Some time in the late 1980s, the former members of Cymande began hearing something unexpected in the hits of the era: their own music. The band had split up in 1975 after recording three albums in the early 1970s, but their music didn’t fade with them.
Unbeknown to them, Cymande had become one of the building blocks of hip-hop, house, garage and more, sampled by the likes of De La Soul, Wu-Tang Clan and the Fugees. Their albums were revered and sought after, and their cult following included everyone from Grandmaster Flash to Jazzie B and Mark Ronson – few of whom realised the band was from south London, not New York City.
As a new documentary on the band makes clear, Cymande’s story is one of musical survival against all odds, but it also encapsulates the Black British experience of the 1970s in the band’s melting pot of musical styles and their proud Black identity – and the institutional obstacles they were presented with.
“I’m not blowing our own trumpet,” says bassist Steve Scipio over a coffee in a Battersea pub, “but I think we are the only band of that period that still has any relevance.”
Guitarist Patrick Patterson immediately pulls him up: “You can’t use that word!”
“OK, relevance is not the right word,” Scipio concedes, “but that has survived, and has moved from decade to decade.”
“There was other Black music going on,” says Patterson, citing British Afro-rock bands such as Noir and Osibisa, “but ours was different.”
On that, they all agree. Drummer Sam Kelly points out that they were a rare prospect as they performed original material rather than covers of US hits. And Cymande’s music prevailed because their distinctive blend of funk, soul, jazz, rock, Caribbean calypso and African rhythms doesn’t sound quite like anything else: on their records, a socially conscious funk track could be followed by a percussive Rastafarian chant, then a 10-minute jazz instrumental.
Cymande’s original seven members were all Caribbean-born. Founders Patterson and Scipio came from Guyana as teenagers. They lived in Balham, a few doors down from each other, and have been friends ever since. The others came from Jamaica and St Vincent.
Patterson describes UK schooling as “a horrible experience”. When they arrived, they were more academically advanced than the British kids – so they were put at the back of the class and told to wait for the others to catch up. “That was the first experience of this horrible spectre of gatekeeping. It travels across cultural, political, economic circumstances that we as Black people encountered here also, which meant that no matter if you were well-qualified or not, putting you over a white person was considered unacceptable.”
Patterson and Scipio, both self-taught musicians, worked with British-Nigerian percussionist Ginger Johnson and in a jazz-rock four-piece called Metre before gathering musicians through the local grapevine to form Cymande, the name taken from a popular calypso song about a dove.
In 1971, a music producer named John Schroeder overheard them rehearsing in Soho and got them into a recording studio. They welcomed his hands-off approach. “All he wanted to do was to capture the essence of what Cymande was,” says Scipio. Their eponymous debut album, released in 1972, made little impression in the UK but it made the US Top 20.
It led to a Stateside tour supporting Al Green – the 30,000-seat venues a far cry from the small clubs they played in the UK. “We were virtually unknown in England,” flautist Mike “Bami” Rose explains. “When we went to America we were amazed that people were aware of the hits.”
“And they were better dancers,” adds saxophonist Derek Gibbs. “When I saw them bumping to Cymande’s music I thought, ‘Wow. British people don’t do that!’”
They became the first British band to play at Harlem’s legendary Apollo. Two more albums and a second US tour quickly followed. But when they returned to Britain in 1974, once again, they were victims of gatekeeping. There were very few ways for a Black band to break through in Britain’s white-controlled media and music scene. They decided to take a break. “But the break ended up being 40 years,” says Scipio.
Kelly and Rose continued as professional musicians with other bands. Gibbs became an electrician. Conga player Pablo Gonsales (who died in 2020) returned to Jamaica. Vocalists Joey Dee and Peter Serreo also died. Patterson and Scipio retrained as lawyers. Their aim was to serve the Black community, many of whose legal troubles stemmed from police or institutional discrimination.
“There’s a high incidence of psychological problems with people of our age, in our close community,” says Scipio. “It’s understandable when you lived in the system at that time, the kind of pressures that you were under.”
Predictably, they were discriminated against themselves. “We had to establish our own chambers because of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of getting into established chambers,” says Patterson.
But Cymande’s music refused to die, and particularly their song Bra. Recorded in 1972, it is unorthodox and joyously groovy, with a bouncy funk bass line, syncopated percussion and an uplifting lyric: “But it’s alright. We can still go on.” Bra became a floor-filler in New York discos before graduating to the turntables of block-party DJs such as Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc and Jazzy Jay, who would extend its extended bass-and-percussion breakdown into a song of its own. You can hear it in the Sugarhill Gang’s 1985 single Work, Work the Body, in Raze’s 1986 track Jack the Groove (one of the first house chart hits), in Gang Starr’s 1988 single Movin’ On, and on De La Soul’s 1989 debut album 3 Feet High and Rising. Five years later, Norman Cook lifted its bass line for Pizzaman’s big beat track Happiness. (The Stone Roses’ Fool’s Gold also bears some remarkable similarities.) These and other Cymande-sampling tracks, such as the Fugees’ The Score and French rapper MC Solaar’s debut Bouge De Là, put the band back in the public ear, as did the British “rare groove” revival of the time.
In the early days of sampling no one thought of asking the original artists’ permission, let alone paying rights. This is when it helps to have two lawyers in the band. “We have managed to protect our interests,” Patterson says with a smile. But they are honoured and flattered rather than offended. “It’s a compliment,” says Kelly. “If the technology had been around 20 years before, we’d possibly have done the same thing.”
By genuinely popular demand, the band reformed in 2014 and began recording and touring again. Now their audience is multi-generational and multi-racial. Perhaps Britain has finally caught up with them. But Cymande’s story is one of Black people who found no place for themselves in the UK, and so created their own.
“We had to construct our own systems to deal with the disadvantages,” says Patterson. “We started a great project all those years ago, and it was unfinished business when we came off the road. We came back to it because the potential of the project remained. There was still work to do. And that’s how we’ve lived our lives: just maximise your potential by whatever skill you have.”
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