The Drum Is Everything - Carmel (1984)

1 More, More, More
2 Stormy Weather
3 The Drum Is Everything         play
4 I Thought I Was Going Mad      play
5 The Prayer
6 Rockin' On Suicide
7 Rue St. Denis (Version)
8 Willow Weep For Me
9 Tracks of My Tears
10 Bad Day

Personnel:
Carmel, voc; 
Jimmy Paris, double bs; 
Gerry Darby, ds
Isaac "Kofi" Osapanin, Johnny Folarin, master drummers
Steve Nieve, hammond org
Peter Saunders, hammond org
Crazy Joe, toaster
Helen Watson, Shirley Laidley, Rush Winters, bg voc
Sounds 18, horns
produced by Mike Thorne

The melting-pot US may have been the birthplace of soul and jazz, but commercialism was not doing soul and jazz any favors. Enter the new melting pot, the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain. Which brings us to Manchester-based Carmel McCourt. Leading a multi-racial austere trio judiciously augmented by occasional African drummers, Jamaican dub toasters, hammond organ players, brass bands and soul backup singers, Carmel's sound was something different. While you can hear in this music the rock/new wave influences around it, this is definitely not new wave pop. This is some crazy unclassifiable stuff. Carmel's singing style is, frankly, caterwauling. The bass and drums sound, with the added organ etc. are distinctly retro: if this is jazz or soul you're gonna find more influences from the 1950s or early 1960s than from 1984. There's some hard-swinging numbers, and some trancy ones. I'm not convinced that all the drums here are acoustic, but there are otherwise no synthesizers gurgling away.

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