand, he thankfully pushed the rock and prog-fusion rather than disco. It also really helps that it sounds very much like a ‘band’ project, apart from funk curio ‘We Supply’ which belongs on a different album altogether.

And what a band it is – Simon Phillips on drums, Charles Icarus Johnson on guitars and Steve Bach on keys. Phillips in particular is a perfect foil for Clarke with his meaty grooves and superchops. Though he was obviously coming from Billy Cobham with his prodigious double-bass playing, expansive tom fills and open-handed style (see below), his grooving on ‘Story of a Man and a Woman Part 2’ is just perfect.

Rocks, Pebbles and Sand‘s opener ‘Danger Street’ sounds like Stanley has been listening to The Who and Van Halen with its big drums, raucous guitar and gargantuan riff. Subtle it ain’t (and one can take or leave Stanley’s vocals), but it really works, mainly due to the mastering and mix – Rocks is one of the best-sounding albums of the era alongside Steely’s Gaucho, Lee Ritenour’s Rit and Zappa’s Sheik Yerbouti.

The duet vocals on ‘Underestimation’, ‘You/Me Together’ and ‘A Story of a Man and a Woman’ might put some people off, but isn’t that female voice familiar? A glance at the liner notes reveals a credit for one ‘Marcy Levy’ on vocals. It turns out to be none other than Marcella Detroit of Shakespeare’s Sister fame, an LA session singer in another life who had recorded and toured extensively with Eric Clapton (co-writing ‘Lay Down Sally’) before working with Stanley.

The funk/disco track ‘We Supply’ sticks out like a sore thumb but features a superb bassline from Louis Johnson and a hilarious spoken word intro from album engineer Dennis MacKay, proclaiming, ‘We supply all your funky needs!’ in the poshest voice you’ve ever heard. Git down and boogie with Dennis…

Stanley had a mixed ’80s to say the least, with a fair few misses but some big hits as well. Rocks is definitely one.

 

 

Hue And Cry: Remote

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hue and cryJust for a few years at the end of the ‘80s, Hue and Cry bothered the charts with a classy fusion of pop, jazz and Latin.

Singer/co-composer Pat Kane said at the time that they wanted to create a musical mix of Scritti and Sinatra; they almost pulled it off with the excellent Remote, released in December 1988.

They also pulled off the Steely Dan-ish trick of singing about subjects which might seem unsuitable in a pop context (domestic violence on ‘Looking For Linda’, corporate sexism on ‘Dollar William’, Latin-American poverty on ‘Three Foot Blasts Of Fire’, the dawning of the Web on ‘The Only Thing More Powerful Than The Boss’).

hue and cry

And yet something about Hue and Cry seriously wound people up. When they emerged on the scene in 1987, they rode a wave of goodwill thanks to their clean-cut looks, anti-Thatcher politics and dynamic ‘Labour of Love’ single.

But by the time of Remote, the tide was turning. Hue and Cry’s relatively soft, ‘aspirational’ sound was anathema in the bombastic late-’80s. It was too jazz for the yuppies and too pop for the jazz revivalists.

Maybe the fact that they’re brothers never helped too – The Proclaimers were the more acceptable face of Celtic brotherhood, more meat-and-potatoes, more reliably blue-collar.

In 1995, Q Magazine wrote a cruel but witty hatchet piece about them entitled Britain’s Most Hated Band, offering them ‘a crisp tenner’ to split up (it didn’t do the trick…). Whatever. I love this album. Recording Remote in New York gave the Kanes access to some amazing guest musicians – Ron Carter and Michael Brecker play beautifully on the very pretty ‘Where We Wish To Remain’, and Pat’s excellent vocals demonstrate a big Mel Torme influence.

The prime NYC rhythm section of Wayne Braithwate and Dennis Chambers supplies a 24-carat groove on ‘Three Foot Blasts’. ‘Sweet Invisibility’ puts a fantastically exciting Latin horn arrangement right upfront in the mix, beating David Byrne at his own game.

‘Guy On The Wall’ is a witty portrait of a perpetual party wallflower set against a ‘Word Up’ groove and brilliant Salsa horn arrangement. Bassist Will Lee delivers beautifully measured performances on ‘Ordinary Angel’, ‘Dollar William’ and ‘Looking For Linda’, offering a subtle commentary on the songs back in the days when a musical performance was supposed to have some narrative development and couldn’t just be ‘cut and pasted’ together.

