To go with today’s other ramblings on associated matters, here's a couple of old pieces about Little Barrie. The older one - appearing second on this page - was written for the sadly short-lived independent magazine Careless Talk Costs Lives in 2002. The less old one (I can hardly say "newer") - the third formal interview I did with the band - was done midway through the life cycle of the King of the Waves album in 2012. It was written for the Culture section of The Sunday Times but never published by them - I was never told why.

It's bittersweet now to recall the late Virgil Howe and his friendly, easygoing presence: the interview was the only time I met him yet he treated my like a friend throughout. The piece came off the back of the band's first big sync success, and was a good few years before Better Call Saul put their sound, if not their names and faces, in front of a massive worldwide audience.

I first met Barrie and Lewis after a gig at the 100 Club shortly after debut single 'Shrug Off Love' was released and we've crossed paths on several occasions since. I always find myself hoping fame and fortune will eventually arrive for the best artists and most likeable people, and maybe that's not happened yet for LB. But the central thesis here - that their talent and their musical philosophy is built for the long haul - remains entirely valid.

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2012 - for The Sunday Times’ Culture supplement

"It takes me a long time to do things, but I'll do them 'til they're finished," says Barrie Cadogan. The man Edwyn Collins has called "the best guitarist of his generation" is trying to explain how the minimalist funk-soul-blues-rock three-piece that bears his name, Little Barrie, have managed to survive and thrive despite what appears a fairly meagre output of three albums in 13 years.

"Sometimes, out of necessity, you have to do other things," Cadogan shrugs, nonchalantly addressing his parallel career as guitarist-by-appointment to a swathe of rock aristocracy. "It's weird, though. We had a lot of friends who were in bands, and while we were going on at our pace, it looked like they were doing so much better. But for a lot of 'em it didn't work out so good - and we're still here."

At long last, things are starting to happen for Little Barrie. Today's interview, in Cadogan's Clerkenwell local, marks the first time he, bass player Lewis Wharton and drummer Virgil Howe have been in the same room since returning from a six-week US tour. They'd been promoting the third Little Barrie LP, King of the Waves, which was released first in Japan (where Rolling Stone gave the band an eight-page feature), then in Britain last year, and came out in the States this February. Its first single, ‘Surf Hell’, became the theme for the Channel 4 comedy Sirens and is being used in a TV ad for Rimmel mascara. The steps are small, but vital.

"You realise how precious it is to get given those opportunities to make the music that you want to make," Wharton says. "And you want to keep on doing it while you can, because ultimately that's what you're here for."

Yet sustaining momentum will be tricky. Cadogan often has to put Little Barrie on hiatus while he tours the globe with the likes of Morrissey or Primal Scream; the band has had to squeeze its studio sessions in to a schedule that's seen him recording with everyone from Paul Weller to the Chemical Brothers.

"I've learned so much from them," Cadogan says of his most recent 'clients', Primal Scream (he remains part of their touring set-up and has contributed to their next LP). "Just the way they work, and the way they combine their influences to make something their own. They're a brutally powerful live act, and it's great to be a part of. And they're survivors: they're still doin' it because they work really hard at it and they want to be good."

It's easy to hear why so many musicians have felt Cadogan could add to their art: while he's more than capable of filling every bar with baroque curlicues and flashy technique, his greatest asset is restraint. He only plays what's needed, leaving space inside the sound to let the songs breathe.

"I think music trips up when it sounds too complex," he says. "It's not about technical ability: some good music is played really simply. When things get too technical there's no spirit."

Crucially, it's a philosophy his bandmates share.

"Individually, we're not precious about our parts," says Howe, the son of Yes and Asia guitarist Steve. "Maybe I won't even play on the verse, then come in for the chorus. If it'll make the song better, I'll change anything."

Little Barrie's songs - vibrant, melodic, rootsy, sparse - are written according to the same less-is-more ethos. Oblique, inscrutable lyrics hint at themes and subjects rather than drawing them sharply. Explanation is scant: in the title track from King of the Waves the lyric starts as if resuming an earlier conversation. Often, the words seem like a series of clues designed to allow the careful listener to unlock a song's mysteries. It is a technique Cadogan isn't entirely able to explain.

"I'm definitely not well-read or well-educated or anything like that, and I haven't really studied how other people write songs," he says. "I don't set out to make things deliberately cryptic: you just write how you can write. If you start forcing it in another direction, it won't work - so you just try and do as much as you can with what comes naturally, I think."

Cadogan set these slowly turning wheels in motion at the end of the last century in his native Nottingham, when he wrote and recorded a single - ‘Shrug Off Love’ - and put it out under that self-deprecating moniker. A friend, Wayne Fullwood, taught himself drums so that Barrie could play the shuffling, soulful, inherently blues-based songs live: Wharton, originally from Portsmouth, talked his way into the band after buying the record.

Moving to London, Cadogan got a job in a Denmark Street guitar shop to help make ends meet between infrequent releases and gigs. Johnny Marr heard him play while considering a purchase, and tapped Barrie for studio work. Primal Scream's Andrew Innes and Gillespie were also customers, sparking a friendship that led, via an afternoon strumming an acoustic guitar in Gillespie's Crouch End kitchen, to the invitation to join them on the road.

