Ahead of the release of the 30th anniversary edition of brother sister, Andrew Levy and Simon Bartholomew take Ed Nash on a trip through the pivotal songs in their lives.
A love of the funk, especially when you come from Ealing, London’s green leafed queen of the suburbs, requires dedication.
Andrew Levy and Simon Bartholomew grew up there, as did I, and when we meet Bartholomew quips, “We probably passed each other on the Uxbridge Road”. For all of its many charms, something Ealing has never had is a live music scene or nightclubs of note.
Like any music lover from Ealing, Levy and Bartholomew had to venture into London to explore the world of clubs and live music, where they found The Cat in the Hat Club, a place that would prove pivotal in the path their lives would take.
Run by Barrie Sharpe and Lascelles Gordon - the latter joined first incarnation of The Brand New Heavies with Levy on bass, Bartholomew playing guitar and drummer Jan Kincaid - it was a scene that opened their eyes to the delights of Rare Groove and funk. One night they brought a tape of their own songs to the club, one of which Sharpe played and the reaction from the audience inspired them to form The Brand New Heavies.
Over their nearly 40-year career, Levy and Bartholomew have worked with a rotating cast of vocalists, starting with Jaye Ella Ruth on their self-titled debut, which was re-recorded with N'Dea Davenport, where a new song, "Never Stop", was added to the track list which became their breakout.
After the success of brother sister in 1994, which is re-released as a 30th anniversary edition this month, they collaborated with the inimitable Carleen Anderson, previously of Young Disciples and goddaughter of their beloved James Brown, and for the last six years Angela Ricci has added her dulcet vocals to the mix.
As they gear up to go on tour, including a date at The Royal Albert Hall next year, Levy explains that as much as they love playing their back catalogue, they’re hungry to start writing and recording. “We need to start getting busy writing again. I'm always writing, I've got fifty ideas I've sung into my voice notes and I’m working on about four or five songs at the moment, but I need to get hungrier”, he explains.
“When you're signed to a label, you have to write and put music out, but I need that little bit of a push to get writing again, because we're really focused on our live career and our back catalogue at the moment.”
New music is coming, but Levy wants to wait until they’ve got material that matches their back catalogue. “There'll be some new stuff, but I want it to be really, really good quality, rather than just doing something for the sake of it.”
Levy and Bartholomew are both music nerds - in the best possible way - and when I tell them Damian Lewis picked “Sometimes” from Shelter for his Nine Songs they get palpably excited. They’ve split their Nine Songs choices between them, and each song charts their formative experiences of music.
Levy fell in love with funk and jazz from the get-go, whereas Bartholomew started his musical journey in a very different place. “People may have been expecting it just to be funk and soul and jazz, but I thought it might be a bit hard on the ear to listen to the playlist, so I’m doing it in more of a DJ style.”
The stories of their Nine Songs take them far from the leafy surrounds of Ealing, taking in a chance encounter on a dancefloor that would shape their future with Jazzie B from Soul II Soul, meeting their hero George Clinton and supporting James Brown, who tried to steal their brass section.
But ultimately, it’s a tale of two life-long friends with a shared love of the funk.
“Dedicated (To The Songs I Love)” by The 3 Friends
SIMON BARTHOLOMEW: When I was around 12 years old, I was a big fan of Rock and Roll and artists like Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and Fats Domino. I bought this album, The Many Sides Of Rock 'N' Roll Volume III, from a record shop called Rock On in Camden, you couldn't really listen to Rock and Roll then, there wasn't much of it about, so everything you could get was golden.
This song was on the album and there was “Psychotic Reaction” by The Count Five and Eddie Cochran too. That album was very important to me, it's a double album and inside it there was a little sheet of paper with adverts and various things from the ‘50s and ‘60s, from the start of Rock and Roll.
There was a picture of a Levi’s advert with this clean-cut guy with his foot up on a wooden crate with a guitar, and I pictured myself in a school playground singing to girls. So whilst I was listening to this song, that was a thing to me.
BEST FIT: What made you want to learn to play the guitar?
It was amazing, because with Rock and Roll you can learn “Summertime Blues” really quickly, it's E and C. Once you’ve got five or six chords, you can play a lot of the songs, and then you're doing what they can do and that’s amazing and exciting.