It’s quite funny to hear legendary jazz trumpeter Jon Faddis play a stratospheric solo on the otherwise very soppy ‘Violently’ (though Michael Brecker very controversially ‘fixed’ his solo – see below…) Pat Kane sings well throughout the album, with great phrasing, inventive ad-libs and excellent melodies.

But YouTube live footage from the Remote era hasn’t aged well and demonstrates why they were such a Marmite band, all cheap suits and wacky horn sections. I saw them at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1989 and struggle to remember anything about the gig.

Even they seemed to sense which way the wind was blowing; they disappeared for far too long after Remote, issuing the stripped-down Bitter Suite live EP and disappointingly brittle Stars Crash Down in 1991. The momentum and recording budget had gone.

But because in the main they lent towards jazz and Latin rather than funk and soul, they avoided the all-too-audible mistakes of contemporaries like The Blow Monkeys, Style Council, Climie Fisher and Johnny Hates Jazz. A great video has emerged of the boys discussing the making of the album:

Level 42’s Mark King talks about his ‘Influences’

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Mark_King_-_Influences

EXCLUSIVE! Level 42’s Mark King speaks to movingtheriver.com about his classic solo album Influences, released by Polydor in July 1984.

MP: Can you just briefly summarise the story behind Influences? Was it your idea or did Polydor come to you?

MK: I was signed to Polydor Records via Level 42 and had a young, heavily-pregnant wife and needed to buy somewhere to live. This was back in 1981 I hasten to add, so Influences showing up in 1984 was really down to my tardiness in addressing the fact that I had taken the advance (£5,000) and, apart from delivering a single ‘Freedom‘, had somehow neglected to fulfil my contractual obligations! Polydor were actually very sweet about it and just before the agreement was due to expire gently reminded me that I needed to deliver an album.

You’ve talked about having loads of ideas in the tank for the album but how did you piece them all together on ‘The Essential’? Did you have to demo all the different sections before recording?

I may have exaggerated the ‘loads of ideas in the tank’ bit, but when push came to shove I booked a few days at Chipping Norton Studio and dived in. The opening piece ‘The Essential’ began on the studio Hammond B3 which Mike Vernon informed me had been used on the Focus album Moving Waves. I’m no keyboard player, but I fired her up and just hit the notes. Next I programmed the drum machine with a pattern so I could lay down some bass and guitar, and the riff and melodies just wrote themselves really. I was jamming with myself I guess, ha! Anyway, that’s how all the sections came to be, and in the twinkling of an eye I was 20 minutes into the album.

What was it like getting back into drumming again for the album? ‘There Is A Dog’ is an amazing tour-de-force.

Ta. I never stopped drumming, that’s what I love to do!

Did you put your bass and guitar parts down with a drum machine first and then overdub your drums? Or did you record your drums first?

I laid the bass and drum box down first. I had an Oberheim DMX drum machine that sounded awful but was a great writing tool because you could programme some pretty accurate drum parts that were in time! You have to remember that these were early days in digital technology, so ears weren’t so tuned in to accurate tempo, but I loved the idea of being able to f*ck about all over the groove and lean on the drum box because it had the time nailed. I laid the drums down next, Gretsch incidentally. Speaking of time, the guy with the greatest meter I know is Gary Husband. He IS a human machine… The guy is a phenomenon with tempo. Never shifts. The Level 42 track ‘Take Care Of Yourself’ was a first take at The Summerhouse Studio played on some Ddrums. That is AWESOME! The great Bill Cobham quote sings to mind: ‘You are either in time or you are out of time.’ I’m usually out.

How did you come to work with producer Jerry Boys? ‘The Essential’ features some really effective edits and cross-fades between the different sections.

Jerry was a good friend and had engineered some Level 42 stuff, which is how we had met of course, and Polydor were keen for me to involve a third party to keep an eye on me as I was three years overdue already, so Jerry was the perfect choice. A really good engineer, plus I respected his opinions. I probably did a lot of the edits myself. I certainly did for the Level 42 stuff.

How did Drummie from Aswad come to play on ‘Clocks Go Forward’? That track has a lovely feel.

Aswad were working in the studio next door and I bumped into Drummie in the corridor. I had just been running over the parts for ‘Clock Go Forward’ with Mike Lindup so I had no hesitation in inviting Drummie in to play with us. The Gretsch kit I had hired had only just shown up in the studio, and there was no stool…aaaargh! But this didn’t faze Drummie at all; he just pulled up a plastic studio chair and got stuck in. The studio floor was highly-polished parquet and it was quite funny watching him sliding around as he played, hahaha! The song is called ‘Clocks Go Forward’ because that was the day we recorded it on.