The group also met Edwyn Collins, who shared their love of vintage analogue recording equipment, and their first LP - the 2005 collection We Are Little Barrie, filled with shimmering melodies, relaxed playing and slinky, tightly precise rhythmatics - was recorded in his Hampstead studio. A tauter, slightly colder follow-up, Stand Your Ground, resulted from a collaboration with hip hop producer Dan "The Automator" Nakamura: following Fullwood's amicable departure, most of the drum parts were played by Russell Simins of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Howe joined in 2008, just as Little Barrie were about to back the actress (and former Miss France) Mareva Galanter on an album. It was an unusual entree into a decidedly idiosyncratic band. "The first couple of gigs were in ski resorts," the drummer chuckles.

Wharton light-heartedly but accurately describes the trio as "record collectors and geeks about music history," and they are all some-time DJs. The bassist is an accomplished graphic designer and has written about motorcycle racing; Howe makes electronic music under the name Sparo. The breadth of their interests keeps their sound from becoming stale.

"Rock music went wrong when it was only influenced by rock music," says Cadogan. "All those great drummers from the early rock groups - your Charlie Wattses or Mitch Mitchells or John Bonhams - they all learned from jazz, so they had more swing in their music which projected into what they did."

They may have lost any chance to become overnight sensations, but the decade-plus of groundwork means that the band's future will rest on sturdy foundations.

"Really, the plan is to try and get as self-sufficient as possible, and do as many things as we'd like to tick off the list as possible," says Wharton.

"I want to keep our options open," Cadogan smiles, caution and experience tempering his evident excitement. "I think, the way the group is now, we've got scope to do a lot of stuff as long as we don't spread ourselves too thin. We're only just seeing what we can really do with this."

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2002 - for Careless Talk Costs Lives

Barrie Cadogan is earnest but not over-urgent; emphatic but in a matter-of-fact way. "I've been in bands before where the idea was 'We really need to push the sound, let's get some more people in'," the singer/guitarist shrugs. "But I've always found that you did more when you started stripping things back to a more raw, primeval state. Once you see your boundaries, what you've got in front of you, you get more out of it."

"BB King plays more or less the same three notes," smiles Cadogan's band mate, drummer Wayne Fulwood, embellishing the point. "It's all the phrasing, the feel, what he gets out of it.

"[Bernard] Purdie plays pretty basic beats, he just plays them dead well," Cadogan continues, referencing the legendary soul and funk drummer. "And that's the thing. Stripping it down and building it from there. Working on dynamics – how much each member of the band plays or sings, how loud we hit it. Johnny Cash reckons he only knew about four chords 'til a few years ago!"

"And he did alright," Wayne points out.

So when you've got it down to that raw essence, what do you find? What comes out as a result?

"It's more direct," Barrie suggests. "More personal. There's less fuss, less f—-ing about. That's why I don't use any effects pedals. I used to think, 'Why are those players so original? Why did they sound so good?' And I realised that it had to come from them. They could amplify their sound but their tone and their feel and their expression came from them, not from the touch of a button."

Sometimes it seems like there aren't any new bands around worth hearing. It's the curse of the age; post-Oasis, post-Britpop, where the alternative has become the mainstream, where, as The Fall's Mark E Smith once wrote, “the experimental is now conventional,” maybe there's no room for anything non-conformist. Maybe you're stuck with what everyone else is listening to, or nothing at all.

But there are other refuges. Increasingly these past few years some people have been turning back, looking to a forgotten past to find new thrills and enervating musical highs. There are undiscovered worlds of music still out there, worlds far more exciting and engaging than anything today's cynical industry can throw at us. And once you've discovered some of them, if you're a musician, you might have found some helpful clues that could bring you towards a new means of expression.

The so-called "New Funk" scene is a case in point. Starting off, often as not, as record collectors, a bunch of like-minded souls have been doing their damndest to recreate the thrill and the buzz they get from little-known but relentlessly, paint-strippingly funky late '60s and early '70s 45s. Bands like Leeds' New Mastersounds and London's Soul Destroyers take a vintage template, write some new songs, and let their growing audiences watch the sparks fly. You won't have read about these bands in the music press, because cynical hacks of a certain age remember something called Acid Jazz, and that spectre chills them to the marrow. They confuse this search for a new mode of expression with a reductive attempt to turn back time; they think these bands are engaged in a pointless process of meaningless musical archivism.

Little Barrie, the band Cadogan and Fulwood formed in their native Nottingham in 1999, and augmented with the addition of bassist Louis Wharton a few months later, have operated on the fringe of the New Funk movement but stand to one side of it. They think there's probably some truth to assertions that the scene is too obsessed with a muddled notion of "authenticity" than it ought to be; too much thought is given, they argue, to honing stylistic tics than to writing and performing from the heart. In fact, they wrote a song about it. ‘Give Me a Microphone’, released on their second 45, quotes James Brown as it berates his many pale imitators, and emphatically outlines the band's mission statement. "This 'get on up' just brings me down," Cadogan laments, "ain't nothin' new this time around"; "Give me a microphone and I will sing my soul," he continues, "but when the moment's gone, I ain't gonna do it no more." Barrie and his band take this as their starting point and don't let up; their music encompasses elements of blistering funk energy, punk rock attitude and from-the-heart fiery soul testifying. The three-piece manage to put you in mind of The Meters and The Stone Roses at the same time, while Hendrix and Shuggie Otis are other valid reference points. But like the man said, it ain't where you're from, it's where you're at.

