Thanks to the labile ways of the nostalgia machine, with the likes of Radio 2, Heart and the like deciding what gets to be remembered (why else mainstream 'forgotten 80s' projects that cover such obscure gems as "Cruel Summer" or "Let's Go All the Way"?), it would seem many in Britain are decided on Eddy Grant as something of a lightweight pop-reggae hit maker from the 80s who works best on the radio or compilations during the summer. “Electric Avenue”, “I Don’t Wanna Dance” and “Gimme Hope Jo’anna”: these are apparently all perfect to slot in between “Don’t Turn Around” and “Rat in Mi Kitchen”. Some will also point out that “he used to be in the Equals... You know, ‘Baby Come Back’...” These songs, for ease of convenience, are so often branded as reggae despite them mostly drawing from other music on Grant's antenna. "Baby Come Back", meanwhile, was good old beat music with a persuasive undertow of ska, but Pato Banton’s dancehall version has infiltrated public memory. And never mind that “Jo’anna” was an angry anti-apartheid record. A wider context on what Grant does is never really provided.
Unhelpfully, radio typically avoids Grant’s first UK solo hit, “Living on the Frontline”, a song of international unrest that, suitably, was heard and reacted to internationally. It watches the world from a nervous-to-say-the-least disposition, perched at the edge, the frontline, but unable to intervene in the gang violence in Africa, the drug dealing and corruption he isn't quite touching but is there right before him. He incessantly repeats "Oh mama, mama, you got me living in the frontline" like someone pacing round and round in circles in either a search for clarity or, conversely, to delay the inevitable (because shit won't do; "Me no want to take cocaine, oh, to block off my brain"). It was very anomalous within the 1979 charts (where it became the best song to ever peak at number 11 – honest, I did a top 100 list) and the discos that helped it become popular to begin with (via, as you might expect, DJs like Chris Hill).
But it got there because it was wise enough to marry its blurry distress with a hell of a paranoid groove. It drones for six minutes over a sparse electronic rhythm that hints at reggae and disco but isn't completely either, leaves its creaky spaces to a doleful organ, a bare guitar solo like the era's arena rock lost in a fog far from home and defeated doo-wop chants, and marks each bar (each cycle) with a squidgy, proto-303 "wab wab wab wab" that is acid house ten years before acid house. It sounded positively leftfield (said Smash Hits' Cliff White, and yes, the Wikipedia article was my work) and, much like Hot Chocolate's "Put Your Love in Me", Heatwave's "Put the Word Out" or the Real Thing's "Can You Feel the Force?", it (in its own inimitable way) did as much to build pathways from disco to the future of British music almost innocuously. Maybe you can DANCE your paranoia away, it seemed to suggest. Of course Chris Hill was wanted to release it on Ensign (already home to Light of the World at this point).
And yet, despite being recorded in Stamford Hill, neither the song, nor its parent album Walking on Sunshine, were originally intended for release in Britain. Grant's public profile had swindled since he left the Equals in 1972 and he subsequently became an unlikely musical entrepreneur (the full extent as to why will become obvious later on in this piece). Chiefly important was establishing Ice Records, a groundbreaking, proto-world label dedicated primarily to a smorgasbord of Caribbean music (typically artists produced by Grant himself) which has never had its due. The label was hugely popular in the Caribbean and also parts of Africa, particularly Nigeria, and he catered the release of his second solo record, 1977's Message Man, specifically to them. Like Walking on Sunshine, it was pure hybrid-pop, absorbing and repurposing Grant's many tastes that were too 'fringe' here (a natural development on his time in the Equals, who jumped styles pretty rapidly and as such have never been easily categorised); "Hello Africa", carried over from his eponymous debut and cited as its most revelatory track (insofar as his biographers consider it a lightbulb moment in what was not yet named soca music), laid out where his heart was now laying.
But Walking on Sunshine, his 1978 third record, was cut in its tracks when the Nigerian government banned the importation of records. By that point it had already gone Gold, and Grant was lumbered with a further 10,000 copies he couldn't dish out (his whole business went no further than London). So he sent them to local record stores and that's how, pretty quickly in fact, the hip priests spotted its vivacious heatwave of a sleeve poking out (a very reggae-looking design, it must be said). "Frontline" was the favourite among its curious buyers and made its procession to London nightlife from there. The album was then re-released properly in the Britain, the US and other major markets in 1979, a full year on from its first release, via a deal with Epic, and this is more or less how Grant's 1980s second coming began, making dance-pop records that are too alive with the idea of possibility to concretely be any one 'thing'.