You play some great lead guitar on Influences – who are your favourite players apart from John McLaughlin?

Cheers. I love JM of course, but Clapton, Hendrix, Gary Moore and Bill Connors are all in there somewhere. So many, really. I love Al Holdsworth too and working with him on Guaranteed was a real privilege.

You played a lot of Influences at an amazing Ronnie Scott’s gig a few years ago – what was it like playing it live?

A lot of fun actually. I was so chuffed at how the guys were able to recreate the sounds for me. Nathan (King) in particular was fantastic on all the guitar parts. It didn’t feel like we were playing music from nearly 30 years before, and having not listened to any of it since then I was quite proud of what I had created way back when.

Thanks, Mark!

Find out much more about Mark and Level 42 at level42.com

More about my history with Influences below.

mark king

Some of these basses and guitars were used during the making of ‘Influences’…

Even though I’d been a huge Level 42 fan from the day I bought A Physical Presence in 1985, I didn’t even know Influences existed until two or three years after its initial release. I came upon a cassette copy in a ramshackle shop near the Swanage seafront while on a family summer holiday. It would be an understatement to say I couldn’t get it onto the hi-fi quickly enough.

And it didn’t disappoint. The sharp crack of the snare drum on opener ‘The Essential’ led me to believe that Level’s Phil Gould was behind the kit. But a quick look at the album credits blew my mind: Mark was playing all the drums, guitars and bass? Yep. Influences takes the ‘one-man-band’ ethos and runs with it. Not for a second does one rue the lack of a conventional band; this music swings, snaps, crackles and pops.

With a few decades’ more listening experience, I now hear some of the ingredients that went into the Influences brew – Chick Corea’s Latin excursions, Spectrum-era Billy Cobham, Mahavishnu and also Stanley Clarke’s mind-bending prog/fusion – but Mark’s musical voice also comes through loud and clear. ‘There Is A Dog’ could almost have graced Return to Forever’s Light As a Feather album. ‘Clocks Go Forward’ and ‘Picture On The Wall’ are in a Level style and wouldn’t have sounded out of place on True Colours or Standing In The Light.

To date, Mark has not returned to such unhinged jazz/rock outside of the Level 42 ‘day job’ (apart from a fabulous gig at Ronnie Scott’s in 2012), but this is one of the great British fusion albums, or fusion albums period. Influences also deserves a place alongside Innervisions, Lewis Taylor’s self-titled debut and Prince’s Sign O’ The Times in the pantheon of great one-man-band albums.

12 Reasons Why The ’80s Were The Greatest Ever Music Decade

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Adam_and_the_Ants_198112. Fun Fun Fun
Your baby-boomer parents might claim that the Swinging ’60s were pretty much a non-stop laugh riot but the early ’80s trump them for sheer musical ebullience. There was a tangible feeling of positivity in the air despite Thatch, inner-city rioting, The Troubles, African famine and the Falklands War. Music was forward-looking and celebrated life, love and happiness (despite state-of-the-world addresses like ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘The Message’), and no one even thought of buying older stuff because there was something new and exciting coming along every week. Live Aid proved a kind of Year Zero for ’80s pop but up until then artists like Culture Club, Dexy’s, Wham!, ABC, The Associates, Frankie, Adam Ant, Madonna, Thompson Twins, Bananarama, Jacko, Altered Images and Fun Boy Three brought unlimited colour and energy to the party.

11. The return of quality British songwriting
How about Squeeze, Morrissey/Marr, Roddy Frame, David Sylvian, Kirsty MacColl, Mark Hollis, Pet Shop Boys, The Associates, Edwyn Collins, Julian Cope, Sting, XTC, Mark E Smith, Thomas Dolby, the Cocteaus, Green Gartside, Boy George, Eurythmics, Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, Nick Heyward, Lloyd Cole, Madness, Paddy McAloon, Paul Weller, Robert Smith, UB40, Siouxsie and Kate Bush for starters? Yes, their formative years were the late ’70s but they did their best work in the ’80s, with the possible exceptions of Weller and Costello. The result was a glorious display of chart-bothering, musically-ambitious British songwriting talent not seen since the late-’60s.