"Whatever you're doing, whoever and wherever you are, there's always gonna be some people who don't get it," Barrie explains patiently, as he and his band mates, who moved to London in 2000 to make things happen for themselves, hold court in their Chalk Farm local. "We've played gigs where more people in the crowd are into retro music, and they're saying things like, 'Yeah, you almost sound like 1967! You're getting there, keep going!' Whereas when you play more contemporary venues, people get it, because they haven't seen a band playing that well; a band that play and look like they want it. People who are…" he pauses, searching for the right words. "I dunno, passionate about their instruments and play with some conviction rather than people who are just trying to look cool and make an irrelevant noise. And without being too muso, because you want to do something different with your instrument but at the same time you want to know how to do it and you want to do it in context."

"I think we do recognise that," Louis admits of the 'retro' tag his band may attract, "we're quite conscious of it, but we're not trying to recapture something that's gone. That's not where we're taking the band and the music. We're making music for ourselves and music for now. It's just like Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys using his SP12 or whatever, that's what works for him. It's not the newest, most up-to-date sampler, but he's not using it just to be retro, he's using it because it's the right equipment for the job."

So Little Barrie look to the past to forge the future. Not because they think you'll take them any more seriously, and certainly not because they're on a mission to be hipper or more widely read, in musical terms, than you. It's just inevitable when there's nothing else going on to get excited about. Give Little Barrie a chance, and what you get in return is raw rock'n'roll energy, performances as intense and as vital as you've wished for stood watching the supposed new sensations every year through the '90s, but never felt.

So far the band have released three singles, all on 7" vinyl, on the Stark Reality imprint, a label run by Gerald Short, a Camden Town-based rare record dealer. The label – they were introduced to Short by mutual friends from the consistently excellent Nottingham-based Big Daddy magazine – and the format perhaps underscore links to the New Funk world that the band's music doesn't quite justify. But Little Barrie have already started to make waves outside the scene's often confiningly shallow waters.

"I had a guitar for sale," Cadogan – who works in a guitar shop – begins, "and a couple of friends who own music shops knew I was selling it, and a guy came into one of their shops asking for this same sort of guitar. So my mate says, 'I know someone who's selling one'. So this guy comes round to buy my guitar. We didn't know who he was, he came round the house, very nice guy. I was a bit sad to see the guitar go, and when I went to the bank with him I told him and he said, 'Oh don't worry mate, I'm in a signed band, I'll look after it'. I asked him which band and he said 'Radiohead'. Turned out it was Ed O'Brien. Anyway, a bit later, Johnny Marr came into the shop where I work and we had a bit of a chat. We had an identical guitar on the wall, and I said, 'I just sold one of them to Ed O'Brien'. And Johnny said, 'I've just been playing that guitar!' He'd just been on tour with Ed. So me and Johnny got to know each other a bit and when we met up again and I gave him a couple of our 45s. And he asked me if I'd play guitar for him on a couple of sessions he had coming up. So I've been recording on the side with Johnny on this Healers thing he's been doing, and I'll probably do a bit more as well. He came down to see the band. He really likes it."

"Noel Gallagher came down to see us too," Wayne announces. "Gem brought him. Same gig actually, the three of them were there. It's good to meet people who are out there and doing it, who are successful, and who'll pass on advice."

Advice isn't going to be a commodity Little Barrie will find themselves short of in the coming months. But they'll be listening, first and foremost, to their own ideas. "We're writing all the time, the frustrating thing is we don't ever seem to have enough time to work through all our ideas," Barrie explains. "But we do know we're creating an album behind it all. We don't know what we're gonna do with it, but we're writing an album's worth of material and aiming for a common theme between the songs."

Expect it to sound and feel the way they think it should: stripped-back, vital, free of unnecessary excess, punchy, important. Their way – the right way.

Finally getting to see a Cymande gig has been one of my highlights of the summer so far. The line-up might be quite different to the one that made the three classic albums of the early 1970s, but as long songwriting duo Steve Scipio and Patrick Patterson are there, then we’re still on the correct side of the infamous “if it’s me and your granny on bongos then it’s a Fall gig” divide. And of course, Cymande aren’t going to rock up in Brixton and risk trashing a reputation and a legend half a century in the making, so those who were on stage in Brockwell Park were more than capable of keeping that legacy growing.

But it was a post-CtT viewing on the BFI Player of the excellent recent documentary, Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande, that had me going back to the start of the century and a piece I wrote for the short-lived Mojo spin-off, Mojo Collections. My recollection is that this was one of those almost unicorn-rare occasions back then where the editor - in this case the inspirational Lois Wilson - came to me with the idea, and set me off to track down as many members of the band as could be found. That task was made significantly easier by Quinton Scott, head of the reissue specialist label Strut, who had made a documentary about the band for BBC radio a few weeks previously. It would have been Quinton who put me in touch with Scipio and Patterson - then both living in the Caribbean - who I spoke with on the phone (the interview with Joey Dee must have been a phone call too). Scipio and/or Patterson passed on contact details for Sam Kelly and Mike Rose, who I interviewed at their homes in north and south London suburbs respectively. There was also a trip out into the hinterlands (by my standards of the day, anyway: I think he lived in Beckenham) to meet producer John Schroeder, who had stories enough for a piece on his own.

