Smitty: You’ve selected some great guys to do the job because this is a great record. Talk to me about the third track, “Parkside Shuffle.” I love that one.
SW: I probably don’t do this the conventional way, but what I do is I’ll do the music first, build up the groove, finish the track, and I don’t usually title the tracks until after they’re finished because then that way I listen to the track a couple of times and I build up this mental picture of the feel of the track, then I come up with a title that I feel fits the track so that when you look at the title it justifies the track. I mean, it’s the same with titling the album Supercharged.
Smitty: Yeah, I can dig it.
SW: I couldn’t title the album until I knew I had enough tracks that could justify giving it the title of Supercharged, and I also don’t put funk in a title of a track until I know that the track is justifiably funky. So to be quite honest, the titles are probably the hardest thing I do.
Smitty: (Laughs.)
SW: I don’t wanna give a really good track this really lame title because a lot of people will pick up the CD, read, and the CD tells the story of the sort of music that’s inside, so you read the titles and you look at the picture and you build up this mental image of what the album will probably sound like.
Smitty: Yeah, that’s a great approach. I know you had some very cool highlights along the way with this record and one of them had to be working with Roy Ayers.
SW: Oh my God, yeah.
Smitty: Yeah, talk about that experience and what that was like for ya.
SW: Well, Roy Ayers has been, in my opinion, prolific in all the funk groove soul movements since the sixties when he first started out. Then in the U.K. we had Brit funk, which was in the eighties, and there were a lot of people who would listen to Roy and go “Oh, I love that stuff. I’m gonna go form my own band.” You had bands like High Tension, a whole load of other bands, and then you had the acid jazz movement and the rare groove movement where people were rediscovering the old stuff from the seventies and eighties and sixties, and Roy Ayers was very prominent in all that side of it as well, but you’d hear the music and you’d think, oh yeah, there’s a definite Roy Ayers influence there.
And then there’s the new beat stuff that’s coming out of London at the moment and when you listen to it you could hear there’s a Roy Ayers influence in that, so throughout my musical learning period as you’d call it, Roy Ayers has always been there. He has always been a huge idol of mine and I never thought I’d get to the stage where I could justifiably ring someone up like him and say “Would you play on my music?” Because it’s a very sort of like, oh, is it good enough for him to play on and all that sort of stuff, and now I’m at the stage where I’m the most happiest musically. I feel I can justifiably ring him up where I had this track and tracked him down by his manager and sent him the track, and he basically said he loved it, wanted to play on it, so he did the vibe parts and the vocal bits that he’s done on top of it, sent it back to me, then I basically cut it up and pieced it all together, but I had this surreal conversation with him. I found myself on the phone and I was saying the words “Hi, can I speak to Mr. Roy Ayers, please?” And it just felt like I was in a dream world.
Smitty: (Laughs.)
SW: And he comes on the phone and starts talking and you get this really stupid moment where you feel like you’re just about to say “Roy Ayers, you sound just like you do on your records.”
Smitty: (Laughs.)
SW: And you have to stop yourself from coming out with these really stupid comments ‘cause you’re so blown away ‘cause you’re talking to this guy on the phone.
Smitty: Yeah, I know what you mean, man. (Both laugh.) That’s kinda funny. Well, I love that track that you guys did, what is it, “Electric Vibes.”
SW: “Electric Vibes,” yeah, yeah. I mean, I had Roy Ayers in mind when I did it, but I didn’t get in touch with him until I was confident enough that the track was where it was. I felt, in honor of him, I had to do a track that would justify him playing on it. And I think, I mean, you know, I hope I achieved that. I certainly think that when you play it, without a doubt you can tell it’s Roy Ayers.
Smitty: Oh, man, no doubt and he can still cook, you know?
SW: Oh, definitely. He’s such a cool bloke. And he lives the groove. It was instantaneous. When he heard it, he basically hummed the parts over the phone to me. He was going “Oh yeah, I can really get into this” and he started humming it.
Smitty: (Laughs.)
SW: I was going “Don’t…no…record now, press record now!” He knew exactly what to do. Of course he would. He lives for the groove basically.
