In a celebrity-obsessed culture, what space can an artist have who not only doesn’t want to be famous but who, at best, gives up everything? Definitely a secluded space in which the little music he recorded has, for the fans, a fetishistic value.
The expression “cult artist” is overused and devoid of meaning, but it is worth brushing up on for 56-year-old British musician Lewis Taylor. After his debut, in the mid-eighties, as a psychedelic guitarist, influenced by Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart and Yes, in 1996 Taylor transformed, for his debut album, into a soul crooner, with a phrasing reminiscent of Al Green and Marvin Gaye and a repertoire of songs ingeniously built on different overlapping guitar parts. His style is elusive: neo soul? Mid time? Trip-hop? The complexities of prog rock and psychedelia are still perceived but very subtle, as in filigree, and the pieces of Lewis Taylor, his first album, are rooted in a careful study of blues rather than rnb and soul. It is not the usual white rhythm’n’blues, perhaps cleverly hybridized with pop: it is something more complex that finds attentive ears among those black musicians who, on the other side of the ocean, were creating the sound of nu soul: D ‘Angelo, Maxwell and Erykah Badu. Lewis Taylor it is perhaps the only album produced by a white man who, in those years, found its place in the canon of black music in the United States. In a 2005 essay, African American academic Mark Anthony Neal includes Lewis Taylor among those “funky white boys” who, alongside “honorary soul sisters” like Teena Marie, have organically contributed to the development of the black musical language.
The peculiarity of this very rich, layered album of neo soul, as well as music, is also content, atmosphere: the songs of Lewis Taylor are filled with a sense of doubt, of nervous uncertainty: “Tell me what we will do / How will we manage” are the first words he sings in Lucky, the opening piece. Over the course of the album Taylor manages to modulate his supple tenor voice through pieces that see him as shy, vindictive, aggressive, childish or scared, often in just a couple of lines. Bittersweetwhich rnb singer Aaliyah had defined simply as “perfect”, has the dramatic incipit of a Portishead song and develops in the confession of a man trapped in a wrong relationship that he cannot break.
The title of each song is made up of a single word: almost a key to enter a world of intricate musical inventions and equally intricate paranoia. He doesn’t have to be a simple man, Lewis Taylor. And it must not have been easy being Sabina Smyth, his then partner, manager and producer. In the notes of the album Smyth appears as an “executive producer” but, as Taylor explained in a long and painful interview in 2006 on the Soul Jones website, “He was with me all the time, in contact with the pathetic scripts of my artistic anxiety: and it wasn’t a walk in the park ”. The artist admits that the role of the partner was much more than that of an executive producer: “Sabina was involved in everything: in the writing, in the arrangements, in the sounds and in the production. She didn’t get the space she deserved in the credits because I was insecure, immature and selfish. Today I can admit that the role of executive producer that I gave her was, if I wanted to be indulgent, paternalistic ”.
Lewis Taylor’s album is appreciated by critics and insiders but does not sell a copy. The label doesn’t know how to handle it: at first it tries awkwardly to push him like a lone genius like Prince, but his music is too dark, paranoid and above all, deadly sin in record marketing, there are no hits on the record. D’Angelo invites him to New York to produce with him the sequel to that sudden success that was his Brown sugar. He leaves, but after four days locked in a hotel alone without receiving any phone call from the artist’s management, he returns to London without having done anything. In 2006, after a career in fits and starts (three other official albums and a lost album, recovered in 2004) Lewis Taylor decides to shut everything down. In January 2006 he performs at the Bowery Ballroom in New York and the show, in reviews, is hailed as a great comeback when it is a definitive farewell to the stage. In June of the same year he reappears with the name of Andrew Taylor as musical director and bassist for the Gnarls Barkley and then makes all traces of him disappear. Yet, in the meantime, his first hit had also arrived: in November 2006 Robbie Williams brings a song of him to pop success, Lovelight. The producer, ironically, is Mark Ronson, a sort of Lewis Taylor who made it. In 2016, in that difficult interview mentioned above, Taylor tries to explain what happened to him: “I don’t have much to say. I still love music, but it no longer defines me as a person and I find this to be much healthier for me. The most important thing I have done in recent years has been to continue living “.
PS This summer a new album of his was released, silently and without any commercials.
Lewis Taylor
Lewis Taylor
Island, 1996