The film places more emphasis than my piece did on the fascinating afterlife of those first three Cymande albums - understandably, as to most people the band will be all but unknown, while the re-use of their music in hip-hop anthems is likely to bring in more viewers. And of course, it was made a couple of decades further on, after the reunion that had seemed highly unlikely when I spoke with the (then former) members was already well underway. It also foregrounds the horrific racism the group’s members and their families faced - again, completely understandably, as the rise of the far right and the return of the demagogues to the mainstream of western politics are showing us how fragile the gains we perhaps naively thought had been made by the turn of the millennium really were. I began to wonder why I hadn’t ended up exploring that in this piece, and - while I can’t rule out failure on my part to see beyond my privilege - it’s also true to say that on those occasions where I asked them about this, the band members clearly weren’t much inclined to spend time discussing it. In many ways - and this is something the film shows implicitly and quite brilliantly - Cymande’s victory over the bigots was in making such joyous and defiant music that didn’t stoop to dignify the hatred by acknowledging it: instead their music is all about the spirit and the fire that burns within. That’s what illuminates those records and those wonderful, timeless songs, giving them the power that they still retain.

It’s great to see Cymande finally getting some of the recognition that their pioneering and inspirational music has so long and so thoroughly deserved. And it’s even better that they’re still going strong. A new LP, Renascence, gives the story a suitably upbeat coda, and a European tour in October - culminating in a Brixton Academy homecoming - following a Glastonbury spot and a string of U.S. dates, promises to be as emotional as it will doubtless be inspirational.

Here’s the Mojo Collections piece, in a slightly longer form than the version submitted and published.

Steve Scipio pauses while he tries to remember. Searching back almost 30 years and casting his mind's eye halfway around the world, the bass player and songwriter with Cymande is trying to recall what exactly his band's biggest hit, the reggae-funk masterpiece ‘The Message’, was trying to say.

"At the time you write these songs, sometimes subconsciously what you're thinking comes out in your writing," he begins. "It's not always deliberate, like 'this is what I'm going to write a song about'. And I think that's what happened with ‘The Message’."

It sounds, Collections suggests, like a song about your own shared life experiences - a song about leaving the Caribbean and moving to the other side of the planet. It aches with a longing for a time and a place you've left behind, and rings with an optimism for the future. And you obviously felt as though there was a message, otherwise you wouldn't have called it ‘The Message’…

"Yes," Scipio chuckles, but doesn't elaborate.

So, um, what is the message in ‘The Message’?

There follows a lengthy silence.

"You'll have to let me get back to you about that!"

—

Cymande may not have been around for long, but their music has had an impact and a legacy beyond the band's wildest imaginings. Formed in south London in 1970 by a shifting aggregation of West Indian expatriates, the band created a new sound that embraced elements of the reggae and calypso of the lands of their birth, U.S. soul, R&B and funk, the emerging Afro-Rock grooves of Nigeria and beyond, and betrayed the thorough grounding in jazz that several of the band's members had. They called it "Nyah Rock", and it's difficult to find music made before or since that bears much similarity to it.

While their complex approach defied easy categorisation and confused music-industry figures in the UK, America took to them with alacrity and their first single became a crossover pop chart hit. They split in 1975, unable to sustain the band in the face of continued indifference at home, but over twenty years later their music was picked up by a new generation, and rap records containing Cymande samples ensured their legacy would not be forgotten.

The Cymande story begins in Balham, south west London, and with guitarist and songwriter Patrick Patterson. Patterson's family had moved to England from Guyana in 1958 when Patrick was eight, part of what has come to be known as the Windrush Generation. "Is that what they call it now?" Patterson chuckles. "After the boat? Maybe I'm part of that generation. I came on a boat, but not the Windrush."

Making their home in Byrne Road, the Pattersons soon made friends, often from similar backgrounds to their own. "I think it was in 1963 that I met Steve Scipio," Patterson recalls. "He lived in the same street."

Scipio was also Guyanese. By his arrival in 1963 he was 13 years old, and met Patterson when he moved into that same Balham street. It wasn't long before the pair were working together in bands playing across south London, mainly within the West Indian expatriate community.

"Steve and I joined an African group called Ginger Johnson and his African Drummers," Patrick remembers. "Ginger was probably the first act to really do Afro-rock in London. He supported the Rolling Stones and made quite an impact. Mike also worked with us in that group."

Mike Rose, a Jamaican seven years Patterson's and Scipio's senior, arrived in England in '62. He met the two younger men in Ginger Johnson's group, and joined them when they decided to form a parallel outfit, Metre. "Metre was to a large extent a jazz band, but as the name signifies, we were dealing a lot in time signatures," says Scipio. "6/8, 5/4, 7/8, those kind of things. We moved away a bit from the usual 4/4 rhythm. And while we were playing in Metre, at the same time we were playing in Ginger Johnson's African Drums, we picked up some more rhythms - African rhythms, polyrhythms, counterpoint, and all this kind of thing. Coming out of Ginger's band this was what we were interested in, so myself, Patrick and Mike were the three that started the new band."

The fourth member was drummer Sam Kelly. A somewhat reluctant musician who played drums only because his brother had a kit set up in their house, Kelly too played in Metre, but only the once. "They had a gig at the Oval House, near to the cricket ground in Kennington," Kelly remembers. "For some reason their drummer hadn't turned up, but somebody mentioned to them there was a drummer down the road. I had literally only just started playing, but they came down and asked me if I could step in. I told them that basically I only really knew one rhythm. It worked, but only with a lot of help from Steve."

Metre were not destined for a lengthy career. "I think Metre sort of died a death and they wanted to play different material with a different rhythm section, with extra horn players," Rose recalls. Within weeks the men were planning a new band based around the instinctive rhythm-section understanding Scipio had quickly developed with Kelly, Patterson's guitar work, and Rose's sax and occasional flute.