I had an Elvis album, The Sun Sessions, and the iconography appealed to me, the guitar is the ultimate rock and roll instrument, an acoustic guitar slung around your neck. There were a few guitars knocking around at my Dad’s house, and a woman at school gave guitar lessons for a penny every Wednesday. I enjoyed finding things in the guitar, it was a little personal zone for me, and then I had some friends who learned to play as well so we’d do little concerts for our Mum’s.
This is a song I came back to recently, because it's just such a mad record and all the lyrics are all basically from other songs, so it’s called “Dedicated (To The Songs I Love)”. It’s a bit of a time machine and I wanted to go back to the beginning when I was discovering Rock and Roll.
“Up From The Skies” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
SIMON BARTHOLOMEW: If people aren't familiar with Jimi Hendrix, “Up From The Skies” is one of the less heavy ones, but the lyrics have a great resonance today.
I went from Rock and Roll and into my older brother’s music, which was Rock, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Reggae, Steel Pulse and Jimi Hendrix, and I was a big fan of his. I was a bit of a rocker, and this was before I go into Punk. I was in a band called Coke Bottle Willie, we played The Clarendon in Hammersmith, we’d organised our own gigs at school in the hall and I felt like a rock star.
BEST FIT: How old were you then?
We were really young. There was a Battle of the Bands on at The Clarendon and we played at it. We were 15 or 16, and one of my older brothers’ friends went upstairs to see a band called The Frantic Elevators, he tried to manage them and they turned out to be…
...Mick Hucknall’s first band.
Yes, you know your spuds. We played there a couple of times. I think our first gig was at The Milford Arms in Hounslow, which was memorable because we had about eight songs and it was just people we knew who came to watch. We got an encore, but then our drummer’s stool slipped down but he carried on playing.
Why this Jimi Hendrix song in particular?
You always think of Jimi being quite heavy, but he had some softer stuff, and people who get into him can ignore the softer songs and prefer the heavier stuff. It’s got a nice loose feel to it, he probably said ‘Use the brushes on the drums’, and he probably wrote it and cut it in one go. I thought I'd choose one with a funky, groovy and jazzy feel to fit in with my Brand New Heavies persona.
“Mother Popcorn (Pt. 1)” by James Brown
SIMON BARTHOLOMEW: This is from a period when we started going to The Cat in the Hat. They’d play a lot of records you’d never heard before, which weren’t in the zeitgeist. It was music that had been left behind really, funky stuff. And they were digging out other songs like “I Believe in Miracles”, which is coming up later.
We brought a cassette of our songs to The Cat in the Hat, they played it and people kept on dancing. “Mother Popcorn (Pt. 1)” is the kind of tune you’d have heard there and it’s probably quite challenging to dance to. We were also playing that type of music, so all the arrangements with the guitar and bass lines were really seeping into our style. This song is a good example of that period just after the ‘60s, when it was more Rock and Roll and Doo-wop, and then he suddenly got super funky.
James Brown was a massive influence on the Heavies when we started. There’s a recording where he was directing a drummer, and it was one of the first beats where the snare doesn't go on the two, which was a pivotal point in Funk, which led on to Jungle and Drum and Bass.
It was James Brown’s energy, that period in his music when he was making the funk and forging it in the room, it's this incredible, evergreen energy. We supported James Brown which was amazing, it was crazy.
BEST FIT: Didn’t he try to steal your brass section when you played with him?
He did, he wanted them in his band. We had this fantastic American horn section, they were like in the American colleges, where they had marching lines and they were marching and doing shapes. They were fantastic and he tried to poach them!
Was James Brown the light bulb moment for you moving into funkier waters?
I bought James Brown’s 30 Golden Hits, which I listened to a fuck of a lot. They're all quite short songs, two or three minutes long, with little bursts of stuff. And that was amazing for me, I was coming from a rock background, which is more fiddly-diddly and heavier, but those guitar riffs were so effective in the pattern of everything working together, with the drums, the bass and the guitar.
Yet it was so simple, and that was a beautiful thing. It was like primary colours.