10. Band Aid/USA For Africa/Live Aid/Sir Bob
Maybe it wasn’t the most musically edifying series of projects in the world, but who cares? At last count, Live Aid has raised well over £150 million. Anyway, there were some brilliant pop moments – Boy George’s vocals, Phil C’s electrifying drum performance and Bowie’s spoken word interlude on ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, Queen, Bowie, Jagger, Tina Turner and Madonna at Live Aid and all the soloists on USA For Africa (except Tina Turner, Huey Lewis and Kenny Loggins…). Live Aid may have killed off New Pop (represented by Adam Ant, Spandau and Duran etc.) and ushered in the AOR-era of Q Magazine and Dire Straits, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

9. Goodbye Dad Rock – Hello pan-sexual/pan-musical New Pop!
A quick glance at the charts during the ‘1981-’83 peak of Post-Punk/New Pop/Second British Invasion might tempt one to say that Lad/Glam/Punk Rock had all but been wiped out. Artists like Human League, Kid Creole, Wham, The Associates, Orange Juice, Talking Heads, Altered Images, Wham, Culture Club, UB40, Pigbag, Everything But The Girl, Eddy Grant, The Clash, Madness, The Belle Stars and Level 42 took elements of synth pop, free jazz, ska, Burundi Beat, Go-Go, electro, calypso, hip-hop, funk, reggae and Afrobeat to the top of the charts, leading some commentators to proclaim the death of rock. By the mid-’80s, Big Country, Simple Minds, U2, The Mission and Springsteen had brought back the Big Bam Boom, but it was fun while it lasted.

8. Sisters Doin’ It For Themselves
Chrissie Hynde, Bananarama, Siouxsie, Donna Summer, Belinda Carlisle, Carly Simon, The Pointer Sisters, Alison Moyet, Grace Jones, Sade, Bjork, The Bangles, Sheila E, Annie Lennox, Janet Jackson, Joan Jett, Salt-N-Pepa, Laurie Anderson, Whitney Houston, kd lang, Tina Turner, Bonnie Tyler, Gloria Estefan (!), Jane Siberry, Regina Belle, Aretha Franklin, Anita Baker, Teena Marie, Jill Jones, Lisa Stansfield, Cyndi Lauper, Wendy and Lisa, Tracey Thorn, Helen Terry, Chaka Khan, Kirsty MacColl, Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman, Julia Fordham, Tanita Tikaram, Madonna… You don’t have to be Camille Paglia to note that this was a great decade for strong, successful female musicians.

on-u sound7. Great Independent Labels
4AD, Rough Trade, Beggars Banquet, Relativity, Factory, On-U, Demon, Creation, Some Bizzare, Big Beat, Mute and Postcard were vital for the music industry and all hit their peaks in the ’80s. Up to around 1985, the Independent Chart actually meant something and was a badge of honour for the kinds of Peel-patronised artists who were going up against the corporate biggies, long before today’s web renegades. By the mid-’80s, ‘indie’ had became a musical style rather than a raison d’etre and labels like ZTT and Blanco y Negro were tributaries of major labels, but at least the lunatics had taken over the asylum for a while.

smash hits6. The peak of Music Journalism
This great musical decade certainly got the journalism it deserved. Again, the roots were laid down in the NME/Sounds/Melody Maker punk years but writers such as Ian Penman, Mark Ellen, Paul Du Noyer, Ben Watson, Tom Hibbert, David Toop, David Hepworth, Mick Wall, Richard Cook and John Fordham flourished big-time and graced the great bastions of ’80s writing such as Smash Hits, Kerrang!, The Wire and Q. Sprinkle in some of the most outspoken, politicised and downright lairy musicians of all time and you have the ingredients for a brilliant decade of music journalism.

5. Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna?
They were almost exactly the same age but can all three really have hit their straps in the same decade? Ambassador, you are spoiling us…

4. Music TV flourishes
The Tube, Top of the Pops, Going Live, No. 73, The Late Shift, The Oxford Road Show, Sounds of Surprise, More Bad News, Whistle Test, The Chart Show, Wired – howzat for a partial list of ’80s music shows? There was a commitment to all music genres across all the terrestrial channels. Forget Jools’s Later luvvie fest or the simpering One Show – in the ’80s you could watch The Smiths on Saturday morning kids TV, Blancmange at teatime and Ornette Coleman late at night. The burgeoning Channel Four has to take a lot of credit (and had a lot to prove) – The Tube was a brilliant statement of intent and later in the decade Sounds of Surprise and The Late Shift showcased superb jazz and blues documentaries.

