Latest news with #AverageWhiteBand
The Herald Scotland
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
How Average White Band 'touched the core' of Black America
Yet a group of six guys from Scotland are among the most influential figures in the contemporary sound of all those genres, and that's despite literally being called the Average White Band. "Those are some Scottish guys," former U.S President Barack Obama said in an interview with Bruce Springsteen. "And those boys can jam." The Boss concurred. Read More: Chuck D of Public Enemy said seeing them on Soul Train was "a revelation", they've been sampled by NAS, N.W.A, The Beastie Boys, De La Soul and Del tha Funkee Homosapien to name but a few. Glasgow's David McCallum may have provided the basis for Dr Dre's 'The Next Episode' but the AWB leave him in the dust - the website WhoSampled credits 169 to one song alone. Go one step removed and you can probably trace Kendrick Lamar's funk and soul infused To Pimp a Butterfly to the Average Whites, Eminem once said "I'm a product of Rakim", who famously sampled the group's 'School Boy Crush'. Anthony Baxter, the director of You've Been Trumped, is currently in the process of making a film about the group entitled Soul Searching. A snippet will be shown at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, with some of the biggest names in music already on board. He tells The Herald: "I've been blown away by how deeply their music is revered in the United States, I've spent the best part of the last couple of years filming extensively and whether it's the audiences they had on their last tour, which was 80% black in pretty much every place I went to, or they incredible impact they've had on some of the biggest names in music today, predominantly hip-hop artists and music producers, they've told me what the band means to them. 'Whether it's Flava Flav, Questlove, or a woman called Melody Spann Cooper who runs Chicago's longest-running black music station who told me: 'they touched the very core of who we were'. "Chuck D said to me, 'you just feel it and that was the epitome of soul'. DJ Premier said 'their funk wasn't made up, it was from their heart and soul'. Average White Band (Image: Supplied) "Questlove told me that when he came across the band on Soul Train it was at that moment he decided he wanted to become a drummer. He played their live album every day for 10 years, because he just loved it so much. "In Scotland everyone knows their songs but I think the story of how they've impacted hip-hop and black music culture in America is one that really surprised me with how deep it goes. 'In Detroit there was this band of brothers called The Jitterbugs who pioneered this dance move called The Jit, and 'Schoolboy Crush' was one of the real influences on that dance move. 'In Los Angeles I spoke to two former Crips and the infamous Crip Walk was really influenced by 'Schoolboy Crush'. Their music has penetrated the culture in America in a much deeper way than I'd initially thought and it's just been a real joy to see how revered the band is." On the face of it, it's a pretty unlikely combination. Six white guys who grew up in post-war Scotland not just doing R&B and funk, but doing it so well they became adored in the places which gave the world that sound. Mr Baxter says: "There were six of them in the beginning and they listened to this kind of music coming in from the United States – Aretha Franklin was their heroine. 'They would search through all the latest Black music coming in, it was being played in one or two pubs around Scotland and they would seek out that music. 'They've explained to me that their Scottishness helped, not only just in the sound of their voices in singing this very soulful, funky music but also when they were growing up after the war it was extreme austerity and I think people like Chaka Khan were going through a similar kind of thing – so there were parallels there." The filmmakers are hoping to have it finished by the end of this year, which marks 50 since the Average White Band topped the charts Stateside. It's produced by Montrose Films along with Screen Scotland, Kartemquin Films, Vertigo Films, and Sky Originals, and it's hoped with the threat of Trump tariffs in the air there will be some Hollywood interest. Mr Baxter says: "I came to know the music of the band when I was growing up but I didn't really know much about their backstory until I read a piece a journalist friend of mine wrote about them. 'I contacted Alan Gorrie about three years ago and sat down with him and spoke about making a film. Since then I've embarked on a journey and found this extraordinary story which was far more multi-layered than I had ever anticipated. "There are still one or two very high profile musicians who are keen to speak to me for the film but what we have already is a terrific story. 'We've uncovered some amazing archival footage along the way, part of the ambition I have is to put the viewer back in 1970s America when they've come across there. "This is more than a music documentary, people will celebrate the music but also be able to immerse themselves in the world of Average White Band and that profoundly important point in music culture. "It's funky, it's R&B, it's soul… it's Average White Band.'
