by the time four guys from Liverpool were finished with it, it would come out very different; it was the same with us. When we were recording, Jazzie in particular would bring a whole bunch of records to the studio and say, ‘Check out this bass line, Simon’ or ‘What’s the piano doing here?’ He was a sound man by trade, a sonics guy, so the sound would be especially important to him.” Law remembers Jazzie putting on the 1975 Johnny Hammond jazz-funk favorite Gears and playing both “Shifting Gears” and “Tell Me What to Do” in the studio. Also included in Jazzie’s (no doubt) Funki Dred–embossed record bag, was Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear , a lot of hip-hop, and Barry White for the string arrangements. “Nellee was really into drum machines,” Law remembers. “When he brought the 909 in, he was like, ‘We gotta use this, man. This is the shit!’ And we would blend that early technology on sampling with live musicianship. It was a beautiful kind of mixture. But we weren’t purists—we wanted to have access to everything.” Barry White was a lot more influential than critics give him credit for, regularly appearing live on British television via primetime shows like Live at the London Palladium and the Royal Variety Performance . His presence was felt on everything from Lisa Stansfield’s “All Around the World” (a number one in 1989, which swiped the beat from “Keep On Movin’”) to chart hits such as Chris Rea’s “Driving Home for Christmas.” “We wanted real strings,” says Law. “So Jazzie hired Mykaell Riley to do arrangements for the Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra and double-tracked it to make it sound bigger. Going after that raw Barry White string sound.” Recording the album at a variety of studios across London— the aforementioned Britannia Row and Kingly Street, they also hired Lillie Yard and Addis Ababa Studios—the group would roll in after 4:00 PM, one by one, often recording into the night. The vibe always relaxed at a Soul II Soul session. “Relaxed is one way of saying it,” Law laughs. “I’ve inhaled enough second-hand smoke for one lifetime!” “One night, the doorbell rang at Britannia Row,” says Rodriguez, expanding on the theme, “and for some reason, we’re not sure why, Nellee went to answer it and there was a mounted policeman [who had arrived on horseback] standing at the door. The local young kids use to do things like scrawl graffiti on the houses and there were often knocks at the door to ask if we were aware of any dastardly deeds.” With smoke bellowing out, Hooper, without thinking, invited the policeman in. “Everybody in the control immediately hid their spliffs!” Says Rodriguez, “Thankfully, the policeman said there was nowhere for him to tie up his horse.” In the era of Yellow Smiley’s and club culture, the good vibes espoused by Jazzie B and the group are personified by the harmonious, zeitgeist-defining catchphrase “A happy face, a
thumpin’ bass for a lovin’ race.” First introduced on the album’s crowning finale, the spoken word “Jazzie’s Groove.” “If you clock ‘Jazzie’s Groove’ and close your eyes, the whole thing, it just sounds like it came from within the city limits of London,” says Jazzie, the pride apparent in his voice. Built around a brass section sample extracted from Gary Byrd’s “Soul Travelin’ Pt. I (The G.B.E.),” it’s a monstrous jam, so good that the original album version of “Back to Life” is largely a cappella and effectively employed as an elongated intro. Says Law: “Jazzie carried around this scruffy-looking notebook with lyrical ideas and all kinds of stuff, and he’d dig it out on occasion, look through, and I’m pretty sure he had the title written as ‘Back to Life’ even though the song didn’t have the words back to life anywhere in it at all.” The original verses also had lines like “Steady are you ready?” and “What’s going on?” that didn’t make it to the single. “I remember that the music for ‘Back to Life’ started off at Ross Anderson’s basement studio in Kingly Street, with Jazzie tapping away at an old Elitist drum machine. He was trying to get the feel of the Honey Drippers’ ‘Impeach the President,’ and we were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, okay—I understand what you’re going for.’ ” The beat, which also had the clap and echo feel of Marvin Gaye’s “T Plays It Cool,” was initially in the mix with the keys and a small amount of guitar by Anderson. “It was never intended to be a cappella, which is why you hear so much spill,” Rodriguez explains, adding: “Caron was singing with one can [headphone] off, and then while we were listening back, I dropped in the rest of the track.” “I just think, Jazzie and Nellee in their wisdom decided to strip all of the music away for the album version, because they just thought, ‘Holy fuck, does Caron sound amazing doing all these harmonies!’” says Law. Meanwhile, over in the U.S., “Keep On Movin’” had been released and soared to number one on the Billboard R&B charts, reaching number eleven on the pop listing and going on to sell over a million copies. “I can vividly remember hearing ‘Keep On Movin’’ for the first time in 1989,” says Atlanta soul DJ Jamal Ahmad. “I was fourteen years old, and I was cleaning out my mother’s car on a Sunday morning. The radio was playing and when it came on, it literally stopped me in my tracks. I think what grabbed me first was the groove and the piano chords, which were much warmer than what you were hearing on the radio at the time. It sounded old but completely new.” Needing a third single quickly, which wasn’t a part of the original record deal, the group decided to rework “Back to Life.” “We were steaming with ‘Keep On Movin’’—that’s the one that smashed it, and then it broke in America, and when you break in America, it’s all guns blazing,” says Jazzie. “So they needed a follow-up, and instead of saying, ‘Oh, thanks a lot, it
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( opposite ) Soul II Soul’s Caron Wheeler, London, England, 1990. Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images.
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