“Was That All It Was” (12" Extended Version) by Jean Carn
BEST FIT: How did you discover this song?
SIMON BARTHOLOMEW: I discovered it fairly recently. I was listening to a lot of stuff on Mixcloud and I did some DJ’ing at the Blackpool Tower before we played there, where there’s these guys who are proper old soul boys that play old disco stuff. It's a really amazing song about a one-night stand, there’s great playing on it and it’s got an orchestra.
This song fits in with the whole disco end of funk. Funk came before disco, and this is from that age of music where there were fantastic 24-Track desks, reverbs and compression, so this sounds fantastic, and it’s a live band playing what later becomes house music. The first song I chose by The 3 Friends was probably done on a 4-Track, the Hendrix and James Brown songs possibly were as well, but here we are with this high-level production.
Jean Carn was quite cutting edge in her style in terms of what she was doing within disco. Disco gets ballparked as one thing, but there was more to it than that. It was revolutionary, rebellious music for people in America who didn't have much money and worked hard. And then you went to a world with lights spinning around and dancing all night, that would have been quite revolutionary.
It was written by Jerry Butler from The Impressions who also co-wrote “I've Been Loving You Too Long” with Otis Redding.
Wow. We did a cover of “Don’t Let It Go To Your Head”, by Jean Carn, which was an amazing song.
She had a five-octave singing range.
That’s incredible, I’d like to hear the low one!
It's quite a good time now for the whole soul scene, there’s a lot of soul festivals that we’re playing at, The Fatback band and Change are playing again and people are getting back into that.
Why do you think people are rediscovering soul and disco music again?
I like to think that when the music is made by bands, there’s a different energy in the music because its people making it rather than post-computer, which is different style of music where you can do everything yourself. There's an energy in people playing, and it’s a recording of that.
“I’m Too Tough for Mr. Big Stuff (Hot Pants)” by Vicki Anderson
BEST FIT: This song has an excellent title.
ANDREW LEVY: It's the ‘Hot Pants’ in the parenthesis which gives it that sexy, slick edge. I'm not sure why they added that, I think it was because there was another song with the same title.
We used to go and hang out at Barrie Sharpe’s house, the DJ that played our song at The Cat in the Hat club. I remember he played this in his living room and I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
I learned how to play the bass by listening to that sort of music and a lot of jazz fusion. I didn't pick the bass up until I was 15 and I didn't have any lessons, so I used to just listen - not necessarily copying the songs or the basslines - but copying the rhythm and the way that the groove went.
When I heard that song I was completely blown away, it’s the energy and also the way she almost raps the song, which is sexy and really powerful and engaging. The actual groove is insane because it's so syncopated, and in every bar someone's playing a different part of the groove. Everything's so clear, and that’s why I learned how to play by listening to soul music, because everything's syncopated.
Verbalising why I love it so much is tough, because it's all so emotional when you hear music, but it's one of the coolest pieces of music I've ever heard. It was probably 1987 when I first heard it, and nothing’s ever topped that song for me.
There’s a link with this song and The Brand New Heavies. Vicki Anderson’s daughter was Carleen Anderson, who sang with you, and James Brown was Carleen’s Godfather.
That's right. Femi Fem of the Young Disciples managed to contact Carleen Anderson and got her to come over and do a concert and then they put the band together. Working with Carleen was a magical experience, she's got an equally powerful and incredible voice.
Vicki Anderson sang in the James Brown Revue, and he wrote in his autobiography that she was the best singer he ever heard.
Her voice is all over his stuff. Just having just having a piece of that Anderson / James Brown history and DNA in our band and our social circles was amazing, it was very, very cool to have that.
“Eighty-One” by Miles Davis
ANDREW LEVY: I remember first hearing this when I was 14. I’d just gotten my own FM radio as my birthday present. I remember fiddling around with it and realising how clear and beautiful the sound was, because AM radio was a bit muffled, and you couldn’t hear the high frequencies in the music.
I was scrolling around and I think I got to Radio 3, when they used to play Jazz. I didn't know it was even called Jazz but I heard this incredible piece of music, I could hear the ride cymbals ticking away and then the bass coming in. It's almost very similar to Dub music, which was I into at the time, my parents are Jamaican, and my sister was really into music, so I had a lot of Dub music in the house.
