Original subtitles

It was a community that helped to build this record.

The nucleus is the sound system.

That's the essence of it all, is what the sound system allowed us to do.

So whether that's Rose Windross, Simon Law, Karen Wheeler, Nelly

Hooper, the list goes on and on. We were all part of a community.

that made the record what it was.

It's an extraordinarily unconventional record in terms of what it consists of,

you know, and it is mostly group.

It's an incredible record that sets a kind of atmosphere.

The other music of the day was house music. Everything was kind of bang,

bang, and no one was really listening to it. It was too fast.

Keep on moving.

Keep on moving slowed it down.

You know what I mean? To being, this slow shit's really good. I'm feeling it.

To be adopted by the Americans was a seal of utter approval to have hits in

America.

We had the Beatles. All they ever do is talk about the Beatles back in the 60s.

Yeah, there's some black guys over here. Yeah, black people in Britain. Yeah,

there's some black people in Britain. Here, have this.

The strings, it is about pulling on the emotions, emphasising the emotional

content.

We've arrived at something that is absolutely sonically unique.

This is a British sound system response to American soul

But let's not forget, you know the essence of the sheer

fabric of what it is Miss Percival my music teacher. She always said Beresford

a great melody is never forgotten

And I think that resonates with me as well. Great people feeding off of great

people, and we got great melodies and great songs.

Their whole lifestyle and their approach for me was the inspiration,

photographing the album cover.

There was this sense that when these guys walked in, you knew who they were.

You know, the silhouette of the Funky Dreads was immediate, because of the

dreads and the movement and feel of life and fun and wildness.

It's interesting.

He has the African symbol.

He's wearing Vivienne Westwood.

And, you know, you've got this British fabric, it's suiting material, and not a

lot of people recognise this as actually supporting a black power sign.

Not in a political, aggressive way, but in a way of going, we're going to take

economic power, we're going to take social power through control of our own

business, through control of our own image, through control of our own music.

But to begin with, it wasn't to make money, it was really all about the sound

system.

Well, we're going back now.

It's only about 10, 11 years we've been together as a sound.

Before there was any shots or before there was any number one hits, there was

always a sound.

Any big city where there's a black community, there are sound systems, and

your local sound system in general would probably be a reggae sound system.

A sound system is basically...

A mobile disco, but not as you know it.

I mean, there could be up to 20 people in a sound system.

It's making your own speakers, and they'd normally be gigantic.

Hiring a van, getting box boys, being able to shift kilowatts into any

premises at any time. I took a bank loan out for a car just to buy turntables.

And that's what we all did, blindly throwing money at something that we were

proud of.

No-one seemed to do it full-time.

i.e. like it's their life.

My ambition was basically to be the biggest sound system in the world.

I put the hours in, I practiced all the time, every day.

Trying to perfect a mixture of this idea of a radio station, a band, a producer

and a DJ.

When you came to see Soul to Soul, for me it was like you had to almost witness

a stage show.

It was an area that people could come and truly express themselves.

So here we are in the middle of Covent Garden, today a French tea shop.

In the 80s, there was a bookshop there, and then in the back, soul to soul, had

the most amazing session on a Sunday evening, the Africa Centre.

Life is just a moment, so enjoy it. Life will take you out and bring

you back in. It's like going back to your primary school. It seems so much

smaller.

You just couldn't get a Black Knight in the West End.

Covent Garden.

on a sunday night you're joking aren't you it still seems really odd how small

it appears to be we would create a real atmosphere we must have got 500

people in there every week it was absolutely like another so often enough

i'd sneak a little peek at the heating system from the time i got into the

venue i put the heating on maximum

It was a true sweatbox.

And the idea of the sweatbox is that as soon as you came in, it was as hot as

hell.

When I was 15 or 16, we used to go there with enough money for the tube and we

used to drink water out of the toilet taps.

Purely obsessed with music and hearing it loud and being able to dance to it.

This would be where we'd set up turntables, obviously facing...

our inclusive audience.

Their sound system was incredible and it was way too much sound system for the

space. There'd be speaker stacks either side of here, then it'd be the next

column, speaker stacks all the way through to the back.

