THE BRAND NEW HEAVIES
BUCKET LIST VOCALISTS
The Heavies have worked with a revolving cast of vocalists over the
years, and the new album is no exception, with featured singers
ranging from Beverley Knight to Angie Stone. But is there anyone left
on the bucket list?
“I’d love to do something with Gladys Knight if she could still handle
it in the studio,” says Andrew. “It’s the uniqueness of her voice. Anita
Baker I’d love to work with, too. A lot of modern singers today, anyone
younger than the age of around 25 or 30, really sound very similar,
and it’s usually a combination of Beyoncé and Whitney Houston. But
anyone with a unique voice I drift towards... I really love Jessie J’s
voice, I think she’s incredible. I’d like to do something quite acoustic, a
bit more organic and funky with her. So, if you’re out there reading
this, Jessie...!”
But for a future collaboration, he might well be keeping it in the
family. “With my own kids, I try to curve them away a little bit from
getting involved in music, but one of them is showing a lot of promise
actually. My four-year-old is an incredible singer. He manages to sing
completely in tune and he’s got a little vibrato going on. He’s obviously
unaware that’s what he’s doing, but yeah, I think there’s a voice there.”I’ll never ever forget. And, again, at
that age it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s Stevie
Wonder over there, that’s cool, and
he likes our music.’ It’s only years
after, you realise how incredible that
moment was.”PUSH AND PULL
The early 90s proved a hugely fruitful
period for the Heavies. It’s easy to forget
just how many hits they had until you
revisit the back catalogue – Dream
Come True, Dream On Dreamer, Back
To Love, Midnight At The Oasis... the list
goes on. But after their early breakout
success, ‘artistic differences’ reared its
ugly head, and Davenport left to pursue
her solo career. In the two decades since,
the Heavies have recruited a string of
female singers (largely from the US),
punctuated by the occasional
return from Davenport.
With respect to the
contributions
these talents
undoubtedly made
to the band’s oeuvre,
you get a distinct
sense of ‘the one that
got away’ – as they
forever try to recapture or
replicate that original magic.
Levy remains unequivocal
about how integral N’Dea
is to the band.
“She’s the voice of The
Brand New Heavies
and our biggest hits in
our heyday were all
about her vocals. And her
writing as well, she actually
co-wrote a lot of the big songs. But
over the years, it’s been quite diffi cult to
keep her in the band for various reasons that
I won’t go into now...” He laughs sheepishly,
before adding, “...related to a recently departed
member, let’s say!”BACK TO THE SOURCE
As the Heavies ploughed on into a new millennium,
something else was starting to happen among the next
generation. The last decade has witnessed a huge
resurgence in old-school funk, soul and disco. Just look at
some of the biggest hits of the last few years: the Nile
Rodgers-featuring Get Lucky; Pharrell Williams’ Happy; andhooked up with emerging American
soul talent N’Dea Davenport. And so,
still in their early 20s, they headed
off to the US and took their new
brand of funk and soul back to its
homeland. The bunch of kids from
Ealing went down a storm, but did
they expect more resistance as
imposter upstarts?
“You know what? When you’re young,
you don’t see it...” Andrew refl ects. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, this is
going to happen, we’re going to go to America, we’re
going to do this!’ Your confi dence level is so high at that
age, you never think of anything not working out. It was
basically just a holiday for us, being driven to a studio, and
we had all these exotic looking girlfriends in LA!” he
laughs. “It was a lot of fun, and music was just something
we did. Then, suddenly, Q-Tip and Ice Cube started calling
us, and we kind of thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing, is it
always this easy?’ So, yeah, for us it was fairly normal. But,
looking back on it now, we were incredibly lucky and it
was an incredibly privileged position to have been in.”
Soon they were counting Stevie Wonder among their
fans. “They playlisted our fi rst single Never Stop and he
came to one of our concerts,” he says. “I can’t remember
where we met him, it may have been a Ray Charles
anniversary, but we got escorted over to him for a press
photo and he started singing the single. That was a moment
The Heavies at the height of their
commercial power in the early 90s