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A kind of homecoming for Eddy Grant
PREVIEW: EDDY GRANT
Jazz Cafe
IT seems incredible that Eddy Grant, whose music epitomises London in the early 1980s, could be 60 this year: and to mark this milestone, the singer/ songwriter who grew up in Kentish Town and went to Acland Burghley school returns to Camden to celebrate next Friday with a gig at the Jazz Café.
Eddy Grant’s songs have become anthems, numbers whose refrain you’ll be able to whistle, even if you can’t name the song, the year or even the artist. Singles including Front Line, Electric Avenue and I Don’t Wanna Dance, means Grant has enjoyed success over four decades.
Eddy moved to London as a child from Guyana in the 1950s and recalls being influenced by Chuck Berry and other Chicago blues artists. It prompted him to start his own band, Eddy and the Equals – he wrote and produced the hit Baby Come Back for them – and enjoyed success throughout the 1960s.
But it was as a response to the Thatcher government that Eddy found widespread acclaim. Politics has always been a key part of Grant’s make-up, and Electric Avenue, written so soon after the Brixton riots of 1981, made him more than a pop singer.
He became a voice articulating the breakdown of communities under the Thatcher government. His politics did not stop there: he was active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and his song Gimme Hope Joanna became a political anthem.
He has returned to London as part of a new tour, taking in Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday party in Hyde Park and Glastonbury, before touching down on his home turf in Parkway to perform his first indoor UK date for 20 years.
At his Barbados studios he has produced for the likes of Elvis Costello, The Rolling Stones and Sting, while Eddy not only writes and sings but plays all the instruments on his solo albums. He has also worked a comprehensive project to record calypso, and ensure the older soca and calypso musicians are catalogued and not forgotten.
Dan Carrier
• Jazz Café, Friday July 25, 7.30pm. |
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