You had to dance.

You had no choice. You couldn't stand still because it would blow you over.

I love dancing.

They were playing stuff that wasn't pop charts.

They were playing rare groove.

They were playing things from the 70s and 80s. It was funky, very vibrant,

nothing I'd heard elsewhere.

Part of tradition in sound systems is cutting dub plates.

These were special records that were made for your sound system in

particular. We made our own music.

We mixed different speeches on top of beats, and then other musical people

started to get involved, making the beats even better.

Mm-hmm.

Wouldn't that be fair?

Wouldn't that be fair?

That was the role of Fair Play initially. It was our special, our

anthem.

It's a very personal thing, you know, it's a dub play.

One of the great things about this

beat was it's got the air, it's got the feel, and

most of all it sounds rare.

I think he approached me at the Africa Center that we'd said, come down to the

studio, we're working on some music.

So I didn't have my own bass.

So I went to the Students' Union and borrowed some money from the Students'

Union, about 200 pounds, which was a ton of money in 88, 89, and bought myself a

bass and went down to the session.

And I walked into the studio and there was this incredible beat.

And Nelly Hooper was there programming.

Roland 808 drum machine, which I'd never seen before.

And they were like the holy grail.

As the track developed, one of the ideas was to make it swing more. It was very

quantized and locked. Make it feel real.

Someone else was booked to play keyboards because they didn't realize I

played a little bit of keyboards.

So I walked over to the keyboard.

First thing that I could play.

with the high piano.

It was really the beat that Nelly was programming into the drum machine that

gave me the idea of doing something with a walking type bass line, a bit like

this.

I was actually jamming through the whole thing. Nothing's repeated because I was

just messing around.

It goes out of time a little bit as well, which is cute.

What was so great about Rose's vocals you're about to hear?

Very sparse.

And very...

I've known Rose for like five years before. She was just always dancing.

Clubs I went to, she was like one of the lads. You know, she was a dancer. I

didn't know she could sing.

I had no idea.

When I was dancing at Africa Centre, Jazzy actually handed me a cassette tape

and I went home listening to it on my Walkman.

And when I got home, It just wouldn't come off. I was dancing around the room.

I was singing, vibing and dancing everywhere to the backing track.

So what I did is I got two cassette players and I pressed play on one,

record on the other and sang, baby, baby, down into the middle.

That was the first proper demo of Fair Play.

There's a bit in the song where I go up a semitone, I think, and Rose follows

that and she does this scat thing, which is unbelievable.

That rise in the key, my energies went with it.

It's almost the most important part of the song. It's the bit that you really

remember.

You're actually going to do this for me live?

Yeah.

When you first heard it, was the bass already on it? The bass is what did the

job, sweetheart.

I mean, that's what had me rocking around the room, don't trust me. That's

what gave me the vibe.

Mmm.

Baby, baby, I've got this feeling in my soul.

Baby.

Would that be fair?

Do you think she will care?

Not yet.

Be there, be there, be there.

I want, I want, I want you to be there.

I was at that night when they dropped Fair Play for the very first time. Our

own tune here.

It stopped all the music, big announcement, right, here we go. It took

a little bit for it to sink in, how important this was for us all.

Punters.

DJs, musicians, everyone, we all kind of... The

music

we loved wasn't being played on the radio.

Pirate radio was really the only way to get Fair Play heard.

And what was important for pirate radio stations is that the higher they were

up, the better your signal would be.

A block of flats is like a castle. You can look out and see, you know, any

challenges coming your way, you know, because there's a cat and mouse game

with the authorities shutting down these illegal radio stations.

So the fact that you were that high up, yeah, it was difficult for them to reach

because 90% of the lifts never worked anyway.

Kiss is stupid, you know it. Get busy.

Pirates Radio.

And that is the way we bust it loose tonight.

We played it on Kiss FM, of course, and I think other pirates played it a lot.

Right, I'm out of here. Stand by for Mad Hatter Trevor.

What we did, we had a mini DJ set up.

Hi, bro.

