The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah by Benjamin Zephaniah

Author:Benjamin Zephaniah [Zephaniah, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner UK

I was soon approached by record labels asking me to record a whole album, or LP, as they were called back then. The biggest offer came from EMI. One of their A&R people came to see me. He offered me a lot of money but he wasn’t sure how to deal with me; he said they wanted to give me studio machinery, like drum machines, and I was to go away and work on some tracks, which would be recorded later, but he didn’t seem to know what my poetry was about. I had the feeling that someone had sat at a desk, read about me and sent this man out to offer me a deal.

There were other offers, but one label stood out above the others. This was Upright Records. They were probably the smallest label that had approached me, but I immediately took to the owner – a bearded family man called Bill Gilliam. He ran two labels, Upright Records and Workers’ Playtime, which had names contracted to it like Dead on Arrival (aka DOA), Jello Biafra and the reggae duo Laurel and Hardy. Bill offered me a deal and, to everyone’s surprise, I chose him over the others. I liked the intimacy of the label, and I liked the other bands on it, plus Bill had been watching me as I’d developed and we had a similar political outlook. Although he was offering the smallest financial deal, he seemed to be the most sympathetic to my ideas and what I was doing.

When it came to recording the album, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to use two producers so we could work as a team. I had never heard of anyone doing this before. If an album was credited with two producers, one of them would be a band member, but I had this idea that I would bring people together on the project to move away from the common reggae sound that was around at the time.

I approached Spartacus R and asked him to work with me on the album with another producer, and he said, ‘Absolutely not.’ He said he wanted to do it on his own or he would walk away. I tried to convince him to stay on board but he refused to work with anyone else, so I told him to walk away. He then told me that if he wasn’t working on the album, then I couldn’t use the track ‘Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death’, at which point I laughed, but so did he, telling me that the track belonged to him.

I did some research and found that he was partly right. This was a lesson I learned the hard way, and I tell young people about it as often as I can. How it happened was that when John Peel asked me to do the session for him, Spartacus R was producing the track and was therefore also taking care of the paperwork. This was at a time when, for the first time in my life, I was making a lot of money.

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