The membership began to grow. Kelly introduced the others to his cousin, saxophonist Derek Gibbs, who joined the embryonic new outfit. Other musicians from south London's West Indian community were brought in. Rastafarian conga player Pablo Gonsales, like Gibbs and Kelly a Jamaican, was a friend of Rose, and a tenor sax player from local Black rock band Protoplasm called Peter Serreo was also recruited. Ray King, born in St Vincent and comparatively old, at 23, when he arrived in London in the early '60s, became vocalist. "Ray was quite an active musician at that time," Patrick recalls. "He had a band called the Ray King Soul Band who got played quite a bit on the radio and played gigs up and down the country." The band were named Cymande, a dove in the Caribbean calypso folklore, and the universal symbol of peace.

Rehearsals began in the basement of the terraced house Kelly lived in on Crawshay Road, on the borders of Brixton and Kennington. Turning the space into a recreation room, the drummer's elder brother George had painted the walls dark blue and decorated them with names and portraits of blues legends like Sonny Boy Williamson and Lightnin’ Hopkins. While the bass and guitar were played through amplifiers, the percussion, drums and brass were played at their natural acoustic volumes. And so, under a single light bulb in a room barely big enough to accommodate them all, Cymande began to forge an entirely new sort of sound.

"We never really defined it," says Rose. "We just got together and played, and what came out, came out. Each player brought his own thing. But I don't think we consciously set out to create our own style."

"We were conscious of not wanting to do what many of the other bands were doing," Scipio remembers. "Most bands did a lot of covers, so we set out to only do our own material. So right from the start, Cymande never played music written by other bands. I think part of the originality of the group comes from the fact that we never really did covers. If you do covers, I think inevitably some of what you're doing will seep into the writing."

A crucial ingredient both in terms of music and the philosophy that underpinned the band was provided by Gonsales and Rose, who were both influenced by Rastafarian theology and musical theory. "To me, the Nyabinghi drums were the only non-American influence in reggae music," Rose begins. "Most of the other influences, the singing style of those earlier bluebeat and ska recordings, were really imitating American blues recordings. But the Rastafarian drumming was the only thing you could say was ours. Everything else was an imitation of something else."

Throughout their recording career, Cymande exhibited a sense of a connection with a past or a heritage; a desire to survive today's troubles and move on, eventually, to a better place. Rose agrees that this was most probably due to his and Gonsales' Rasta input.

"All of us were subconsciously influenced by that sort of thinking," he says. "That was the era of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. We were all opinionated politically, we were all Black people in the Diaspora. We came from the colonies, and we were very conscious politically."

Pouring all these disparate elements into a new mould took time. "We would play maybe three or four times a week," Kelly remembers, "but there were no set times. We had nothing else much to do. I wasn't working, I remember that. So we'd usually just go on 'til somebody was hungry and then we'd walk down the road to the café or whatever."

Scipio and Patterson were the band's main writing axis. They had begun to compose their own material in Metre but in Cymande they brought it to the fore. "Sometimes the songs came from patterns Steve had in mind, lyrics he had written, or material that I had put together, and then he and I would collaborate and then take it to the band," says Patterson. "We wrote mainly on guitar, and later piano."

The songs were largely fully formed by the time Patterson and Scipio introduced them to the rest of the band, though Kelly remembers that while metres, tempos and lyric melodies were already determined, brass lines and rhythm patterns were often the work of the band members who played them. "My recollection is that maybe 70 per cent of the time they'd have the basic arrangement worked out, and the chord structure," the drummer says. "But they'd come down and play it, we'd listen, and it would grow. They'd throw things at you. There was never really any time - though I could be wrong - where anyone said, 'This is the way I want it played, and that's it'. But I did get writing credits on some of the songs, and it was only through the generosity and foresight of Steve and Patrick that that happened."

——

Cymande began gigging, playing venues like the Oval House, upstairs at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in Soho and at pub rock venues such as the Greyhound in Fulham. A friend of Ray King's, Mike Rispoli, booked them gigs outside the capital, and for a time became their manager. But their big break came by accident when John Schroeder stumbled, almost literally, upon them.

Schroeder, a former house producer at EMI and Pye, had just set up his own independent label, Alaska. A veteran of the music industry, by the time he first saw Cymande he had co-written a UK chart No. 1 hit (Helen Shapiro's ‘Walking Back To Happiness’), discovered and produced Status Quo and, as an artist, made a million-selling record (Sounds Orchestral's ‘Cast Your Fate To the Wind’). But Schroeder also had a long-standing interest in Black music, and knew a hit sound when he heard one, being the first person to sign the Motown label to a British distribution deal.

"I was always going out to see bands," Schroeder remembers. "I distinctly remember going to this club in Soho to see someone. But when I got there, the band I was supposed to be seeing weren't there, and this other band were there instead. And when I walked into this group of people, all this colour and life, the first thing that hit me was the infectiousness of the rhythms."

He mulled over this chance encounter. "They were playing on my mind, and I remember I had this number to call," Schroeder recalls. "I was, 'Shall I, shan't I?', and in the end I did."

After visiting a number of rehearsals, at which he advised the band on aspects of their arrangements and helped them hone their songs, Schroeder booked some studio time for the group. "I didn't really know what I was letting myself in for," the label boss and producer admits, "I just knew I loved the music and wanted to be involved."