20 DJs might have a door key.

We come up the lift and try and look around, make sure there's no-one

noticing you.

Get into the building, take cover from the DJ that's on.

It's about last night.

With Pirate Radio getting bigger and bigger and this tune being played all

over Pirate, I'm sure the record label must have thought, whoa, we could be on

to something here.

We put out Fair Play and then we put out Feel Free. The money was...

Tiny, as I recall, maybe just £500 for each of the first two singles.

Something like that. I mean, really small.

I think they got to 63 and 64 in the charts.

Neither of them were hits, which normally would be the point that

triggered the album option.

I remember Jazzy saying to me, the record label weren't wholly behind the

album, as if it was on the precipice.

Nick Clark is my head of A&R at Ten Records.

Mick came to me and said, there's something going on with this band.

There's an underground swell of support, of belief, buzz.

I think we should take up the album auction. And I went, yeah, let's do it.

What Soul to Soul had that no one else had was this great logo.

It's like an image of a Funky Dread.

Short back and sides, Funky Dread on top.

Very cool look.

And they were selling these T-shirts. These T-shirts were really popular.

people wore these t-shirts with pride it was like such an underground thing so

just based on these t-shirts they opened a shop modern people tend to dance

with this music i'll put you in a trance the soul soul movement was

inclusive this audience that they have was multicultural london anyone could be

a funky dread So the fashion component allowed people to be part of this quite

elite, quite exclusive community.

Particularly for young black men, you know, Maggie Thatcher's reigning at that

time. There wasn't that many jobs.

Things felt pretty desolate, really, in terms of the future.

It was black men doing this work, making money, opening shops, being successful.

Well, that was really, really important to see.

They were being black. They were who they were.

People wanted what they had. They wanted this product. They wanted the sound.

They wanted the music.

Britannia Row was owned by Pink Floyd, and I think they did a lot of their

albums there.

Ordinarily, the control room was a bit of a haven, a special place where no one

really entered, and it was very quiet and very earnest, and people would be

working really closely on the desk.

Soul to Soul kind of just changed that for me anyway.

People popping their head in, saying, Hi, Jazzy, making themselves comfortable

at the back of the studio.

It felt a little bit nightclubby, very alive.

It was kind of like a sound system feel to it.

There are different musicians coming in. We're all in this world of sampling.

It's about looking for breaks, looking for sounds, looking for, you know, real

hot singers.

We're trying every idea that we feel is the fever for the record.

What came next completely blew me away.

Jazzy called me, and I remember the words exactly.

I think I found our Anita Baker.

Come up, come up to the office.

I want you to listen to this.

So I went, Anita Baker?

Because Anita Baker was, in the 80s, the female singer that was the most revered.

Not Whitney, Anita Baker.

I came up there and he played me the demo version of Keep On Moving.

Instantly I knew, this is special.

The right time is here to stay.

Stay in my life. My life always yellow as the color of sun

rays.

I hide myself from no one.

I know that time will surely come when you'll be in my

life. My life always yellow.

Yeah, I mean, Karen.

It's pure soul singing.

She got her name singing lover's rock and reggae, but she was a real soul head

as well. That was kind of frowned upon within that community, but when she got

the opportunity to spread her wings and sing more soul music, she just

flourished and blossomed, you know, just extraordinary.

When I first heard Keep On Moving, it sounded like a disco track.

And I was thinking, this is going way too fast.

You're missing all the words and the worth of the lyrics.

If you give me a chance to do it differently, I'll ask Simon if he wants

to jump in on it with me, and I'll do it with Simon Long, because I know that

he'll have that sensitivity for that.

And so what we did, we slowed it down.

Not a ballad, but more sultry and more a story.

It's based around this beautiful ninth E minor nine chord hanging in the air here

with this ninth in the verse.

It's full of questions in that chord.

You know, which way is it going? It's not the straight E minor.

That's kind of the straight. This is so much more questioning.

And I think I was creating a scene which was like going to the clubs and coming

out early in the morning, very early in the morning.

You know, it's just a sort of, you feel full of hope, but there's lots of

question marks.

The song was written in the early morning on our way home, packing up the

sound system.