3. ’80s Pop Tribes
Again, the watchword is variety; music and fashion pretty much went hand-in-hand in the ’80s to the detriment of neither. New Romantics, Goths, Soulboys, Ravers, Casuals, Psychobillies, Brosettes, Durannies, metal kids – they all had an instantly-recognisable uniform and ethos. The DIY punk spirit had came to the fore again, but this time with added musical spice. And this time there was so much to go around that no-one could be accused of being a fashion victim.

2. Music Video comes of age
The Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night and The Monkees laid the foundations but the music video was raised to an art-form in the ’80s. The great clips of the decade – ‘Sledgehammer’, ‘Thriller’, ‘Walk This Way’, ‘House of Fun’, ‘Stand and Deliver’, ‘Smalltown Boy’, ‘Land of Confusion’, ‘Take On Me’, ‘New Frontier’, ‘Once In a Lifetime’ – sometimes used the latest technical innovations, sometimes delighted in their DIY, no-frills approach and sometimes ‘borrowed’ from conceptual art/movies, but all became virtually inseparable from the songs.

1. Black Music goes mainstream
Motown and the ‘early 70s pioneers laid the foundations but Run DMC, Sade, Cameo, SOS Band, Robert Cray, John Lee Hooker, Prince, Tone Loc, Salt-N-Pepa, Bobby Brown, Miles Davis, Rick James, Anita Baker, Courtney Pine, Miles Davis, The Pointer Sisters, Whitney Houston, Albert Collins, Shalamar, De La Soul, Janet and Michael, Al Jarreau, Luther Vandross, Teddy Pendergrass, Prince, Maze, Buddy Guy, Grandmaster Flash, Chaka Khan, Imagination, Lionel Richie, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross and Fatback all smashed it in the ’80s. Blues, soul, funk, jazz, electro, go-go, house and hip-hop were setting the agenda. It’s quite astonishing now to think that a song like Houston’s ‘Saving All My Love For You’, an R’n’B ballad with jazzy chord changes, could power to number one in 1985.

English Snapshot: Peter Gabriel III

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peter gabrielSo was my gateway Gabriel album, as it probably was for many teenagers in the 1980s.

But, in 1986, I don’t think I had a clue about his Genesis past or earlier self-titled records. So I went back and checked them out.

The cover artwork snagged me but initially I really struggled with Melt. The deceptively dry, claustrophobic mix, extensive use of processing, Gabriel’s animalistic yelps and the barmy Fairlight sound effects seemed very forbidding compared to So (elements drastically souped-up and ‘normalised’ by the superb 2002 CD remaster).

The opening ‘Intruder’, with its liberal use of flatted-fifth chords and Gabriel’s schizophrenic vocal, was exceptionally unsettling to a teenage lad in leafy south-west London. Forget Black Sabbath, this sounded genuinely dangerous, in a particularly English way.

The question is, of course, what an ostensibly happy, settled, middle-class young man such as Gabriel was doing digging around in the dirt in such spectacular fashion. But thank goodness he did. He extended ‘character’ songwriting – also used to memorable effect by the likes of Randy Newman, Sting, Steely Dan and The Beatles – far beyond the range of Genesis, conjuring up a memorable parade of the bungled and botched operating on the edges of society.

Musically, Gabriel apparently instructed producer Steve Lillywhite and engineer Hugh Padgham that nothing ‘normal’ was acceptable. Hence the famous cymbal ban, the layering of Kate Bush’s ethereal backing vocals and seemingly out-of-control processing and phasing.

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Kate Bush and PG recording at The Townhouse, London

The album’s themes seem to be the moral trapdoors of late-20th century urban life (mental illness, sexual violence, political assassinations, terrorism, the dehumanisation of war, social isolation).

You could argue that at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper, Bristol riots and IRA bombings, this was the perfect soundtrack.

‘Intruder’ subtly probes the sexual connotations of ‘breaking and entering’, equating a petty criminal’s intrusion with other kinds of violation, suggesting – controversially – some kind of tacit consent or ‘understanding’ by the victim.

On the epic, affecting ‘Family Snapshot’, Gabriel somehow manages to make us feel empathy for a fame-obsessed political assassin, especially in the closing ‘All turned quiet, I’ve been here before…’ section (which It Bites ‘paid homage to’ on fine 1988 B-side ‘Staring At The Whitewash’).

