In Spring of 1993 I answered a ‘Musicians Wanted’ advert in the Melody Maker. What had caught my eye was Blues-meets-Rap, which I thought was an intriguing notion. It was just around the time when jazz-meets-rap was getting underway with Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest and the Digable Planets and, of course, US3 and Guru’s Jazzmatazz. Blues-meets-Rap seemed like a great idea to me.
The project was called RAW and was the brainchild of a Northern Soul buff named Andy Phillips. Andy was a little older, had been a saxophonist around the Two Tone scene in the early 80s but had never made it. He figured this was his last chance and he was giving it all he’d got. He had found a singer named Dominic Martinez who could do a reasonable imitation of an old blues singer, and a young girl singer named Kirsty Willcocks who had an excellent r’n’b voice in the prevailing style. What Andy was doing was actually way ahead of its time: he would sample and loop bits of old blues records and weave original songs around them. Little Axe and Beck had a lot of success doing something similar but Andy was first. My job as guitarist was to emulate the guitar parts on the samples and weave in and out of them. It was fun and it was new. We rehearsed at Andy’s flat in North London and we began to get an act together. Simultaneously with this, Jools Holland and the noted producer Laurie Latham had decided to start a record label, Beautiful Records, and Andy had got wind of this and convinced them to give us some studio time at Jools Holland’s home studio in Greenwich.
Not long after this, a documentary was aired on the BBC named “Rhythms Of The World”, featuring the late John Walters presenting a young, London based harmonica player named Errol Linton. The thrust of the programme was that young Errol was The Real Thing: a bona fide black blues musician playing and singing his own blues right here and now in London – and that this was (and is) noteworthy. It is to Walters great credit that he could, as he put it, “still tell butter from margarine”, and that he recognised that Errol was not just a talented blues copyist but an artist in his own right.
Andy watched this programme and immediately called the BBC and requested that he be put in touch with this Errol Linton. Andy had decided that Errol would be perfect for RAW. Thus it was that, one day in 1993, I walked up the stairs to Andy’s flat and heard what I thought was a Sonny Boy Williamson record coming out loud from behind the door. I was surprised because I was obsessed with Sonny Boy Williamson at the time and thought I had heard all his records. Open the door and there was Errol sitting in the middle of the room, playing harmonica. He was shy, he still is, but we cautiously shook hands. By the end of the afternoon’s session I thought: I want to play with this guy, and I think he might have been thinking something similar because he asked me if I wanted to play a gig with him and his band at the Dublin Castle in Camden Town. “Yes”, I said. Most definitely.
I went round to Errol’s home in Brixton to go over some material with him, but really we just jammed. I remember we played a version of Miles Davis’s “All Blues” that I still have on an old cassette tape somewhere. Come the gig, I turned up to meet the rhythm section on the bandstand. It was chaos. We had a jazz-funk bass guitarist named John and a heavy rock drummer named Junior, and Errol and myself. Errol would say something like: “This one’s in G”, and count off. We would try and join in but almost every number more or less fell apart. Some of them took longer than others to do so. When they did, Errol would play an absolutely blinding unaccompanied harmonica solo, and the three of us would try and creep back in as best we could until it fell apart again. The audience seemed to like it, however, and Errol seemed completely unfazed by the chaos onstage. I wish I had a tape of it. At the end of it, Errol gave me about £20 and I went home.
What happened to RAW? We recorded what I thought was a blinding 4 track EP. Errol played on two of the tracks and I played on all four. It sounded fabulous, the cover art was cool, it had a nice sleeve note from Jools Holland who played piano on one track, and then… Nothing. It never came out. Beautiful Records as a projected record label was quietly shelved, Jools went back to his unspeakably lucrative career and, presumably, Laurie Latham went back to high class freelance record producing. Our calls were not returned. It was a damn shame.
Reading between the lines it seems there was a conflict of interest in that the label manager was also Laurie Latham’s personal manager, and that any work Latham did for Beautiful, being speculative, was time spent NOT doing work that made a living for him and his manager. Also, a rift had developed between the two singers in the band. Dominic started suffering paranoid delusions, probably as a result of smoking too much skunk – and I daresay the old music business lags figured he wasn’t worth the hassle. I don’t blame them. He wasn’t. But they should have done something with what was left. There was a lot of talent left on the shelf. Hey-ho. That’s showbiz.