While Schroeder thinks the first sessions were at De Lane Lea studios on Dean Street, Sam Kelly is convinced these initial recordings took place at Pye's studio. "I remember it very clearly," the drummer attests. "It was the first time I'd ever set foot in a recording studio. I'll never forget it!" Neither, for different reasons, would Mike Rose.

"It wasn't the first time I was in a studio, but it was the first time I'd been in that situation where everything was under the microscope," the saxophonist remembers. "We were exposed, really, as novices, especially the horn players. We didn't realise we weren't playing in tune when we were playing together until they played it back to us. Our limitations were exposed."

"The horns, as a section, were pretty bad," Kelly agrees. "They were individuals, and they were basically jazz players, excellent soloists, but when it came to riffing together they found it extremely difficult."

The group recorded four songs as a demo. Songs were selected by Schroeder and the sessions only began after some intensive and focussed rehearsals. Patterson acted as a conduit for the producer's input. "I would talk mainly to Patrick, who would then go back to the band with my thoughts," says Schroeder. "He understood that the commercial angle I knew we'd need if we were going to be able to sell any records could be achieved without losing the rawness and the appeal of what Cymande was all about. He was brilliant, and we needed someone like that."

The four tracks were recorded in November 1971, and Schroeder took cassettes of them when he visited the annual European music business convention, MIDEM, the following January. "Foreign record companies wanted English product and couldn't get English records from the majors, because they had offices all over the world," Schroeder explains. "I'd been going to MIDEM for years, and that time I bumped into a contact of mine called Marvin Schlacter from Chess records in the States. He had put out ‘Cast Your Fate To the Wind’ in the USA so we had a bond. He took the cassette back to America and I went back to England."

Within a month Schlacter was in touch. "I got a telegram from Marvin saying, basically, 'Cymande, strong reaction, would love to release'," the producer smiles. "They wanted an album, but we only had four tracks. So we went back in the studio to make the rest of it."

As well as the brass, another problem area for the band was vocals. Again the band turned to the local musical community for help, and drafted in Protoplasm singer Joey Dee. "Ray King was a very good entertainer, but I don't think he was cutting it too well in the studio," Dee recalls, "so they came and asked if I would help out."

A decision was taken to add material to that already recorded rather than start again from scratch. Nobody Mojo Collections spoke to when researching this piece is sure exactly which four tracks were on the demo, though Schroeder and Sam Kelly are sure that ‘Zion I’, the debut LP's opening track, and ‘The Message’ were among them. Confusion persists about the sequence of events, with Kelly among those who think that the original tape recorded at Pye would not have contained vocals by Joey Dee. If this is true, it means that ‘The Message’ and ‘Zion I’ would have later been overdubbed as the versions on the album feature him singing. But, certainly, by the time the band's nine track self-titled LP was released by Alaska in the UK and Chess's Janus imprint in the US, the majority of the vocal duties were handled by the newcomer. Only ‘Getting It Back’ features a lead vocal from Ray King.

The album is a fascinating portrait of a group who had inadvertently created a new sound, which they’d called "Nyah-rock", a reference to the Nyabinghi folk elements Rose and Gonsales had brought to the group. ‘Zion I’ and ‘Rastafarian Folk Song’ showed these elements at their most explicit, while ‘Bra’ - "a colloquial expression meaning 'brother', not a ladies' undergarment," Patterson laughs - exhibited a complex but lightly handled take on funk with an undeniable Afro-rock influence. The 10-minute ‘Dove’, meanwhile, was a largely instrumental exercise in mood and atmosphere that recalled Santana.

Lyrically, the record dealt with what would become the band's defining preoccupations: respect, unity, peace, love and a never clearly delineated sense of a striving after something, some place - perhaps a longing for home. ‘The Message’, in particular, sounded almost haunted by the experiences of leaving the West Indies. "My brothers, I watch you go," Dee sighs over a reggae-tinged chugging guitar riff from Patterson that sounds almost like a wheezing Hammond. "Like a river our love has flowed."

"I've never had that interpretation," the singer demurs, "but there was always a message to Cymande's music. Don't forget, at the time, that era, those sort of messages were around, the idea that we should be moving forward and not keeping a good man down. I've never seen the 'home' part, but it could be in there."

The album sleeve featured a painting by Scipio that combined the dove of the band's name and the head of a Rastafarian. The inside of the gatefold sleeve - "A gatefold sleeve!" Schroeder splutters at the memory. "It was bloody expensive, but I wanted it to be the best it could be" - featured Sam Kelly's photographs of the nine band members, taken at the last minute when it became apparent that the record was going to be released. A photo of eight of the band standing outside a bricked-up building on Crawshay Road was included on the reverse. Within months the road had been demolished and a new estate replaced the old street pattern. Cymande's roots were literally being wiped off the map.

The record looked great, and sounded unlike anything else. But something had to happen. The situation was getting desperate for Schroeder, who had released the album in 1972. "I was getting very nervous, because if it all failed at that point I would have been in the bankruptcy court," he laughs. "But Marvin released it. Their form of marketing was to play it to radio stations and each station chose a track to play. And ‘The Message’ got a really strong response. Marvin said, 'It's not just going down well from specialist stations but from pop and rock radio as well. I want you to come over.' And it all started happening."

