US AN DEM
One morning in 1990, after my morning run, the phone rang. The voice said, ‘Hello, is that Benjamin Zephaniah?’ I confessed to being me, and the voice said, ‘My name is Chris Blackwell. I’d really like to talk to you. I’m in the air at the moment, flying into London. Can we meet tomorrow?’
Chris Blackwell was probably the most important man in the music business at that time. He started Island Records and was famous for introducing the world to Bob Marley, Robert Palmer, Millie Small, Traffic and U2, to name a few, and he was the person most musicians would like a meeting with. But I was no young kid looking for a record deal, so while I was surprised by the call, I wasn’t running up and down filled with joy, thinking this was my big moment.
The next day we met in an apartment he owned in a posh part of London. He told me he had been reading some of my work and people had been talking to him about me, and he couldn’t understand why we hadn’t worked together. In fact, I was already having low-profile talks with a well-known Island Records man called Jumbo, but it was all a bit slow. Once I said that I would be willing to do an album on the Mango label, a subdivision of Island, things started to move quickly.
It didn’t take long for us to sign a deal, and the idea was that I would find a couple of producers, work on a track with them in order to try them out and then pick one. Jumbo suggested that I work with Paul Smykle, known to us all as ‘Groucho’ – a name he was given simply because although he was black he looked like Groucho Marx of the Marx Brothers. He had done some great work in the past, most notably with Black Uhuru, and was well respected in the music-making world. We got on extremely well, and so we got down to work. His style was futurist; he hated drum rolls, and was very much into the emerging digital technology. I liked his style, I thought he would produce a great remix, a great single, or even an album in the future, but I wanted this album to be a lot more rootsy.
As I was coming to this conclusion, Chris Blackwell suddenly sold Island records to Polygram. The world was told that things within Island would carry on as normal, but I was informed there had to be cuts, and although my album could go ahead I had to stay with Groucho. As it turned out, Groucho and I had some great times together. As with many of my recording sessions, they would be part recording session, part political and philosophical debate, and Groucho loved that.
We produced the album Us An Dem, which was released in 1990. To this day I think it’s a great album, but it was a flop commercially. Well, that may be a little harsh; after all, it sold a fair number and was deemed worthy of rerelease by Cherry Red Records in 2009. It was also popular in the USA. One track, ‘Everybody Hav a Gun’, was a big hit in Jamaica, but most of my hardcore followers thought it was a bit too funky and overproduced.
If you think outside of categories and labels such as reggae or soul or house, you can really appreciate the album; it stands alone. But when you start to think commercially, and wonder where to place it and how to market it, then you run into trouble. I was told that over £25,000 was spent on the recording of it, the most I had ever spent on the recording of an album, but yet in purely commercial terms it was my biggest flop.
By the early 1990s, dance music was firmly established as the dominant sound. Rave culture had happened at the end of the 1980s, turning a huge section of UK kids into a loved-up nation who would spend hours dancing in fields and warehouses. It wasn’t really my scene – I didn’t want to take ecstasy or drugs of any kind – but I was impressed by the way this music achieved something almost magical. For decades soul singers and ballad singers had been writing lyrics about people coming together to love one another: men and women, obviously, but also young and old, black and white. Now you had this minimal dance music – some of it with no lyrics at all, or just someone repeating ‘Aciid! Aciid!’ – and it achieved that very thing without saying it. It simply did it. I also liked the fact that the people involved with the scene didn’t give a damn about how you dressed or what age or heritage you were.
I preferred the heavier drum and bass sound that emerged in the mid-1990s. I’d go to nights at clubs like Fabric and Heaven, which always had a great atmosphere, and I got into the stuff put out on the Metalheadz label, formed by Goldie. I was receptive to the new sound, but I knew a lot of established musicians at that time who were really frustrated by it. They’d practised their instruments for years and then, suddenly, it was all about computers.
I think some of my best musical adventures are my collaborations. By definition these are projects that take me away from reggae and into different directions. I like taking my reggae attitude and mixing it with people who might be more into dance music, or rock, or even folk. To date I have done some great collaborations including with the Wailers, Kinobe, Swayzak, Amira Saqati, Back to Base, Toddla T, Mieko Shimizu, David Lowe and Sinéad O’Connor.
Sinéad was somebody I’d always respected and wanted to meet, so when I was asked to work with her I jumped to it. Usually when I collaborate I’m the one with the heavy message and the others have to put it into context, but it was different with Sinéad. She put down some lyrics about a vampire sucking the blood of the people. Nothing new there, as this metaphor appears a lot in reggae, but then she says loud and clear, ‘From now on, I’ll call you England.’ I thought, Well, that’s heavy!
I came with lyrics about the evils of empire and it worked well. It was one of my favourite collaborations and, after we recorded the track, we became good friends. We used to talk a lot about what reggae was trying to do and what she wanted to do, and before long she flew to Jamaica to record a brilliant roots reggae album called Throw Down Your Arms. I loved it because it didn’t sound like white reggae. She’d gone to Jamaica and worked with real reggae musicians, and she wasn’t trying to sound black. Her voice simply blends well with that music.
I feel really privileged to have been the first person to have collaborated with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, but my dream collaboration would have been with Bob himself. He was a poet who sang his words – words full of social commentary, prophecy and wisdom. I am an angry ranter of verse. I think my lyrical chatting combined with Bob’s angelic voice would have worked really well. Actually I know it would. Well, it works when I’m in the shower.