I used to think the protagonist of ‘Lead a Normal Life’ (‘eating with a spoon, they don’t give you knives’) was stuck in a borstal, but now I’m sure it’s far worse than that. And is the narrator of ‘I Don’t Remember’ an imprisoned political dissident or someone in an abusive relationship? It’s certainly not going to end well judging from Gabriel’s indecipherable whispers over the mechanized hum of the Fairlight in the outro, suggesting meek (drugged?) capitulation or even death.

It took me ten years or so to fully appreciate the album. But now it’s by far my favourite work by PG. Some fantastic UK session players play as if their lives depended on it, especially Dick Morrissey on sax and bassist John Giblin. Tony Levin delivers one of the greatest and most influential basslines in rock on ‘I Don’t Remember’ and single-handedly invigorates interest in the Chapman stick.

And, in my opinion, Padgham and Lillywhite have never done better work. Check out their stunning sound design on ‘And Through The Wire’; the mix subtly develops the drums with a little more room reverb in each successive chorus until the explosive last one when Marotta’s snare and Paul Weller’s brutal guitar threaten to destroy your speakers.

And the gradual building of ‘Biko’ and ‘No Self Control’, the latter with some distinctly Steve Reich-inspired marimbas played by Morris Pert, remains an aural treat. This fantastic album still challenges and surprises after all these years. 10/10.

Miles Davis & Marcus Miller: Siesta

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I came across this gem in a big crate of reduced cassettes in the old Our Price shop in Richmond town centre.

I was a huge fan of Miles and Marcus’s ’80s work but Siesta had somehow passed me by. It was hardly reviewed anywhere despite the fact that it was the official follow-up to Tutu, possibly because it was ‘just’ a movie soundtrack and – even worse – the soundtrack to a really terrible movie.

But it quickly became the soundtrack to my summer of 1988 along with Prefab Sprout’s From Langley Park to Memphis, Prince’s Lovesexy, Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick and Scritti Politti’s Provision. Its Spanish-tinged melancholia, beautiful playing by Miles and stunning bass/keyboard work and production by Miller drew me in immediately.

Miles’s stock was rising high at the beginning of 1987. He was healthy, enjoying critical and commercial success with Tutu and playing to packed concert halls. The question was, how would he follow Tutu? A film soundtrack was definitely not the predictable option.

Of course, Davis was no stranger to the world of movie scoring, even though his famous Ascenseur Pour L’échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold) soundtrack was mostly improvised in just two days, and his music for Jack Johnson was similarly spontaneous though subject to detailed post-production work by Teo Macero.

But when Davis got a call from the producers of Siesta after their request to use Sketches Of Spain on the film’s soundtrack was turned down, he turned to the trusted Miller for help. Miller was also on a roll at the beginning of ’87. Fresh from co-producing and co-composing Tutu, his career was branching out in all directions.

He hadn’t done any soundtrack work before and embraced the project, thrilled to work with Miles again and rightly sensing that the movie’s Spanish elements might open up some dramatic musical possibilities. But the clock was ticking, the budget was tight and time was of the essence.

Siesta is a fascinating companion piece to Tutu and it features some of the most arresting and spontaneous Miles trumpet playing from the last decade of his life. Indeed, some Davis-watchers such as critic Paul Tingen reckon it’s the pinnacle of Miller and Miles’s ’80s collaborations.

Miles sounds fit and strong, investing the material with both power and pathos, consistently providing a sound that someone once described as ‘a little boy looking for his mummy’. Apparently when Miller played the elegiac ‘Los Feliz‘ to an assembled cast and crew, several people broke down in tears.

Miles solos at length with glorious open horn on several tracks. The dramatic, flamenco-tinged ‘Conchita‘ was used by American ice skater Nancy Kerrigan for her 1992 Olympic routine – she got a bronze medal.

The ghost of Sketches of Spain/Miles Ahead arranger Gil Evans looms large and the album is dedicated to him, ‘The Master’. One can only imagine how ‘Los Feliz’, ‘Siesta’ or ‘Lost In Madrid‘ might have sounded with Evans’ full orchestral backing and arranging, but Miller and main collaborator Jason Miles consistently find just the right musical ingredients with gorgeous piano voicings, subtle synths and fretless bass.

