When it comes to pop’s mainstream male black musicians, the mid-1980s belonged, ostensibly, to Michael Jackson. Alongside were the supporting cast of Billy Ocean and Luther Vandross. You could hear the intros to any music from these three artists and know instantly who was singing. Yes, there were others, but these three were household names in the UK.
I think the same thing could, or should, be said of the singer who’s the focus of today’s post. Especially when referencing Track One, Side Two from one of the albums that passed a lot of people by when it came out in 1985. An album that continues to pass many people by.
Back in the 80s, people living in large towns and cities in the UK bought their music from a shop called Woolworths. Okay, they used independent records stores, too (and at Christmas from WHSmith when your gran bought you vouchers – because it’s a stationers and pens and pencils and beautiful notepads aren’t the kind of thing 12 year old boys like me wanted, they’re the kind of things that 50 year old me wants, but I am totally off-track now, so…)
What I’m saying is, there were only a few places that always had the latest, greatest thing. Woolworths was one of them.
Back in 1985, I can vividly remember walking into my local Woolworths, taking the stairs to the second floor and seeing an album that had a man in a brown leather trench coat on the front. He had a moustache even though Movember hadn’t been invented. And he oozed coolness to pre-teen me. The cover also had a sort of cartoon-style text that just said Colonel Abrams. I probably thought that, maybe, he was in the army or something. Whatever, it spoke to me. I wanted the album.
I pulled out my money and paid whatever it cost to have it. I’m guessing it was about four pounds. I treasured it on the long bus journey home.
Then I made a mistake that, it turned out, was the best mistake to make. I put Side Two on first.
The song that kicks off the second side of this debut album is Trapped. Wow. What a track. As an opener (to me) it blew my tiny mind so much I lifted the needle at the end of it and placed it back down so I could hear it again. I was hooked.
That’s not to say the rest of the album is bad. It’s not. The basslines and synth work on many tracks is sublime, including the actual opening track, The Truth, I’m Not Gonna Let, and Picture Me In Love With You. This is a man who played in a band with Prince on guitar and had been working as a singer in the music industry for a couple of decades before scoring his biggest hit.
Colonel made the kind of music I would later hear as the soulful building blocks of Chicago House, and what is now known as R&B. The rhythms are layered. The toots and wheeps of the synths don’t follow the melody but suck the listener in like a sonic whirlpool. And the beats… it’s here that the production (by the notable producer, and drummer, Richard James Burgess) not only positions this album in the decade of its making, but also makes it more than the sum of its parts.
This was a man at the top of his game, with major label backing and some of the best production available. However, a glittering career was to remain out of Colonel’s reach. In 2015, he was back in the limelight, but sadly for very different reasons. The man behind the soulful voice from Detroit, a city renowned for its music and its musical legacy, was struggling. Homeless and suffering from diabetes, he was down on his luck. Despite a crowdfunding campaign, Colonel passed away in 2016. A year of many legends passing away, so his name was simply added to a long list of lost luminaries.
Unlike many of those artists, Colonel’s work has yet to revisited. The CD of this amazing debut was reissued in 2010. It contains a gold-selling record, but it’s more than just one track. It’s time to revisit it for the classic it absolutely is.