In advance of his live appearance on this Friday’s WIN (11pm BCB radio) multi-talented singer songwriter and officially nicest man in Bradford, Imani Hekima came into BCB to talk about songwriting, his influences and his attitudes to censorship.
For people who haven’t heard your work before,what can the expect from your live performance on Friday?
IM:Something quite soulful , I guess. Songs with a social message which are based upon my key influences which have been things like the first band I ever followed, The Specials and all the 2-Tone stuff. I also grew up hearing Bob Marley’s albums, I like Curtis Mayfield which is also very message oriented. So it’s all of that, but through my own experiences
So were The Specials your formative musical experience?
IM:Definitely. At some point in every adolescent’s life you find an artist or a band that you hear or see on TV which strikes a chord with you in a way that nothing else does and that’s what The Specials and 2-Tone was to me. I was part of a gang who were into dressing up, going out and dancing, going to youth clubs and all that . There was a little group of us that used to go round places in Bradford and we established our own little youth club night at Checkpoint which is still there, and prior to that Textile Hall, and out of that we formed bands. The first band that I was in came out of that experience and they were called Spectre and we were like a ska band.
Were you writing your own material in Spectre?
IM:It didn’t take that long before we started writing our own material. I remember our first gig was all covers. We did stuff from UB40’s first album and The Specials’ first album. We used to do “Death Disco’ by PiL and “Peaches” by The Stranglers. Our drummer was a punk and myself and my two older brothers Roger and Stu liked punk as well, so it wasn’t a big deal to do Stranglers’ songs because we loved them.
Was 2-Tone as much a social focus as a musical one for you?
IM:In the 70’s youth were very tribal you could tell what a person’s musical taste was from how they dressed.There were various different youth tribes. Obviously, there were the punks, there were soul boys, there were people who were into reggae and we liked a bit of each of those things but we couldn’t really embrace the whole image. When the 2-Tone thing came along it was perfect really, because it represented a fusion of Jamaican culture and British culture and it just reflected our experience perfectly.
You mentioned Curtis Mayfield before, how did you get into that kind of early 70’s politically conscious soul music?
IM:The 80’s soul like Freddie Jackson and Luther Vandross didn’t really move me at all. It wasn’t that it wasn’t good music, but I think it was a lifestyle thing. Soul then was very kind of aspirational. It seemed to be all about wearing the finest shoes. We were into looking good ,but it was much more earthy. Our idea of looking sharp was a shiny pair of Doc Martins.There wasn’t any social message in the music, and it sounded a bit too pristine. The Motown and Stax records of the 60’s and 70’s were very sophisticated for the time, but they were very gritty as well.It was people playing in a room and you can hear the difference between that and the 24 track stuff from the 80’s
So I got into Stevie and Sly Stone from following the influences of the people I liked. When I read that UB40 were into Stevie Wonder it intrigued me and I wanted to find out more and now I can really hear his influence on their tracks.
When did you first start writing the type of material that you’re doing now?
IM.It was around about the turn of the millennium. Through the 80’s I’d been in Spectre and then after that I had a few years out and went back to Uni and during that period I was playing solo jazz piano at the West Yorkshire Playhouse because I’d gotten really into jazz. Towards the end of the 90’s there was a neo-soul movement with people like Eryka Badu and the The Fugees and that was really refreshing beacuse it was like contemporary soul that harked back to “What’s Going On ” and Stevie’s 70’s albums, but with a modern hip-hop feel to it.They were singing about current issues and that was a real catalyst in terms of me getting back into being a musician and writing and playing gigs.
Do you think that writing about political issues has held you back commercially?
IM: I don’t know. I think that if I did stick to more commonplace topics like love it might possibly be easier for people to get a handle on the music. It’s a hard question to answer. In terms of commercialism, I don’t mind that aspect of tailoring your sound so that someone who likes commercial or poppy music can get into it, but not so much that you’d compromise your musical integrity. It might have been easier, but it wouldn’t have been me. I got into music because I wanted to do things that I thought were good, and then if you do that well enough, hopefully other people will like it.
The programme this week is about taboos. Would you ever not write a song because you felt the subject matter might be too controversial?
IM:It’s difficult to say. A lot of the songs on “Imanifesto” do have a clear message. The ideal at the moment is to be able to say something clearly but also not be too literal. It depends where I am in my life – sometimes I can be at a point where I want to be completely direct and that’s good as well, but at the moment I like the idea of not being too obvious. There’s times when it’s good to be direct, but there are times when you can be very direct and sometimes people won’t get it. It’s surprising how many people aren’t focussed on lyrics.
Has anyone ever challenged you about any of your lyrics?
IM I haven’t had a lot of that. On the whole it’s been quite positive. I did a song called “Shame” which is about honour killings. The song was originally written about the period in about 2007 when people like Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse started to go off the rails. So I wrote about that experience and then about three years later someone that I knew who ran a Facebook page which highlighted honour killings needed some music for a video he was putting together. I was orginally going to give him an instrumental version, but when I looked at the lyrics I thought “this actually fits the subject matter” so I gave him the vocal version of the track.
The video’s quite shocking because it’s got images of acid attacks and someone said to me that every one of the victims in it were Muslims and also someone said that the same thing happens to women in the West and felt that the video might indirectly contribute to Islamophobia. So that was one instance were in a lot of ways the issue overpowered the music. When people looked at the video they commented on the video but not about the song. So that’s always a possibility if you do polemic or political music. You might get people who focus on that and the sound of the music gets overlooked . I’d like people to dig the music really, if they like the message then great, but first and foremost I’m a musician and I like to do stuff that’s entertaining and makes people feel good.
Imani Hekima will be making you feel good LIVE on WIN on BCB 106.6 Friday 19th July from 11pm. His LP “Imanifesto” is available from iTunes