One afternoon in the late ’70s, Eddy Grant was making the regular pilgrimage from his home in North London to the Black Theatre of Brixton when he noticed the name of the market street next to Brixton tube station: Electric Avenue, so called because it was the first shopping street to be lit by electric light. ‘That’ll make a great title for a song one day’, he thought, filing it away for future reference. The name resurfaced a few years later, when Grant was in desperate need of new songs. His stash of lyrics and tapes had gone missing when he moved from London to Barbados and now his record company were getting impatient. Working with engineer Frank Aggarat at his new Blue Wave Studio, Grant turned the street name into a song that contained subtle allusions to the 1981 Brixton uprising. It went to No 2 in the UK and US.
From the moment Grant arrived in London from Guyana at the age of 12, he knew that one day he’d go back to the Caribbean.
After moving to Bayleys Plantation on Barbados in 1982 and building his Blue Wave Studio, Grant recorded an album - Killer On The Rampage - playing every instrument himself. “Electric Avenue” was the second single, following UK No 1 “I Don’t Wanna Dance”. That song was a farewell to England disguised as a love song, while “Electric Avenue” sneaked the politics of protest into the charts with a similarly sly and catchy melody. The video was picked up by MTV, who had been awakened to the potential of black music by the popularity of “Billie Jean”. That helped make “Electric Avenue” a hit in the States and meant Brixton’s Electric Avenue became famous throughout the world.
“On the surface, it’s a very simple song and all the great songs are like that,” says Grant. “I have found over the many years I have been making music that the songs that are most direct and simple, with clever interplay of sound and meaning those are the ones that really catch people’s ears.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.