But when I heard “Eighty-One”, I thought ‘What on earth is this?’ I remember having the radio next to my pillow, waiting to hear who it was by. It was Miles Davis and from then I really started getting into Jazz.
It was quite a young age to be engaged that deeply with Jazz music, which is quite hard to listen to unless you spend a lot of time trying to understand it. But it must have been something in me where the switch just flicked on. I wasn't a musician. I didn't know anything about musicians, or recording, or being in a band.
I was given a bass two or three years later, so I had all those years between that moment and getting a bass, just listening to and sucking up music. Even when I listen to “Eighty-One” now, it takes me right back to when I was 14.
BEST FIT: This was from the album E.S.P., which amazingly was recorded in three days.
He did sixty studio albums; they must have been constantly the studio, we’ve done much less than that!
I didn't realise Herbie Hancock played on this until I read about the making of the album.
ANDREW LEVY: He’s another guy I didn't realise was in that band until years later. It was hard to get information then, it was bad enough being able to afford to buy records, and you couldn’t just click and find out who the producer or who the writer was on the records.
Years later when I found out he played on it I thought, ‘Of course, it’s Herbie Hancock’, because I recognised that style of playing, and later on down the line I heard his band The Headhunters, who were another incredible band, and I figured it out.
“Keep On Movin'” by Soul II Soul
ANDREW LEVY: This song is important because when I was eighteen, through clubbing we hooked up with Jazzie B. We weren’t The Brand New Heavies at the time, were in a band jamming and we played at the Africa Centre, which was Jazzie B’s Sunday night club in Covent Garden.
He heard me playing and a few months later he called me up and said, ‘Andrew, come down to Addis Ababa Studios’, which was in Harlesden. I didn't have a bass, so I had to borrow some money from the Student Union, my determination at that age was crazy.
I walked into the studio and Nellee Hooper was programming on an 808, it was this drumbeat that I heard blasting through from the top of the stairs. I walked in with my bass, plugged it in and played a bassline. The song ended up being released and it was called “Fairplay”. I also did the keyboards on it, not knowing how to play them, but I could just figure stuff out and bluff it.
So that started my relationship with Jazzie B and when Club Classics Vol. One blew up and I saw my name on the back of the album, I thought ‘Wow.’ I was obsessed with Jazzie B at the time, because he was the first person in my world to become world famous, he was number one in America and I looked up to him.
When I heard “Keep On Moving” it blew me away. The beat and the bassline were just outrageous, everyone was really blown away by that song. There's no way you can hear it and not totally engage into it, whether it's on a dance floor or on the radio.
It was so powerful for us that Jan, our ex-drummer, was writing a song called “Never Stop” at the time and he called me over to his house to work out the bassline to it. “Keep On Moving” was the precursor for “Never Stop.” If you listen to it, the mood and the arrangement are quite similar.
And Jazzie B, if you’re reading this, we didn't nick your song! But it was a trigger for us to write “Never Stop”, which was the song that got us into the American charts and kicked off our career. That's the impact that song had on us and even when I hear it now, I’m just ‘Wow, that’s incredible.”
BEST FIT: Bizarrely, I once met Jazzie B’s life coach, who said his key piece advice to clients was to take five minutes out of every day, clear your mind and think about nothing, to declutter the stress out of your life.
Jazzie B is a very wise and an incredibly centered man. He asked us to do a remix, and that was another thing that blew me away, Jazzie B asking these three nutters from Ealing to do a remix? It was the most we were ever paid to do a remix. I couldn't believe how much he was willing to pay us.
One day he invited me to his house and gave me some advice that I’ve never forgotten. He said, ‘Andrew, you’re this big and you’ve still got a manager? You're crazy. You can manage yourself.’ We kept the manager at the time, but in the last ten years I thought, ‘We know more than the managers, so why do we need a one?’ He’s a smart man.
“One Nation Under a Groove” by Funkadelic
ANDREW LEVY: This is another song from when I was very young. I wasn’t interested in or knew anything about musical instruments, but I was in The Boys Brigade in Ealing, which is a Christian based youth group, which I thought at the time was a bit like the scouts, but a bit cooler.