Schlacter asked Bob Schwade to become the band's US manager, and the latter confirmed the Londoners a string of dates across the States with another of his clients, Al Green. "I went back to tell the band this. I'll never forget that meeting," Schroeder says. "They came up to my office at Marble Arch. It wasn't just my office, it was where I lived as well. I remember saying, 'Marvin's come back, your record's doing well in the States, it's going to be a hit. And he wants you to go over there and play.' And they were… Well, to be honest, they were shitting themselves. There they were, playing in a basement in Brixton, and suddenly they're being told they've got to get a stage show together to go and tour America? They'd played gigs, but nothing very big, and to be told they had to get ready to support a chart record in the States was some leap. It was mind-blowing for them, and some of them didn't want to go."

Two members of Cymande did at this stage leave the band. Ray King, already being eased out following Joey Dee's arrival, took this as his cue to leave. Peter Serreo simply didn't want to tour America, and Cymande made one last visit to Protoplasm and secured the services of the band's leader, saxophonist Desmond Attwell. Now an eight-piece, the band flew to the States and began hitting the promotional trail. It was 1973, and the band had been in existence for barely two and a half years.

"The first tour for us was brilliant," Scipio remembers. "Brilliant because for many of us - in fact, I think for all of us - it was our first visit to the U.S.. It was this big country we'd heard so much about, so it was exciting. And even more so going around with a star like Al Green. Having said that, we never actually got to meet him properly. We didn't see a great deal of him at all, despite the fact that we were in the same venues every night for two months."

"When we did the Al Green thing we started down in the south," Mike Rose recalls. "People were eating popcorn and ice cream when we were playing, waiting for the main man. One time in Louisville, Kentucky, there was a power failure and they made us play percussion until the power came back on. That was one of the first shows we did - ten minutes of just percussion in front of a packed auditorium… We didn't play in the New York area with Al Green, we did a week with Billy Preston at the Apollo Theatre. The MC was Screamin' Jay Hawkins. The heyday of that place was probably in the ‘50s, so when we went there in the ‘70s it was probably on the way down, but it was still some experience."

"I didn't care who we toured with, I was going to America!" guffaws Joey Dee. "You know? The land of music. And I was going there to sell mine. This was the dream. I walked around with a James Brown album, Live At the Apollo, and there I was, standing on the same stage! I can't explain how I felt."

"In retrospect," Sam Kelly suggests, "maybe we should have stayed in America. There was some talk that the record company wanted us to go out on some more dates after those first two months were over to capitalise on ‘The Message’ being a hit. But I think a lot of the band were ready to come home."

So Cymande returned to the UK, where the release of their album had resulted in a wave of indifference. John Schroeder knew Roger St Pierre, a journalist who had written about the band in his NME soul music column, and he became the band's UK press officer. "I don't think they did fit in to anything that was happening at that time," St. Pierre says. "They had an American sound but the music wasn't American. It was a new genre. There were lots of bands that were very good, but you couldn't call them unique. But Cymande's sound really was simply Cymande." Tony Blackburn played the group's records, and John Peel booked them for a session, but the band's singularity made them a hard sell and the mass media kept them at a distance.

Instead of playing more US dates, the band agreed to make a second LP to follow up the single's American success, but Alaska couldn't afford to release it in Britain, so underwhelming a response had the band provoked. Sessions began at De Lane Lea as soon as enough material was ready, and the band's follow-up, Second Time Round, was released in America before the end of 1973.

The work of a more polished and settled band than its predecessor, Second Time Round contains some of the group's most overtly politicised songwriting (‘Fug’, with its assertion that "All around the world people are dying/Because of greed, hate mistrust and lying") yet also betrays more of the personal nature of their art. ‘Crawshay’ is a homage to their basement rehearsal room roots, and ‘Trevorgus’, a song about Jamaica written by Rose and Gonsales, is named after two of the band's long term mates. ‘Willie's Headache’, too, resulted from those Crawshay Road sessions. "That got its' name because there was a bloke called Willie upstairs, and we were giving him a headache," Rose laughs. Willie was in fact Sam Kelly's uncle. The song also reflected Patterson and Scipio's interest in unusual time signatures, written as it was in 5/4 time. "I had the idea for the lyrics and the melody was going round in my head, and I recognised that I was thinking of it in 5/4," the bass player recalls. "I toyed with the idea of stretching it out, adding the extra beats to the bar to make it more conventional, in 4/4, but when I did that it took away from the feel of the song."

Sessions went well, particularly after the band got their first cash injection following payment of royalties on their American record sales. "The only big argument we ever had was about money," Sam begins. "John Schroeder had got the first cheque in from the States, and he wanted to pay us, but none of us had bank accounts. So he said he'd make us a cheque out and we could go to the NatWest bank near his office and cash it. Patrick, Steve and myself went over to John's place at Marble Arch and picked up this cheque, for five grand, which was a lot of money back in those days. We had to stuff the cash in the pockets of my duffel coat and go back to Brixton on the tube. Patrick and Steve were standing either side of me all the way home, we were all trying to be discrete but we were completely paranoid! We got off the tube and walked up to Brixton Hill, where the band were waiting. And we took this huge pile of money and spread it out on the floor, and started to divide it up. And it was then that people started to think, 'Well, you know, I write a lickle piece o' 'dis you know!' It took us ages to sort it all out."

The other disagreement the former band members recall at all was during their second American tour. Following Second Time Round's release, they returned to the U.S., this time to headline a string of college dates. Instead of being part of a larger whole, as they had been on the Al Green tour, Cymande were the focus of a smaller scale effort, and while, as Patterson tells, this tour was "still quite good, good gigs, good venues," it wasn't "as easy" as the previous tour.

