You gotta be bold: In celebration of UK soul

As a new wave of soul singers continues to rise, it’s time the originators of this hugely successful genre, from Des’Ree to Gabrielle, got their flowers. Tochi Imo talks to The Real Thing, Jazzie B and Lemar about UK soul’s evolution, the struggle to break through, and their influence today

Clockwise from top left: Gabrielle, Greentea Peng, Lemar, and Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B (Getty/Shutterstock)

It’s usual to be taken aback at The Masked Singer’s big reveals, but the season that aired in February this year was a much-needed reminder of one of the most distinctive voices in British music history. Under the Harlequin costume, a singer with crimped hair draped over one eye showed herself to the audience as the words “British pop legend” flashed across the screen. It was UK soul queen Gabrielle.

The musician’s appearance on the TV show sparked a wave of nostalgia for soul lovers, who remembered albums such as 1993’s Dreams and 2000’s Rise (both No 1s) with misty eyes. But it also brought Gabrielle music to a new generation of fans. Together they helped propel her seventh studio album, Do It Again, to the top 10 in March this year – her highest-charting album since her greatest hits volume in 2002.

It’s a familiar story: the UK has countless exceptional soul artists across the decades – from Gabrielle to Des’ree and from Shola Ama to Omar – but many of them haven’t managed to maintain success, receive widespread recognition or enjoy long-term industry support. Kevin LeGendre wrote in The Independent in 2015 that Black artists had struggled to compete with white major label soul-pop. For many, UK soul is now synonymous with artists such as Sam Smith, Amy Winehouse and Adele.

For millennials and younger generations, UK soul is now more synonymous with artists such as Sam Smith, Amy Winehouse and Adele. But as the discourse around Black British music has grown louder over the past five years, with grime, drill, and UK rap albums dominating the charts, there’s never been a better time to celebrate the genre’s Black British pioneers. Especially as a new confidence in soul music is emerging once more, and the likes of Jorja Smith, Tiana Major9, Joel Culpepper, Children of Zeus and Greentea Peng – whose debut album is released on Friday – continue to rise.

The UK’s soul history dates back to the Sixties. Back then, a young generation of music lovers enjoyed the Black sound of soul music that came from the US, often via US Air Bases dotted around the country. In some places, that passion grew into a scene dubbed “Northern Soul”, where dancers would perform gymnastic moves in clubs to the tougher, underground soul records instead of the softer, Motown-style sound. Britain produced a small number of soul acts during the early days, but the most successful artists of the time were predominantly white, and “blue-eyed soul” artists like Tom Jones and Dusty Springfield reigned supreme.

When The Real Thing released their single “You To Me Are Everything” in 1976, however, the Liverpool-based group showed that the UK could create classics in the genre too. They held the No 1 spot for three weeks and were one of the most, if not the most successful Black acts in the UK during the 1970s. But today they are often called words like “overlooked” and “underrated”.

While their American counterparts had huge chart success that lasted decades, The Real Thing didn't experience the same. After releasing a few more hit singles, they failed to again puncture the top 10, which Amoo says was partly due to British audiences being more comfortable with soul artists who weren’t Black. “If a white band had the hits we did, they would’ve been propelled to megastardom and that’s the sad truth,” founding member of the band, Chris Amoo, tells The Independent.

Amoo also explains the differences between the UK and American music industry at the time, and the way that the intricacies of soul vocals were less respected in this country. “I remember doing this great ongoing adlib at the end of one of our songs,” he reminisces. “I was influenced by Luther Vandross and the like, but I was told at the BBC to cut that off because it wouldn’t get the radio plays here. In the US, you had to do that extra stuff, go that extra mile with the runs and the harmonies to get plays. It’s just not the same here.”

Listening to the single, however, you may be unable to pinpoint anything distinctly British. “We didn’t have the privilege of working on our own sound,” Amoo says. “We were trying to mimic the sound of American soul music because that’s what people wanted to hear back then, and nobody can really deny that.”

The ceiling for UK soul artists did, however, appear to shatter during the Eighties, with the stardom and international acclaim of Sade Adu. One of Britain’s best-selling female singers, Sade was powered by vocals that were as velvety as they were understated. Her 1984 debut album, Diamond Life, reached the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 in America and No 2 on the UK album chart, and her sound continued to define the decade.

From then into the Nineties, the British music scene experienced a soul renaissance. A flurry of soul artists and groups such as Eternal, Mica Paris, and Shola Ama emerged, who embraced pop music hooks while sticking to soul’s smooth core themes of love, healing and encouragement. Then, when south London singer Des'ree released “You Gotta Be” in 1994, at the age of 26, it became one of the definitive soul-pop songs of the decade. Its instructive lyrics – “you gotta be bad, you gotta be bold, you gotta be wiser” – became an uplifting mantra for tackling life’s challenges. Nearly three decades later, those words still ring true for British soul artists.