The lyrics to Keep On Moving were based around us moving out of the Africa

Centre due to harassment from the authorities who'd put a lot of pressure

on the Africa Centre.

As we were heading back to Camden, very early in the morning, the song just

came, Keep On Moving.

And at one point, the lyrics, yellow is the colour of sun rays, came because I'd

looked out of the window and I'd seen the sun coming up. which was an

incredible time as the day begins.

And it's funny, I'm just reading what I wrote on the day. That is so faded. By

that point, my China graph was probably running out.

Jazzy loved massive overdone bass lines. He loved the bass to be so heavy. He was

obsessed with heavy bass lines. At the time, a lot of music coming out didn't

have that.

That time, we were going out to the clubs and listening to all this rare

groove and all the 70s funk, and hearing that stuff loud, you really started to

appreciate the DNA in the music and how the things are working.

And it's a synth bass that we're using, but I'm really trying to get a James

Brown feel going in there.

See? It's kind of around the kick drum.

It's lovely the way the bass holds on one note, really, pretty much for the

whole verse. And then into the chorus, it starts to shift with the chords

rather than just holding.

Still bass, one note.

Here it goes.

And now it starts to... I

wasn't present for the recording of the strings. I heard the

finished thing and I just thought, holy moly, that sounds so amazing.

I did most of my engineering apprenticeship at Nova Studios.

There's Tommy Steele Studios in Bryanston Street, Marble Arch.

And they were always bows and fantastic stringed instruments.

I mean, my job was actually setting up these musicians. So when you're in the

midst of them, when they're warming up, I'm in the room with them. I'm part of

the bloody instrumentation in my head.

And the idea, romantically, was always to have that sort of sound on my dubs.

I got a call from Jazzy in his traditional way. Yo, Mike, I need your

strings. That's it.

In much the same way that Soul to Soul was about, can we challenge Rasta just

by shaving the side of your head to make a major statement? Can we add strings,

which just gives us an edge of sophistication? That's really what we're

looking for.

It was a process of getting them to unlearn everything they'd learned.

in classical music education.

These were black folk that had no swing.

It had been beaten out of them. So the challenge was to take away their scores,

and then you're going to feel the part. And it's almost injecting the

Africanness back into them.

Keep on moving. It starts with a really simple, relaxed, slow line.

I think what's important about the strings here is that we're trying to

inject an emotional quality, an emotional feel.

I mean, it's so big and... It's lovely and warm

and lush without anything.

The little punctuations in the...

Rhythmic punctuations that Michael has put in the arrangement.

Double bass there coming in, beautiful.

And here we go, here's the drop.

And then...

It's really lovely to listen

to just like this.

brought to soul was reggae, was the essence, the feel, the experience, the

knowledge of where the bass drops.

That's what made it feel different to an American soul track.

Within the motive, just to explain, within the motive, you've got which is

the motive.

And then you've got the chop, the reggae chop, which is drop.

The drop is actually silence.

Chop.

That's dancing. That is pulling together within that small moment.

Reggae, the drop, and the chop.

When I heard the finished version before it was released or anything, I just

thought, wow, okay.

I'm really proud of this.

i had no idea it was going to explode in the way it did but i knew it was good

you know what i mean bbc one together now with one of the hottest 12 inches

this week rod has the details it's keep on moving and soul to soul and they are

playing live on top of the box just down here it was only after that

success the question came up of what are we going to do with this in america

the late 80s, the idea of black British artists, even in Britain, was

challenging for record companies, let alone Breaking America.

In terms of what they identified as soul, we don't exist.

There were some people in higher divisions of the record company that I

don't think take us as serious as what we really are.

when I went to meet the black American counterparts of Virgin.

And I got there maybe about 4 o'clock for a 5 o'clock meeting.

I left the building after 9 and saw nobody.

I was kept in the reception room.

And I don't even... Maybe, you know, did she forget?

No, I was totally shunned.

You know, it got me going.

It was hurtful, but it got me going.

It was very confusing to the American record company. They didn't understand

what this sound system, this musical collective was.