The Herald Scotland
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Anything but Average: Why AWB were a simply great Scottish band
Scoppa went on to say that the group went beyond merely sounding like a soul band. It was a soul band. "There's no question about that, although there's the obvious question about how in the world the sextet got to this level of proficiency and emotional involvement in a culturally alien idiom". Read more: The band attracted lots of critical praise for their exemplary musicianship and songwriting skills – the same qualities that appealed to the Atlantic Records label, one of the biggest and most influential labels ever. Atlantic released the AWB album and saw it be certified gold and top both the pop and the R&B charts in the States. Its single, Pick Up the Pieces, did the same. Some critics alighted upon the 'Average' in the band's name. "Average White Band is rubbish!!!", exclaimed one writer on the UK magazine, Beat Instrumental, in 1973. "They should be called Extraordinary White Band. Why? Simply because these six, white, dedicated musicians have something unique – the ability to play black soul music that not only sounds right, dammit, but FEELS right, too!" Then there was this, from a Rolling Stone writer in December 1974: "Their name has a nice sense of irony and confidence, because the Average White Band plays music that is anything but white; despite their pale faces and soft Scottish accents, they play, sing and write as if to the ghetto born. "Make no mistake", added Judith Sims. "This band isn't 'good for a white soul band' - they're just plain good, with high-intensity rhythm, strong, ungimmicked vocals, and a wealth of original material that ranks with the best R&B songs". Marvin Gaye, James Brown and Ben E King were all said to have admired the band. And, famously, when they became one of the first white groups to appear on the venerable US music show, Soul Train, the host Don Cornelius told the audience: 'It's something that has to be seen to be believed. They play and sing like they were raised on cornbread and black-eyed peas.' One of the very first Scottish bands to make it big in the States, the Average Whites deserved all the critical and commercial success that came their way. It was not doffocukt to see why they had such a successful crossover into the US music market. As the Scottish music historian Brian Hogg has put it, the AWB album continued the group's "intuitive and rhythmic understanding of black music, but infused with a great sense of discipline [than on their debut album, Show Your Hand]". Pick Up the Pieces, that great instrumental, was their calling card. On YouTube there's a video, shot in 1977 at the Montreaux International Festival. It's all there: that great opening sax riff, the driving drumbeat and rhythm guitar chords, that energetic funk groove. The band were much, much more than one song, however. Others come to mind: Let's Go Round Again, Person to Person, Cut the Cake, You Got It, Nothing You Can Do, and a brilliant cover of the Isley Brothers' Work to Do. Plus, they were great live - even until the very end, when the original line-up from the glorious days of the Seventies had been whittled down to just the remaining original founding members, Alan Gorrie and Onnie McIntyre. Anthony Baxter's new documentary should be worth watching.
The Herald Scotland
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Scots band one of 'great lost combos of Glasgow musical heritage'
Taken together with archive footage from elsewhere, and with their excellent 1976 debut album, Cado Belle, they show just how good a band they were. Alas, they made only one album, and a four-track EP, though all of the band members enjoyed considerable success afterwards. Writing in these pages in 2012, Keith Bruce, the Herald's then arts editor, had this to say: 'Among the great lost combos of Glasgow's musical heritage, the name of Cado Belle is recalled with particular fondness by those who saw and heard them. They made just the one self-named album, released in 1976 on the short-lived Anchor label, but it stands up well as an example of blue-eyed soul funk alongside the work of the Average White Band and London's Kokomo (three of whom guested on the disc in supporting roles)'. Cado Belle arose out of a particularly fertile period in Scottish popular music, before the advent of such bands as Simple Minds and the rise of punk and new wave. 'There were some amazing bands around back then', recalls Maggie Reilly, who was Cado Belle's singer. 'The Average White Band were doing brilliantly. Cafe Jaques, from Edinburgh, and Clifford Hanley's band, the Motels, were both really interesting. You just felt that something was happening'. Cado Belle, for their part, went against the tide by opting to remain in Glasgow and not relocate to London in search of fame, as so many others did (and still do). 