The Nineties’ British soul rebirth wasn’t without the eccentric London-based collective that let the world see sound-system culture in a whole new light. Soul II Soul kickstarted UK soul’s comeback with the global hit “Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)” in 1989, and showed that Black British stars could be successful without having to mimic American tropes. Jazzie B of Soul II Soul recalls how they were among the first Black British musicians to have visibility on a global scale. “We were part of a community that made us what we were,” he says in an interview. “Nobody was making music like ours. Nobody looked like us. Dark-skinned, dreadlocks. You see it more today, but there wasn’t anything like that then.”

At the time, says Jazzie B, Black music was popular and yet many Black people weren’t allowed into UK clubs and venues. “There were a lot of gigs we couldn’t get into,” he says. “In those days, there used to be a quota of how many Black people could come in and perform. Even when they were tearing the a** out of our music, only a certain amount of Black people could get into these venues.”

Soul II Soul DJ Jazzie B performing on Bestival’s Castle stage in 2017 (Getty)

But Soul II Soul started to change all that. One of the collective’s key contributions included their popular club night at The Fridge in Brixton, south London, which was a lifeline for Black communities and helped to change the nightlife landscape.

Despite his band’s name, soul seems to be more of a state of mind for Jazzie B. He says that defining music as being country-specific betrays its originality. “We fought hard to not be pigeonholed, to not be categorised,” he says. “Artists here tend to box themselves as ‘UK this, UK that, UK Soul, UK Garage’, but we wanted to be known for what we were making, not where we were making it. Adding ‘UK’ to the front implies that it’s somebody else’s and we’re making our version of it, but our music was just ours.”

In the 2000s, soul-skewered singles continued to chart high, and singers such as Lemar, Beverley Knight, and Corinne Bailey Rae were everywhere – but some groups still had a hard time finding acceptance. London neo-soul duo Floetry, for example, moved to America after being rejected by music industry professionals in the UK. Most notably, the duo’s single “Butterflies” was given a miss by labels in Britain but was embraced by Michael Jackson, who went on to record the single for his 2001 album Invincible.

What’s more, in the UK, singers increasingly had to look instead to TV talent shows and the accessible music that comes with it in order to go mainstream. “Soul and blues had a good period [in the UK] before my time, but it’s definitely not as easy as if you do pop,” says London-born singer Lemar. Following his popularity on BBC’s talent programme Fame Academy in 2002, Lemar brought out his debut album Dedicated, which went double platinum in the UK a year later. “My music has always been soulful, but more so because of my voice [than the sound of the music]” he continues. “Soul music here [in the UK] has always had to have a pop slant to it because it’s the nation’s genre of choice.”

Lemar performing at the London Palladium in 2015 (Getty)

Lemar says it was difficult to get exposure as a soul artist in the UK, and so the popularity of Fame Academy was key in helping to propel him into a bigger arena. “I’d been making music for eight years prior to that,” he says. “I had support from Choice FM and I’d been doing gigs, but an artist needs an audience. If nobody knows you’re doing it, they can’t support it, but Fame Academy allowed me to have that. Where else was the public going to hear me every Saturday for three months?”

One of the most notable and distinctive elements of UK soul is the range and number of Black women within it. Up against stars like Caron Wheeler, Des’ree, Heather Small of M People and Beverley Knight, no other genre – with the exception of R&B – can comfortably claim to have such a significant number of successful Black female artists. But it does appear that, following the soul renaissance of the Nineties and early 2000s, many of these women were cast into the shadows. Unless you won a telly talent contest like Alexandra Burke and Leona Lewis, it was rare to gain national recognition. Many soul artists were still releasing music but they were doing so independently, without the backing of a major label or major budget.

We are yet to see another genre that allows Black women to take the lead as they did during the best parts of this soul golden age. The industry’s lack of support for (and narrow view of) Black female artists was recently highlighted in Little Mix star Leigh-Anne Pinnock’s recent Race, Pop & Power documentary on BBC Three. In it, a number of Black British women vocalists – including Sugababes’ Keisha Buchanan and X Factor winner Burke – discuss the difficulties they’ve had in navigating a predominantly white musical landscape. “When I was 15,” says Burke, “they [music management companies] said: ‘We’ve got one Black person, we can’t have another.’”

Today, it does at least feel as if things are changing. Soul’s influence has permeated everywhere and can be heard across today’s musical landscape, both within and outside of the genre. Contemporary artists such as Nao, Michael Kiwanuka and Lianne La Havas are showcasing the fluidity of soul and soulful vocals, and meshing those styles with jazz, R&B and beyond. And as new-school soul artists continue to resist typecasting, and embrace independence and interpret soul in their own ways, hopefully the music world can be reminded of the original artists who pioneered the wave, and offer them the same acknowledgement – and headline festival slots – they deserve.