Walking on Sunshine lights Grant's mentality clearly enough. Almost every song holds onto a single chord or two, giving his every sound enough room to breathe and move. And yet despite the hit single, the album flopped (commercially anyway – I reckon the weeklies gave it the time of day, at least before forgetting about it forever). Given that people were already decided on Grant as 'reggae', and that there weren't exactly a lot of reggae on the albums chart, perhaps the perception was that "Frontline" was a one-off, a future classic that, like "Silly Games" (which was on the chart at the same time), made more sense to the wider British public as 'pop' – not quite the album reggae Penny Reel would be turning music heads onto. And yet within a year, the Clash were recording his old Equals side "Police on My Back", and "Electric Avenue" wasn't far behind, so Grant's time was coming. For those who actually heard the rest of Walking on Sunshine, there was enough evidence as to why it should be.
"Frontline" itself is half-halted on the album by Grant's freaky, wordless back-and-forth chorale section, a devious response to the world's systematic self-destruction. This begins "The Frontline Symphony", essentially a seven-minute coda to the song proper (meaning the same groove plays for 13 minutes. Are we sure this isn't disco? But for as long as things are heading into oblivion it could go on forever). The basic rhythm, wubs and everything, is kept as intact as a doomsday metronome, except pervading is the ominous, synthesised orchestra playing a disquieted symphony – classical music is now in Grant's vision, except he's not conjuring anything but his own continued agitation, so it's hardly Tomita's Snowflakes are Dancing. Regardless, as a seven minute prog-electronic piece, grand compositionally but spacious sonically, it envelopes past, present and future – looking back to Wendy Carlos' Moog cantatas, to the present day's minimal wave, and, via what remains of the first "Frontline", to the future's Phuture. But beyond all it sounds like Jerry Dammers locking heads with all of these things (it could practically pass as part of the gothic, end-of-all-life-itself Muzak on the latter's More Specials. 'Easy listening' as timebomb).
Suitably, there are no "Still Life"-style sweeps at its climax; instead the symphony has been eaten up, the whole thing rotting into an orange hum of spitting noise as if finally asphyxiated. The "Frontline" pair are positioned at the end of side one, so with that at its end you'd think side two would have no choice but to go somewhere else. But the only other song on side one – the opening title track – is really what balances "Frontline" and the rest of the album. "Living isn't everything," he sings, "but you know the feeling love can bring". His apprehension is there, but life will proceed. It's all about the reward in that uphill climb (quite literally; "Lead me to the mountain top, and we'll work until it's time to stop"), the will to go on, and to will others on ("I got to tell you that you doing fine, walking on sunshine"). It's as if "Frontline", as a hit single, leered concerned listeners to the album and having got them at that point Grant then instils all the necessary hope in them about things moving again.
Rather befittingly, "Walking on Sunshine" ended up the album's best known song, thanks to Arthur Baker unexpectedly breaking into the top five of 1983 (his year of all years) with his Peech Boys-inspired dub-garage-electro recasting (and I'll remind you how the primary influence, Baker's friend Larry Levan, played "Frontline" at the Paradise Garage pretty regularly). Part of what Baker heard in the track is it's easy dance groove, but it is maybe surprising that Grant's original might even be the one that better anticipates house; his slightly Latin rhythmic interplay is not miles off "Girls Out on the Floor", nor the underwater guitar line and mid-song bloops from mid-90s one-offs. But the almost Mutant Disco-like horns (which star in their own lengthy call-and-response section, as if almost jazz) underline how the song could easily have come out on ZE. At the very least, it almost invents Liquid Liquid. And as Record Mirror's James Hamilton noted at the time via his observation of an "almost Hi-Tension power", there are parallels with the then-nascent Britfunk, its energetic remodelling of disco-funk to a socially aware young Britain (and it was a genre with a lot of grassroots, much like Grant out here).
