‘Black musicians in their own country were not listened to’

The history of the British funk and soul band Cymande is one of hope, success, deception, oblivion, reappraisal and a second life. In the first half of the 1970s, Cymande, consisting of six British migrant children from the Caribbean, released three albums, which did well especially in the United States. But in their own country the band had so little success that Cymande called it quits in 1974. ‘Ho ho, we never really stopped, we just went and did something else in between,’ says guitarist Patrick Patterson (72), who founded Cymande in 1971 with his friend Steve Scipio.

That ‘a while’ lasted about forty years, but Cymande has been active again since 2012. And now there’s a nice documentary, Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande, created by Tim Mackenzie-Smith, which premiered at the US SXSW Festival in March of this year. The accompanying shows gave the band enthusiastic reactions and various performances, such as this weekend during the Into The Great Wide Open festival on Vlieland.

“Yes, that’s great, but we knew we were good. And also that we would come back one day,” Patterson says via Zoom from Florida, where he combines “business with visiting friends.”

Dignity

Just like bassist Scipio, he entered the legal profession in the 1970s, they did well and both moved to Anguilla, an island near Sint Maarten in the Antilles. ‘We were not taken seriously in our own country at the time. So we put Cymande on a break to do something else. We wanted to build our own existence, and if that didn’t work with our music, then with something else. One set up an electrical company and we went straight. We never considered disbanding Cymande and claiming benefits, which was far below our dignity.’

The word dignity often comes up with Patterson. ‘Dignity is for me the key word in Cymande history, or rather the deprivation of it. We, black musicians, were not listened to at all in our own country. Then we would come back from an American tour, we would have been the support act for Al Green in front of 30,000 people, and then we couldn’t even get into the smallest of rooms here. Radio and television were not waiting for us in Britain in the early 1970s. It was tight for British black musicians.’

That would change when Bob Marley broke through from the same Caribbean in the late 1970s. ‘But reggae was not that well known when we started, not even in London. You did see rastas and Cymande also knew Jamaican reggae influences, but it wasn’t much.’

From the outset, the band brought a beautiful-sounding symbiosis of jazz, funk and soul, live and on record. Warm, rhythmically smooth, with room for long drawn-out Patterson guitar solos, as in deafone of the prize songs of the classic debut album.

Connections in the US

Cymande owed a lot to producer John Schroeder who saw the men play in 1971 and well wanted to record a record with them. ‘He had the right contacts in America and before we knew it we had an album on an American label, and we were allowed to play there too.’

That was a present for Patterson and the rest of the band. ‘Perhaps those two tours were the best weeks of our lives. First as a support act for Al Green, and then as the first British band to play for a week at the Apollo in the New York district of Harlem, as support act for Jerry Butler. We had never seen audiences dance so well to our music.’

But then they returned to cold London in 1973 and nothing seemed to have changed. “The media still pretended we didn’t exist. Black music did really well, but only the American one. O’Jays, Stevie Wonder, Three Degrees, that work. Nobody wanted to know that there were also Brits who could make good black music.’

Did Cymande quit after three albums in four years out of frustration? ‘No, we just saw it as a logical development. We had been running into all kinds of blockades in England for years. In essence, the entire music establishment was just as racist as the police force and the rest of the government. We learned to deal with that early on.

‘Okay, they didn’t want our music? Now let’s do something else. Cymande’s time was yet to come.’

Pioneering work

What Patterson and the other band members didn’t know is that in the meantime, in New York clubs, the DJs have their number brac had discovered. The five minute long track had a great funky break that you could stretch endlessly by sticking it to the same break you picked from another copy of the same record. By numbers like brac DJs developed the endless disco mix and laid the foundations for breakdance and hip-hop.

‘Actually, it only became clear to me that our music was pioneering when we saw the documentary. In it, all those DJs from then and now who used our music as a tool for their set have their say.’

Samples from brac and The Message popped up in hip-hop songs by De La Soul, The Fugees and MC Solaar. ‘Our children came up with it, we didn’t know anything about it.’

That Cymande’s records in the late eighties and early nineties were much sought after by British DJs in the so-called weird groovescene, Patterson knew that. ‘Hip-hop wasn’t so much in Britain at that time. There was a lot of dancing in trendy clubs to old, obscure soul. The lesser known James Brown tracks and funk from us too. Rare groove was the hippest dance music before the breakthrough of hip-hop and house around 1990.’

Patterson liked that songs like The Message landed on compilation LPs with weird groove songs. He is still waiting for the reckoning.

Try again

‘I just went on with my work and occasionally played in a band. But I thought it was hopeful that a whole new generation had picked up our music after all. So when we were all heading towards retirement I thought, let’s try it as Cymande again.’

That was around 2012, almost forty years after the last performances. “Now the small clubs wanted us. And we also made another record.’ this album, A Simple Act Of Faith (2015), according to Patterson, we should immediately forget. “We needed a few more hours of play, it went too fast.”

More yielded Cymande the meeting with director Mackenzie-Smith. “He had made a documentary for the BBC in 2017 about boxer Anthony Joshua, which featured our music. I liked that so much that we approached him. He was a fan of our music and wanted to make a documentary with us, so everything came together nicely.’

By working on the film, which was much delayed by corona, Patterson was strengthened in the idea that Cymande’s music is really special. “I knew our time would come. But that our music is still so isolated and that young people are now en masse go wild Brothers on the Slide or The Message I think beautiful. It’s so nice to get people dancing after all these years to music that nobody wanted fifty years ago. Cymande is back. We are going into the studio with a very famous producer at the end of this year. I’m not saying who, but believe me, we’re going to make a very nice record.’