Vernon Reid first made his mark in the 1980s with his genre-mashing, socially conscious band Living Colour, who broke the mould with their mix of punk, rock, metal, jazz, funk, and hip-hop. That eclecticism remains today on his new album Hoodoo Telemetry, which is testament to the vast musical spectrum he grew up embracing.
The first music I remember hearing
My parents are from the West Indies, from Montserrat. They’re part of the Windrush generation. So the first thing was calypso. But one of my most enduring memories was seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. One of the things that is important about them, aside from their tunes, is that The Beatles gave artists the permission to change radically. The Beatles made it possible for Pink Floyd to go from Piper At The Gates Of Dawn to Dark Side Of The Moon to Animals. The Beatles gave permission for Sly And The Family Stone to do what they did.
The first song I performed live
Evil by Earth, Wind & Fire at a high school assembly. It was a panic, but I managed to get through it. I think the terror and the thrill became intertwined. They became one and the same.
The greatest album of all time
The album that turned my listening around was John Coltrane’s My Favourite Things [1961]. It’s the first time I heard improvisation and really got it. I was taken on a school trip to see The Sound Of Music, and My Favourite Things is one of the principal songs. We had an afterschool music programme, and our teacher played the Julie Andrews version, then he took that record off and put on the John Coltrane My Favourite Things and it blew my mind. I felt that John Coltrane really loved the words. He really felt that lyric, and he put that feeling in his saxophone.
Best live show
It was 1980 and I was playing my first festival, and seeing Muddy Waters with James Cotton and Pinetop Perkins, I felt the living history of it. Recently I was part of the tribute to Ozzy and I saw the final concert of Black Sabbath. It’s indescribable, the feeling of everyone in the stadium singing the words to War Pigs, and so much love was being projected at Ozzy. That’s up there in my top concert experiences of all time.
The songwriter
Curtis Mayfield. He could write about lofty things and positive things, but he also wrote about the street in a way that was really gritty, like Super Fly and Freddie’s Dead. Curtis Mayfield wrote about male-female relations, he wrote about the street, he wrote about social change. He wrote about the despair and he wrote about uplift.
The guitar hero
Jimi Hendrix. There are many other heroic guitarists before him, but he went against all the odds and expectations. He took the living influence of Bob Dylan, and he turned that into a dragon in his hands. When he burnt his guitar at Monterey, it was a crypto critique of capitalism. What guitar meant for everyone, he changed it, and he did it with incredible songs.
The singer
Otis Redding is straight out the crate. There’s absolutely no guile. He was every song that he sang. (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay is incredible. This is a guy, he messed up, ‘ten thousand miles from home just to make this dock my home’. He’s homeless. He made it a glorious tune about the endurance of the human spirit.
The best cover version
Aretha Franklin covering Respect. Respect was Otis Redding’s song. When Aretha did Respect, Otis said: “That girl done stole my song!” But he meant it admiringly. It became an anthem when there was so much tumult about the role of women. For the women’s movement it became the rallying cry.
The best record I made
With Living Colour, Time’s Up [1990] is talking about things that we’re literally still dealing with today. But with Vivid [1988] I was happy every day making that record. I think because there were no expectations. I didn’t know anything about the business at all. It really was an outgrowth of us as a band, playing locally in New York. It’s the best I felt making a record.
The greatest protest record
Black Sabbath was never seen as a protest band, but War Pigs is one of the greatest anti-war songs of all time. It’s up there with [Bob Dylan’s] Masters Of War. It’s up there with [Jimi Hendrix’s] Machine Gun. It’s a masterpiece, there’s no mistaking what it’s about. They equated the military industrial complex with the occult, and that was very powerful and very new and cleverer than they’re given credit for.
My Saturday night/party song
There’s a bunch of party jams, but Humpty Dance by Digital Underground is just relentless. It is so funny.
The song I want played at my funeral
Curtis Mayfield, We People Who Are Darker Than Blue. It’s a beautiful song, there’s a solemnity to it, and it’s about black people in totality. Curtis Mayfield was such a phenomenal poet, a phenomenal lyricist.
Vernon Reid's Hoodoo Telemetry is out now via Artone/ The Players Club Records.
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