BEST FIT: I was in the scouts when I grew up in Ealing, it wasn't cool.
It wasn't cool when I discovered girls at the age of twelve. Everyone started in The Boys Brigade when they were ten, but as soon as they hit twelve or thirteen, they left! During those few years I had a wonderful time, we went camping and all these different things.
On a Thursday night, we had this little youth club at the local church hall, and there was a Northern Soul type guy called Andrew who used to buy records. We used to have this little disco thing between 5 and 6pm, and he'd bring his disco records and we’d dance to death in this tiny little room upstairs at the church hall.
One day he brought this 7” in, I remember looking at the label and when he put it on, I couldn't believe what I was hearing, I thought ‘This isn’t like anything I've ever heard.’ I didn't know anything about Funkadelic, I just thought it was amazing music.
It went into my psyche and percolated and until I started playing music I didn't realise how much of an influence it had on me. It's very simple, it's quite raggedy in the way it’s put together. It's a powerful song and it had a big influence on me.
Later on down the line, in about 2016, we actually ended up in George Clinton’s studio. We were on tour in America with N'Dea (Davenport) and his roadie was tour managing us. We needed to start writing some new stuff and he said, ‘Guys, I'm going to George’s studio, you can meet George.’ I thought ‘Yeah, right.’
We drove to Tallahassee from Atlanta and when we turned up there were people lying around the studio sleeping. I think when George is on tour people just hang out there if they haven't got anywhere to live, there’s people sleeping in the toilets and at the back of the studio.
We started recording and I couldn’t believe the drum sound they've got in there. I think it's exactly the same setup as it was when Funkadelic were recording. We did 10 or 15 backing tracks, N'Dea didn't sing for some reason, she used to fall asleep with a glass of red wine in the back of the studio. We were all quite tired after the tour.
Did you meet him in the end?
We ended up meeting him at the airport and it’s amazing how things cycle in life. Listening to “One Nation Under a Groove” when I was twelve years old and then years later sitting in his studio.
“I Believe in Miracles” by The Jackson Sisters
BEST FIT: This is your joint pick. This song was on the playlist at my wedding reception and as soon as it came on, everybody got up and started dancing.
ANDREW LEVY: That’s exactly what it used to do for us, when it was played by the DJ, it was that moment of the evening where everyone was looking forward to hearing it. All the clubs used to explode, everyone's on the dance floor and it's amazing. It still has that effect now. It's such an uplifting experience listening to that song. It's brilliant.
SIMON BARTHOLOMEW: It really epitomizes The Cat in the Hat club. Barrie Sharpe said that back in the day that song wasn't really much of a hit or much of a go to tune, but I think the intro is the thing about it, it's fantastic, isn't it? It’s like Pearl and Dean.
ANDREW LEVY: I thought their voices sounded incredible together, probably because of their DNA. It’s like when Sister Sledge sing together, it’s like an incredible string section.
With your four decades of friendship and history, of all the songs you could have picked together, what made you go for this one?
SIMON BARTHOLOMEW: It really encapsulates the beginning of the band, even before we'd done a gig, we were dancing to that.
ANDREW LEVY: We used to go out clubbing together, the three of us, me, Simon and Jan. Simon and I met when we were eleven, so it's a long time.
SIMON BARTHOLOMEW: First it was Rare Groove, and then it went to The Wag Club and then people started doing warehouse parties. It's a seminal track from a seminal place in London, which became a worldwide scene, and that’s the birth of that, that and Dingwalls, but Dingwalls was a bit more jazzy. The Cat in the Hat was pure funk.
With the Rare Groove scene, people were finding records in America and putting paper on the label so the other DJs wouldn't know what it was. In those days they had cassette players and vinyl decks, and that was the dance floor that we were first heard of as The Brand New Heavies.
Jan’s Dad had a really good quality microphone, we made three songs on a cassette and they played “You Gotta Catch That Beat” there. We should have released that song, it’d be amazing to release that. Of the three tunes, I didn't think they’d choose that one, actually.
But there was a synergy in that, we were making music based on the music we heard at that club. And I “Believe in Miracles” is one of the banging tunes from that time.
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