As George Cole pointed out in his great book ‘The Last Miles‘, only Michel Legrand, Gil Evans and Miller’s names have shared a Miles Davis album cover, and that really proves how highly Miles rated Miller’s efforts. According to Miller, there is much more Siesta music residing in the Warner Bros vaults – here’s hoping the album gets the ‘Special Edition’ treatment soon.

Prince: The Family @ 30

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I’ve bought this album (still unavailable on streaming platforms at the time of writing) on almost every format since I found a cassette copy in the early ’90s, back when it was a pretty rare groove.

The Family came out during my favourite Prince period. He was embracing jazz, fusion, psychedelia, classic rock and even modern classical, mainly prompted by his collaboration with the very excellent Wendy and Lisa but also other associates Sheila E, saxists Eric Leeds and Eddie M and string arranger Clare Fischer.

The author with The Family in background, summer 1991

This was my soundtrack to summer ’91. I instantly loved the retro Hollywood glamour of the cover artwork and the way it chimed with the whole Parade/Under The Cherry Moon concept.

The Family slipped out on Paisley Park Records in summer ’85 (just three months after Prince’s Around The World In A Day) to a very low-key critical and commercial reception. These days, the album is known mainly for including an early version of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’.

But it’s full of far superior fare to that such as the killer opening funk medley, classic near-hit ‘The Screams of Passion’, charming pop of ‘Desire’ and especially instrumentals ‘Yes’ and ‘Susannah’s Pyjamas’ where Prince indulges in some fantastic Sly Stone-meets-Miles bass, guitar and drum grooves. This is the album that led Tutu producer Tommy LiPuma to recommend Prince to Miles as a possible collaborator and it’s easy to hear why.

The Family was put together by Prince when the first incarnation of his massively successful offshoot project The Time split up in the summer of 1984. The band’s keyboardist/vocalist Paul Peterson (renamed St Paul by Prince), drummer Jellybean Johnson and vocalist/dancer Jerome Benton were summoned to Prince’s house along with his then-fiancee (and sister of Wendy) Susannah Melvoin and Leeds.

A band concept was quickly ad-libbed by Prince, who, according to engineer David Rivkin (reported by Per Nilsen in his superb Prince: The First Decade book), issued them with the directive: ‘We gotta go after some of that Duran Duran money!’

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But what they ended up with was far from Duran Duran music. Prince wrote all the songs (except ‘River Run Dry’), played all instruments on the basic tracks and sang all the guide vocals.

Peterson and Melvoin painstakingly replaced Prince’s scratch vocals (and apparently took dance and acting lessons!), Leeds added his trademark baritone, tenor and flute and Fischer provided deliciously non-linear string arrangements.

Prince’s ‘no bass’ philosophy (as famously heard on ‘When Doves Cry’ and ‘Kiss’) seems well to the fore on The Family. I still have in my possession a cassette of demos from the album featuring Prince’s phenomenal bass playing on ‘High Fashion’ and ‘Mutiny’, presumably deleted at the last minute.

The Family was released without much fanfare or marketing. After just one gig at First Avenue in Minneapolis (rare footage of which was recently removed from Youtube), the project was put on hold when Prince recruited Melvoin, Benton and Leeds for his Under The Cherry Moon movie.

Peterson was put on a retainer, but, tired of waiting around for Prince to get back from filming in the south of France, served his notice by phone call. According to Per Nilsen, Prince was flabbergasted, believing that The Family’s time wasn’t far away and that St Paul was jumping ship too soon.

And, in a way, he was right – The Family album just won’t go away. At the request of Roots/D’Angelo/Erykah Badu drummer Amir ?uestlove Thomson, a long-time fan, the four-piece minus Prince delivered a mesmerising comeback performance at a pre-Grammys bash in 2007.

And then in 2012 a full-length album Gaslight was released under the new name fDeluxe (with considerable contributions from Wendy and Lisa) and a successful world tour followed (including a great Jazz Cafe gig in London). It proves that this band was much more than a Prince side project and are a pretty formidable funk/soul act in their own right.

Level 40-Who? True Confessions Of A Tribute Band Drummer

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Boon Gould, Phil Gould, Mark King, Mike Lindup, London 1982

I first became aware of the legendary jazz/funk/pop band Level 42 in January 1983 when I saw them on ‘Top Of The Pops’ miming to their hit single ‘The Chinese Way’.

I was just another young music fan and burgeoning drummer enjoying the Second Golden Age of British Pop, but this was different: the band was tight, soulful, and yet somehow otherworldly.