"That was when I got to see Cymande," Joey Dee laughs. "We were doing a gig at the Sugar Shack in Boston, and Patrick and me had a big argument. Trust me, I can't remember what the argument was about - it couldn't have been that important or I would have remembered - but the end result was that I went on strike. So I stood in the crowd and watched them play. And by the end of the first song I felt sorry for them. Patrick was singing, and this was not a good idea! The guy doing the mixing said to me, 'Joey! You cyaaan do this to dem man!' The music was still there, the people were still jumping: but the voice…! And I thought, 'Oh shit, I can't put the group in jeopardy'. So after about three songs I ended my strike."

While in the States the group began work on their third LP at Chess's studios in Chicago. Sam Kelly remembers a room filled with ancient equipment and steeped in history, and sessions conducted by an unfeasibly young engineer who nevertheless knew the studio inside out. Promised Heights was finished back at De Lane Lea, but again was never released in the UK. By far the most accomplished of the band's records, it was the only album to feature a song not penned by the band, called ‘Brothers On the Slide’.

"That was written by Johnny Chapman and a chap called Swabe," Steve explains. "Swabe sadly died a few years ago. Johnny was a musician, a guitarist. He and Swabe wrote this song and he came to us and said, 'Do you want to sing it? It fits in with the style of what you're about'."

The song bears a more than passing resemblance to Curtis Mayfield, who Scipio, Patterson and Kelly all acknowledge as a major influence. "They had to fight me to get away from that," Joey admits. "That was the only way I could hear it, so when I sang the song it was so easy to go into a falsetto and that just made it sound even more like Curtis Mayfield. It wasn't that I was imitating him, it was just the whole song - it makes me want to sing like that, it's got that atmosphere. They were on my case, man!"

Oddly, for so commercial sounding a track, ‘Brothers On the Slide’ was never released as a single. Indeed, no singles were taken from Promised Heights, and the band didn't make a third trip to the States to promote it. They soldiered on for some months following its 1974 US release, playing one major London show in January the following year supporting Kool & The Gang. But the writing was on the wall. Patterson and Scipio remember an eventual realisation that it was time to call a halt to the band's activities. Dee was, he says, the first to leave. But some confusion over what happened when could perhaps be explained by the discovery of a "lost" fourth Cymande album.

Recorded at "N.E. Studio, London" - a play on words because the album was made in fits and starts in whatever studio Patterson could get down time in - it was released by New York's Paul Winley in 1981. While it bears Cymande's name, and all its songs are co-authored by Patterson and Scipio, there are few other links to the band's early '70s heyday. Kelly and Rose both contributed, but vocals are shared between Trevor White and Angela Wynter. The music, too, is different, with a synthesiser sound that dates it badly. Still, there are glimmers of the old magic, but the album has largely been expunged from the official record, and in truth marked less the final flourish of the band than the first step toward Patterson's next outfit, View From The Hill, in which both Winter and Whyte were regular collaborators.

The connection with Winley is intriguing, as it directly links Cymande with hip-hop music. Winley's label was among the earliest to release rap records, and its Super Disco Brakes [sic] series were the first records to compile the breakbeats favoured by Bronx DJs at rap music's genesis. ‘Bra’ was included among these tracks, and it was also the first Cymande song to be sampled by a high-profile rap act when De La Soul used it as the basis for the track ‘Change In Speak’ on their classic debut, 3 Feet High And Rising. Since then the band's music has been plundered extensively, with the Fugees probably being the best-known example. The title track to their multi-million selling The Score LP features a loop from ‘Dove’. Cymande’s members uniformly approve of people using their music, but come down hard when permission is not sought first.

The band members all moved on to other things. While Patterson formed View From the Hill, he also began a legal career and now divides his time between London and St Kitts, where he is a barrister. Scipio too took up law, and is now Attorney General of Anguilla. Sam Kelly and Mike Rose are professional musicians, the former a veteran of sessions with everyone from Michelle Shocked and the 2001 chart hit by Gordon Haskell, ‘How Wonderful You Are’, and voted best blues drummer in the UK for four years running by readers of Blues In Britain magazine. Rose toured with Aswad and Paul Simon (on the Graceland tour) following Cymande's retirement, and in between high-profile jazz dates and West End musicals is currently working with Jools Holland. Attwell and Gibbs live in south London and no longer play music professionally, while Joey Dee lives in New York where he sings in a band. Gonsales returned to Jamaica, and is not in regular contact with his former band mates.

"I never felt that the band actually ever split up," Sam Kelly shrugs. "We're all pretty much still in touch." So could a reunion be on the cards? Patrick Patterson doesn't take the suggestion particularly seriously, while Steve Scipio says "I think our wives would kill us before they let us back on a stage!" Rose and Kelly, though, would sign up if it was decided that a few Cymande gigs would make sense and fit into their schedules. Joey Dee is perhaps the most enamoured of the idea.

"If they wanted to play a gig or two then yes, I would do it," the singer reasons. "Yeah man, I would love to. In my whole life the two best times I had was in a band in Guyana before I moved to England, and Cymande. I haven't enjoyed music so much since. I do nice things now, but there's no comparison."

So who knows? The will may be there, though Patterson and Scipio remain to be convinced. But is there a glimmer of hope for those who would love to see the band perform again? The day after Collections speaks to Steve Scipio and poses that troublesome question about lyrics and meaning, he sends us an email. "The message in ‘The Message’," he writes, "is simply; 'We can make it, but only if we are together'."