Everyone who works in music develops their own version of what to do when you’re caught out: the fixed smile and just-chirpy-enough ‘oh brilliant’ when someone you know in the real world hears what you do and says they’ll give you their demo. And everyone’s got the polite responses prepared for after listening. ‘It’s not my specialism, but yeah great,’ ‘Mmm, this is a really individual statement,’ ‘I like the percussion,’ that kind of thing. What you can’t prepare for, though, is being handed a demo like the one my son’s nursery school key worker gave me back in 2012.
I really didn’t want to have to do the polite fob-off, because I liked Joel. He was brilliant with the kids, treating them as individuals, laughing with them and showing every sign of enjoying the work. He was always chilled and easy to make small talk with at drop-off and collection (I’m a very awkward person, so ‘easy to make small talk with’ is no small statement). We occasionally chatted about music as he quickly figured out my line of work – I’ve still got a monthly progress report somewhere where his notes express hilarity that my boy knew the difference between grime and hip hop at the age of three.
Then came the revelation he was a singer, and the cdr handed over at home time. ‘Oh brilliant,’ I beamed, readying my bland praise phrases. But I took it home and played it, and was left reeling – truly at a loss for what to say, and not for the usual reasons. Here was someone who channelled Prince, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye, but in his own distinctly south-east London voice. He had beats that drew on leftfield hip hop and even Balearic styles and sang about Biggie Smalls. He had intriguingly poetic lyrics and hooks for days. He was, clearly, a star.
It wasn’t just the obvious talent, but a sense of local pride that made me want to get involved. I’d only lived in London for ten years at that point, but my wife was born and brought up around Southwark and Lewisham, and had never lived further away than Blackheath. Though he was the best part of a generation younger, her reference points overlapped with Joel’s, and his accent and dry sense of humour echoed those of her friends and relatives. His guitarist at the time was the son of the nursery school manager, too – which only added to the sense of intergenerational local connection, especially once we went to gigs with nursery staff in attendance.
Oh yes, I did do my best to get involved. I knocked on doors and made introductions – sometimes helping, often not… but what an education it was for me. I knew about structural discrimination in the abstract – as an electronic music journalist and A&R, I was acquainted with the way the landscape of opportunity looked very different to grime producers than other electronic artists, for example. But this was different, this was being brought face to face with the daily realities of a Black artist being told that they needed to be something that they weren’t and didn’t want to be.
In multiple offices, people acknowledged Joel’s talent but were very firm that he wouldn’t succeed unless he stayed in one of the approved lanes. He’d need to choose one out of the following niches: Radio 2 / Jools Holland retro safety, ultra-groomed chart pop, credible soul-jazz, the rap-adjacent ‘urban’ marketing box, or eternally playing second fiddle as ‘feat.’ vocalist for dance producers. And, actually, he did make some house tracks – one with my West Country friend Jabru, which became a minor club success, and a single with Groove Armada – but he turned down many more because that’s not what he wanted to be known as. Probably just as well: the early 10s was the era of Joey Essex house music, of dozens of Sams and Heidis and Ellas and Jesses.
Joel was absolutely clear in his ambition, though: he wanted to be a real deal funk/soul artist and reach ‘more than just a specialist audience who know who Maxwell is’: to have mass appeal. But even people with great taste still threw grim ‘realism’ at him. Worst of all was the advice – offered sympathetically and pragmatically by a successful industry figure I took his tracks to – that the only realistic avenue for a singer of his style was to go on The Voice, get noticed in the industry, get paid from session work and treat his own music as more or less a hobby.
It was a long slog. From time to time after my kids left the nursery we’d meet up, sometimes for a pint, sometimes in the day with my whole family. One time we went for Venezuelan breakfast in Crystal Palace and for a walk round the park. He was still self-financing his recording, and he had a new job mentoring older kids at risk of exclusion: he told us about crying when one hyper-intelligent boy who couldn’t help cheeking adults finally got expelled. He wanted to make sure my son was staying fit and happy. It was becoming harder to see what the path forward for him was musically: he was in his 30s by now, and despite nods from people like Annie Mac and Mary Anne Hobbs the same doors were remaining closed, he was still playing to a hundred or two hundred people at a time, and his education career seemed more serious and demanding. But his self-belief was as strong as ever.