They didn't quite get that the leader of the band was not the singer, and that

the singer on the record wasn't on everything else that they did. I think

they just saw it as a club record, and that's how Keep On Moving was promoted.

In New York...

a dj called frankie crocker who had a very big drive time radio show telephone

numbers two one two nine five five wbls frankie crocker loved the record and

made it a drive time special 107.5 wbls

so

that means everybody who is stuck in traffic during the drive time experience

keep on moving

Primarily, the overall production sound stood out on radio as sonically

different. They got it. It connected.

Ended up being one of the fastest-selling albums that Virgin had

at that particular period of time.

It hit big time.

I went to LA to see them perform, and I remember in the whole journey, I was

totally aware, my God, I'm going to see my mates perform at a Hollywood Bowl.

Two years ago, we were doing a gig in a dingy little spot.

You know what I mean? Getting like 150 quid each or something. What is going

on? They were loving it.

The album is a piece of music, collective piece of music. It was new to

them. It was fresh. It was so un-American.

Half the album features female vocalists. True to Sound System style,

you know, there's three singers who come up and do their thing.

And then, you know, the other half of the album is Jazzy doing his thing. You

know, rapping, spoken word stuff.

Just listen to that all day, can you?

Very nice.

I mean, it's like, when we play that live, the crowd goes nuts on it. And

it's a tune that you can keep going for a long, long time, just jamming on that

groove. All sorts of things can happen. You can introduce the band.

Karen can just sing something else on it.

Jazzy can have a word about whatever.

One of those endless grooves, this tune, you hardly want to stop.

It's nice to have not been connected to that album but be so connected to the

sound system at the time Because if he came up to me and said would you reckon

I'm gonna rap on that don't rap Jazzy I'd have been don't rap me just put the

groove on you know I mean the grooves the one man up we'll pop into the group

No, no, don't rap Jazzy, and I'm so glad he did They

see there's two of us from the north and three from the east and

through our style

People just came to recognize us as the funky dreads and dread and dread and

dread There used to be a horn sample there There you go, we're flying live

Well, you know trust has always

meant a lot to all of us

For us to stay together.

The idea was to tell a story. The kind of Isaac Hayes, Barry White, Jazzy B

summary.

For everybody who can remember the epic centre.

Nelly encouraged Jazzy to really get his voice to go low.

That gave us the idea to now make our music.

Some extra bourbon. Yeah, have another one.

Okay, not bad. Yeah, try lying down.

I remember maybe one take I did under the piano.

Oh, yeah, that's it. Yeah, OK, right. So microphone in position.

Off you go.

The future.

The future for Soul to Soul.

A happy face, a thumping bass for a loving race.

Ah, yeah.

Yeah, well, we're a collective.

It's brilliant.

It's almost like he made that for the American market.

This is what Soul to Soul is.

This is what us Brits can do. No, I'm not rapping in a Yankee accent. No, this

isn't even rapping.

I think

the

album clearly needed the success of the singles.

If we'd had a hit, we'd keep on moving.

And then I had a conversation with Mick.

What's our next single going to be?

We've released all the songs that are, if you like, conventional songs.

Fair play, feel free, keep on moving.

There's nothing else on the record that isn't really kind of just a groove or a

rap or whatever.

And then I said, there's that great acapella track right at the end of the

album.

Steady, are you ready? Are you ready?

What's going on? What's going on? I said, that's a great song there. Waiting

to get out.

Cold fresh air.

Feel the melody.

That would have been like at the African Centre.

I remember saying to Jazzy, however do you want me, it's just got this lovely

rhythm to it.

You know, that's like, it's inspired.

Just before we release a record, we go through an endless process of various

mixes. Here's an example of a dub plate that came out before the release of Back

to Life, single as you knew it.

I had so many different versions that I would play.

But this one in particular got the most response.

and you get a surge either to the dance floor or to the dj booth people trying

to find out what it was

karen

wheeler vocals were so significant she acted verses

and that great opening line to the single.

The lyrics back to life work because it sounded like something to keep people up

and optimistic.

Just got an ear for songwriting itself.

hearing melodies and putting vocals on them. That was my thing of making up

songs. I just did it for years. I was about 11 when I started doing that.