If my discussion of side one hasn't make it obvious enough, I consider Walking on Sunshine one of the most innovative and quietly impactful dance albums of its time. Some (not me) consider the second side to be weaker thematically (what, because it's about happiness found? People can be so boring), but Eddy's masterful ear for bringing together almost incongruent components until they've formed a unique sound continues. And really, "My Love, My Love" is not only some light relief after "The Frontline Symphony" but the album's best song and frankly one of the sweetest love songs I have or will ever hear. Essentially cross-breed soca pop, the strength in the joy its exudes is aided by its cheapness (that chintzy drum machine and squiggly organ playing to their hearts' content, like Timmy Thomas finding happiness!), and he sings the whole song like love is an epiphany he's only just had for the first time – how else could someone arrive at a chorus like the one it has? It absolutely refuses to keep a lid on itself, and is all the more loveable for it.
"Just Imagine I'm Loving You" is a tad more shaded – he's apart from his lover, with whom he wasn't treating as he should. Her mother still isn't keen on him but the girl'll 'just imagine' a happier time with him in her dreams as her pillow. It's all a little unsteady, so requires the audacious, watery arrangement Grant gives it, again on the dub-disco axis but this time a moonlit sway (the main bassline curiously reminds me of "Annie I'm Not Your Daddy", while the waterlily synths ensure even the mid-range sounds translucent). It's perhaps surprising that the track closest to lovers rock, and to conventional reggae, isn't a love song at all but "Dancing in Guyana", a slowing of the pace as Eddy reflects on his native country during a trip to Georgetown to see his girlfriend. Guyana is a place of animation ("they all say that's the way") that he's temporarily putting aside in order to put it into perspective, and how it seeps into not only the rest of the record but Grant's whole career. The castanets particularly jump out of the mix (as they always seem to in pop, cf. "World Leader Pretend"), but if they remind me of anything in that regard its, of all things, the almost free-form hand drums in "Zabadak!" by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, whose own globetrotting hits (that among them) can be partly seen as a precedent for what Grant was always trying to do.
"Say I Love You", the album's most popular song in Nigeria, is one final giddy love song to wrap up many of the record's routes. There is calypso and there is funk in its Rhodes organ and a lot of gradually-unfurling ecstasy (his many overdubbed adlibs and James Brown-esque whoas – there is no mistaking the genuine jubilance). Strange that the album doesn't end there, then, but with the shadowy and enigmatic "We Are", which exhibits a quietude so pronounced you may not notice it is easily the record's fastest song. A dolorous rock guitar, not unlike that of "Frontline", is the only really accent colouring. Otherwise, its minimal funk with a repeating, unifying chant: "We are the sunshine, we are the light, we are the love in our hearts, we are the land". But it's so far back in the mix and drenched with so much echo its ungraspable, a thought that's still just over the horizon. Much of the 'song' is dedicated to wordless vocal drift from the chant, a rather sinister cloud in the sky. So the determination of the beat is you figure why we will get 'there'.
As a marriage of dancefloor funk with a social chant it develops on what Brass Construction proposed as much as a lot of Britfunk did (and as a fusion of dance music and a uniting chant it again sees house on the horizon – imagine the lyric as a bit of nightclub or rave euphoria in sample form), but what of all the dust in its receptors? Slow it down and you might even have something close to Massive Attack (the vocals give me the same uneasiness as the post-Whitfield strings on Blue Lines). It ultimately is one of the many ways in which Walking on Sunshine was without real precedent.
But there's something about it I've ignored. Grant played almost every instrument himself – apart from a bit of percussion on a few songs and the “Loving You” piano – and did it all in his own studio, with himself as engineer and producer, for his own label. He even had the record pressed at his own plant. This makes one want to put him in the same lineage as Roy Wood or Todd Rundgren – one-man-band studio boffins who saw pop as a mapless journey, to reshape history and history-to-come as they saw fit (the extent Eddy went, taking care of business as well, has parallels in one end of punk but also today's Bandcamp pop). With Walking on Sunshine his experimental spirit caught up with his pop pedigree and burst out in all new hues and styles. Think of 'anything goes' fusions between Caribbean music and the rest of pop to come, like Dennis Bovell's Brain Damage (1981), not to mention the concurrent meld of reggae into post-punk, and it seems particularly potent. How it has remained so overlooked may never be too clear (as if the world wasn't yet willing to catch up itself; 'walk on, sunshine'), but it is among the greatest albums of its decade – relevant, inviting music that constructs its own connections to what lay before it, casting its sun on you.
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