And their musicianship was superior to other chart acts of the day. For a few years, they were my band.

Cut to 2000. I was embarking on a career as a session drummer. However, all the gigs I’d been offered had been with sub-Stone Roses indie bands or smooth jazz acts. Then I saw an ad in Loot magazine: ‘Drummer Wanted for Level 42 tribute band. Call Nick on…’ My mind started racing. This was the dream gig.

I rang Nick – playing the ‘role’ of famous bassist/vocalist Mark King – immediately. I managed to impress him by mentioning that it would be fun to play ‘The Return Of The Handsome Rugged Man’, an obscure B-side that sounded like Jeff Beck jamming with Weather Report.

Nick had also recruited Peter, a keyboard player, and the three of us met for a drink, sharing Level 42 stories and trivia. These were the halcyon days. We were all buoyed by a shared love of the band’s music.

Nick was an amiable, meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. He did have a passing resemblance to Mark King, but also had the rather distressing habit of calling all the drummers he had ever worked with ‘w*nkers’…

The first few rehearsals went well. Nick was a capable bass player and, vocally, a passable Mark King impersonator. Peter did a good job of aping the band’s trademark keyboard sounds. I was trying to replicate Phil Gould’s drum parts to the letter and doing a reasonable job. We named ourselves Level It Up, a pun on the band’s 1983 hit ‘The Sun Goes Down (Living It Up)’.

After only a few rehearsals, Peter got us a gig at a Level 42 convention in a huge hotel off the A303. We were nowhere near ready to be playing live, but felt we might recruit a much-needed guitarist and backing vocalist at the venue.

The initial omens were not good – I had contracted laryngitis the day before the gig. By the time we arrived at the hotel, I was almost incapable of speech.

I looked at the live stage and immediately noticed something: no drums. Suddenly two assistants appeared and an Ikea-like structure was erected next to the keyboard rig: the dreaded, electronic V-Drums, with all of their naff connotations to the ‘boooo!’ sounds heard on terrible disco records. I had never played them before in my life, and the chances of Phil Gould ever playing them were miniscule.

We were told we would be playing at 9pm. I peered at the clock. It was 4pm. Somehow we got through the afternoon with regular toilet breaks and watching bass players trying to play exactly like Mark King in a soundalike competition.

Suddenly the raffle was over and we were on. I sat behind the V-drums tentatively and peered out into the crowd. There was silent expectation. Opening number ‘Almost There’ went by without any big hitches. There was even an enthusiastic reception at the end. They knew we were trying our best.

‘Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind’, conversely, was an unmitigated disaster. My V-drums started faltering halfway through the track and suddenly cut out completely. Had someone pulled the plug?

The stage manager rushed on to fiddle with the wiring while I tried to hide behind the keyboards. ‘It’s never happened before,’ he growled, throwing me an angry glance as the small crowd chatted amongst themselves. My throat tightened painfully as I tried to respond.

A dilapidated acoustic kit was summoned from an anteroom and hastily set up. We resumed playing but the thrill had gone and we couldn’t recover. This was the first real omen that our little tribute band was heading for the skids but I still didn’t heed the warnings.

Nick’s sister sang with us for a rare gig at his local and we got someone in to play guitar – he papered over the cracks for a while, but wasn’t the main problem.

The problem was that my relationship with Nick was starting to echo the real, troubled relationship between the people we were ‘impersonating’ in the tribute band – Phil Gould and Mark King – whose falling out precipitated the breakup of the original Level 42 lineup.

Was life imitating art? Maybe all tribute bands eventually start to ape their heroes in ways other than musical. Maybe it’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you spend many hours in a rehearsal room trying to copy another band’s music with all the management skills and forced intimacy that entails, do you naturally take on the roles that characterised the original band?

All I knew was that whereas I once looked forward to rehearsals, now I dreaded them. That’s when reality finally kicked in. It was time to leave the cut-throat world of the tribute band.

Sure, we’d ridden on the crest of a wave for a while, but let’s face it, the odds were stacked against us. Yes, we might have played The Railway Tavern in Andover once a month, The Green Man in Guildford now and again, The Old Red Lion in Carshalton if there was a last-minute opening.

But the phone wasn’t ringing, and, anyway, as I found out later, there was already a Level 40-Who doing that circuit.

‘Level 42: Every Album, Every Song’ by Matt Phillips is out now.