The complexities of her layers, the question and answer, they

weren't us cutting the tracks separately.

This was done by Karen Wheeler.

Here we have the question.

And here we have the answer.

Then bringing in the chorus. This has always been the chorus.

The how is so lovely.

I love that.

The low how, this one.

That's totally separate.

I wasn't there when Karen did all these finished vocals.

And, you know, she's one of these singers, let me just try this idea.

And I can just imagine her sort of going, hang on, I've got this other

idea. And she goes in there and all she does is, how?

How? You know, Jazzy and Nelly sort of go, what the hell is that all about? But

when you hear it all.

together it's like makes sense you know and she really knew what she was doing

it was just you could sit back and just okay karen do your thing okay

So I think in terms of how and this is a regular thing it arrived from jazzy

you'd always have drums Bass Involved and you

might have the early stages of the vocals often the vocals are still being

written and This is what I'm working with for the most part and trying to

think through how do we add strings

in the form of stabs.

So from a reggae perspective, you're dancing to this already on a different

beat to a soul head as we move into our motive, which would always complement

the chorus.

So even in the absence of the vocal, this is dancing.

We've got a hook line and we've got that offbeat, which is what gives it the

swing, gives it... the reggae emphasis.

The main riff of Back to Life has this sort of Bollywood slide riff, kind of

always a bit sort of cheeky as well.

And then when it gets to the middle eight.

Harmonically everything shifts and goes somewhere completely different and

really lifts off.

This is the lead vocal that's weaving through it all.

When you put that lead vocal across the backgrounds, the two things go together

really beautifully.

It still just rocks, man.

The basic lyrics of Back

to Life, it's almost like coming back from the dead, as it were.

You know, there's a conversation about Karen being frightened in terms of her

life and thinking tomorrow would never come.

Well, Back to Life for me...

It was because I died and came back again. That's how I went back to life.

Because I literally died on the labour table and my son was about to die.

He's got cerebral palsy.

And at 21 years old, I couldn't handle it.

And it was hard.

I just put back to life in it because I just thought there's got to be more than

just that's the end of your life.

And I wrote it because I needed to write it for myself and other people. It

wasn't just for me. It was like, if anyone feels they're under, you have to

find a way to get out.

And music's my way to get out.

This is what Club Classics means to me.

You come from an angelic, almost sweeping vocals, right back into that

nitty-gritty, hardcore, sweaty groove of Soul to Soul.

Music for the next five years.

Everything that got sent to me is a promo.

I remember I had literally in my record box at one point 20 tunes that I was

playing. pop songs, club tunes, new music. They all jacked that soul-to-soul

sound and the strings.

Before Fugees and before the rest of the development, et cetera, et cetera, there

was soul-to-soul. And I'm suggesting that soul-to-soul were responsible for

opening that door.

It's still important because the music is still brilliant.

I mean, when I put on Keep On Moving, Back To Life, Fair Play, it just takes

me.

It's the groove, it's the melody, it's the authenticity, it's the analogue

sound. It's all in the grooves of the record.

Coming from a sound system was something completely new, something that didn't

happen before then.

Soul to soul sound system.

It was close.

It was very it was a community none of these people Individually worked

until we all connected together

We'd

gone from underground to overground and international in one album We tried to

bring together reggae hip-hop soul house music.

And it's so important to appreciate that music furthers itself by fusion.

They've championed this idea of you need to own all the elements, your look, your

merchandise, the sound.

And then we jump forward from Soul Salt to Stormzy and we can see a continuum

here where black artists are becoming more emboldened, more confident.

You couldn't write it.

People write about the punk scene where it came from and where it ended up. They

write about, you know, this country that's been drummed into me since I was

a kid. I love these musical stories and then to have somebody you know be part

of a musical story that's part of British history is fantastic.

And to actually say, oh, I was there.

It's actually true. I saw it, you know.

It's amazing. It's an amazing story.

once again thank you very much for all your support and your help and that's

not the heart that's not the soul of myself so to another day another time

keep loving in your heart and I wish you all the best