'We made the decision to get up at ridiculous o'clock in the morning in Gibson Street – everybody got into the van and we drove to London or wherever it was', Maggie said earlier this week. 'We weren't going to move [to London]. That was the decision we made, we wanted to be based up here. In a way it was great but in another way it was to our detriment, because of the distance. But it was all very exciting'. Cado Belle came together in October 1974, the musicians having previously played in two local bands, Joe Cool and Up. They assembled for a jam session at band member Colin Tully's flat in Gibson Street, Glasgow, and realised just how much potential they had. Their first gig came in early January 1975, at Greenock's Regency Bar. Right from the start, they were determined to become self-sufficient when it came to songwriting. By that April they were attracting the interest of London-based journalists. Melody Maker's Ed Jones, catching them in action at the Burns Howff, in Glasgow, one Saturday lunchtime, described them as 'one of the most promising bands I've seen in many a day'. Read more: Cado Belle, he went on, 'are new to most of the audience, but they sit up and take notice as guitarist Andy Darby's tasty lines interweave with the mellow sadness of Colin Tully's tenor sax. The rhythm section of Gavin Hodgson on bass and David Roy on drums link up with Stuart MacKillop's keyboards to provide, in a set made up almost entirely of their own songs, an ambitious springboard for the vocal mastery of singer Maggie Reilly'. To Jones, Reilly was indeed something special: 'A diminutive package of funk with a curtain of long dark hair and bar-room queen clothes, she can holler a blues with the same surprising maturity and authority she shows improvising on a mellow ballad. There are occasional echoes of Kiki Dee, Maggie Bell and Joni Mitchell. On one wordless elegy, her scat yearnings bring an undeniable lump to the journalistic throat. If there's any justice, the world will be hearing more of her'. There was a distinct buzz around Cado Belle, thanks in part to repeated showcase gigs in London venues such as Dingwalls, and record company A&R staff began sounding them out. The band signed a recording deal with the Anchor Records label in March 1976. The producer was one Keith Olsen, who was big news at the time. A few years earlier he had produced Buckingham Nicks, a folk-rock album by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, which did next to nothing upon its release. Later, however, he played one of its tracks, Frozen Love, to Mick Fleetwood, drummer with, and co-founder of, Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood and his bandmates liked what they heard, and invited the duo to join them. Buckingham and Nicks revitalised the Mac, and the upshot was the Olsen-produced 1975 album, Fleetwood Mac, a soft-rock, multi-million-selling classic which contained such hit songs as Rhiannon and Landslide. 'After that", says Maggie, "Keith was looking for a project, and Anchor told him, 'We've got a few bands coming through'. He came with his girlfriend to see us in London, in this really skanky club in [London's] Swiss Cottage - I can visualise it now - and he saw the band and loved what we did, and said he would really like to work with us'. Olsen, however, was in for something of a cultural awakening when he joined Cado Belle at a recording studio in Wales. 'It was in the middle of nowhere and everywhere we went in anywhere, people started talking in Welsh', recalls Maggie. 'We started feeling like we were in one of those weird films, like we were going to end up murdered!' Olsen, accustomed to life in the Los Angeles fast lane, was like a fish out of water in the rural tranquility of Wales and, later, the Cotswolds, where further recording took place in the scorching summer of 1976. Maggie remembers him 'spending many hours in a car on the motorway going up and down to London to keep up his energy'. As the countdown continued to the album's release, critics continued to shower praise on the Glasgow band. One college newspaper critic, reviewing a gig at Hammersmith's Red Cow venue in June 1976, declared: "If handled by the right producer, Cado Belle could have a debut on their hands to equal [Average White Band's] first Atlantic recording. See this band now, when it's cheap". Cado Belle's album remains a splendid achievement – 10 assured, immaculate tracks that display to striking effect the band's collective musical abilities and Maggie's distinctive voice. It really deserved to chart, but sadly didn't, even though it it did attract favourable reviews, and was received much airtime on Radio Clyde. John Peel was another fan. In the meantime the band continued to hit the gig circuit, honing their sound and expertise. In October 1976 they supported the US country-rock band Poco; a press ad at the time described Cado Belle as 'totally unknown and absolutely incredible'. In Jim Wilkie's 1991 book, Blue Suede Brogans: Scenes from the Secret Life of Scottish Rock Music, Alan Darby reflects that in the wake of the album, 'the punk thing happened, the record company went broke, and we had internal problems. Perhaps if we had gone to America, it might have lasted longer'. (In the same book Gillian Maxwell recalls being impressed by Cado Belle when she was a student at Glasgow University, in the days before she managed Deacon Blue in Glasgow. If they had been around in the Eighties, she told Wilkie, 'they would definitely have been a major group'). Today, Maggie Reilly puts it thus: 'The whole punk thing came in and everybody was vying for Billy Idol and the Damned and all of that. They were published by own publisher. We were still bustling along. 'Anchor wanted us to release [album track] Airport Shutdown as a single, and I was in tears about it, because I thought it was a great song, but I disagreed, because I thought it was the least of the great songs we had on the album. I wanted something like Rocked to Stony Silence, something like that, because I felt they were really powerful. Anchor weren't very pleased with that'. The band was disenchanted with various aspects of their involvement with Anchor Records, including the release of a 1977, four-track EP that included two (rather fine) cover versions – one of Brenton Wood's 1967 hit, Gimme Little Sign, and the other of It's Over, by Boz Scaggs's 1976 album, Silk Degrees. 'We just felt that we had all these great songs of our own', says Maggie. 'We had loads of songs and we couldn't understand why we were doing cover versions'. Read more On the Record The band also wanted to work more intuitively in the studio than Anchor's laid-down measures allowed. 'I was elected – or I elected myself, I don't remember how it went – and I went down to London and spoke to Ian Ralfini, the head of the company,' she says. She told him that none of the band was happy with the way things were. 'Please let us go', Maggie told Ralfini. After a discussion he agreed that Cado Belle could walk away. When she returned to Scotland, the band was relieved that their future was now in their own hands. They broke up, though, in 1978. That January, they appeared alongside two other Scottish acts - Gallagher and Lyle, and the Average White Band - on TV's Old Grey Whistle Test. After the band's demise the musicians all went on to greater things. Stuart worked with Abba, Diana Ross, Tina Turner and Rod Stewart; Maggie sang with Mike Oldfield (hers are the lead vocals on Oldfield's international chart-topping 1983 hit, Moonlight Shadow) and she co-wrote several songs with the man who had been responsible for Tubular Bells. She has also performed duets with David Gilmour and Jack Bruce - former members of, respectively, Pink Floyd and Cream - and has collaborated with the goth band, Sisters of Mercy. In 1992 she had a European hit with a single, Everytime We Touch, which she co-wrote with Stuart. In 2005 it was turned into a high-energy smash by a German dance outfit, Cascada; later still, it was picked up by the marching band at Duke University, North Carolina, as part of the pre-match entertainment at basketball games there. She also co-wrote Family Man, the Hall and Oates hit. Colin Tully, who died in June 2021, composed music for the Bill Forsyth film, Gregory's Girl, played sax on What's Another Year?, Johnny Logan's Eurovision winner, and played with John Martyn. Alan Darby, who died in February 2023, was a brilliantly talented guitarist who performed with both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, toured as second guitar player in the Eric Clapton band, and took part in sessions with such names as Rod Stewart and Van Morrison. Maggie today has her own band, touring and releasing solo records. Stuart MacKillop has been her constant musical partner since the days of Cado Belle. What does she think of the album now? 'I don't listen to it often', she says, 'but funnily enough we've been going through a bunch of old DATs, old tapes, that Stuart has found, lurking. We never actually noted at the time what was on them. 'We've been listening to them and there's a whole bunch of things that we made demos of that we never actually recorded. We used to work lot in Brian Young's CaVa studio, back in the day, and Brian said he'd found all those old bits and pieces. He said, you never did anything else with them, you just made the demos. Stuart and I have now been talking about recording some of these. 'I'm going on tour to Germany at the end of April and when we get back there will be a five-day period with my band. So I think we're going to record some of these old songs from the perspective of today, from now'. *
