IT'S ALIVE! THE INMATES EXHUME THE CORPSE OF R&B

At the time we got the band going, it (rhythm and blues) was one of the most unfashionable things that you could do.

-Ben Donnelly

IT'S ALIVE! THE INMATES EXHUME THE CORPSE OF R&B

FEATURES

by

Rob Patterson

“Whether we’re a faction or not, I just don’t know,” says Inmates bassist Ben Donnelly.

The Inmates are proof that in today’s world (and especially today’s London), one can be different by being, well...relatively normal.

“At the time we got the band going, it (rhythm and blues) was one of the most unfashionable things that you could do,” explains Donnelly. “When we started off, all the gigs were completely different—we’d play for totally different audiences. They’d be punk, or the early mod audience,' all sorts of things.. .even heavy metal. The lot! But it always went down. You name it, we played with them.

“I remember playing some of our early gigs at places in the East End of London, these little out of the way pubs where we could polish up our act. There were a few mods down there, all dressed up and the like, maybe 30 or so of them from the same school. We’d try to help them out by putting thgm on as support groups or something.”

.Now the mod style and music has swept London, and the Inmates find themselves supporting bands like Madness, who used to open for them. But they seem to have no regrets about the situation.

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“Those bands have just taken off,” says guitarist Peter Gunn.(who admits that is not his real name), where we have been steadily getting bigger and bigger.” He demonstrates with one hand flying upward while the other traces a slow building curve. “But when you play a music that has a specific audience; if you do something that audience isn’t into, they won’t like it. We don’t have to worry about that.”

“We draw a cross section of people. It takes longer that way, but by the end of the evening they always like us, and they come back/’

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The Inmates aren’t pressured by fashion or commercial demands of the record industry, which reflects in their casually confident attitude and raw, good-time rhythm and blues style. Why?

“We didn’t really expect to get signed up playing this sort of music, quite frankly,” answers Gunn.

"Deople who play the type of music we do,” explains Donnelly, “they always have this idea—Christ, if I form a R & B band. I’m gonna spend a year or two doing this and Pm not gonna get a contract. Pm not gonna make a record, so Pll have to do it semi-pro.

“They don’t take a chance, if you like. But that didn’t arise with us because playing rhythm and blues is what we like doing. We formed tfiis band for our own pleasure.”

Not expecting to be signed, the band didn’t give up their day jobs until they pacted with Radar Records: Peter teaching science, Ben working as a checker for Chelsea Girls Stores, guitarist Tony Oliver working as a messenger for Zig Zag magazine and singer Bill Hurley laboring away at an automotive magazine. Fo,r them, the Inmates was a night out playing mu$ic they loved.

But their seriousness about that music Showed through. Playing small pubs and support slots on benefits (many arranged by their manager, Ron Wilson, once an actual inmate after a career in lorry hijacking; now active in PROP, a London prisoner’s rights association who Sponsor musical benefits), the Inmates earned a reputation that got them a four week residency at London’s prestigious Hope and Anchor Pub. By the fourth night, they were selling the club out, and the doors of the London pub scene were open to them.

“We played all of the 20 or so main clubs in London, so over a period of time we had most of the.major record companies come down,” says Donnelly. “They’d all have a drink and a good time, but then we’d g^t this stock reply at the end of the night: ‘Hev/, great! But...won’t sell any records.”

But an independent single (“Danger Zone” b/w “Dirty Water”) and an article by Max Bell of NME caught the attention of Radar Records chief Andrew Lauder. “He was interested enough to come down, and one of the last ones to come see us,” continued Donnelly. “But aftet; the gig, which was a particularly good one, too, he said ‘Let’s do something.’ A few weeks later we were getting the contracts sorted out.

“I guess from there he’s proved to the other record companies that they slipped up a bit. Back then we were one band'on our own doing R&B. Since we’ve signed with Radar and the record’s come out, there’s a lot more R&B bands in London now. It’s sort of very healthy on the circuit now—four or five good bands worth seeing and another 15 or 20 getting the occasional gig. It means a lot of people who enjoy playin’ R&B now can.”

But, as Donnelly explains, their lovb for R&B is not a conscious decision to clone a style. “What we do is not sort of an intentional, uh...y’knoW, let’s do a song and it’s got to be written before ’69 or something like that.

“If we want to dp a song, say you want to pick a good, strong song that will sound familiar live to that on the record as well, since we’re not interested in making records we can’t' perform. And say we couldn’t come up with a song ourselves that we want—like asoul ballad, for instance. If we kicked around a few good ideas and can’t come up with something, then we might find a record pf a very good song—we could rip it off if we want to and stick our name on it, but we don’t do that—we’ll say OK, we’ll do that song. It’s just more likely that we’ll find that song on a 60’s record than one made in 1980. It’s not a preconceived notion.. .it just works out that way.

“In the 60’s, before the advent of large studios and everything, they just happened to write better songs. We do stuff that’s 70’s and 80’s styled.. .but it’s really that we like the material from back then. It’s strong material and it comes across live. ”

With classic songs on their LP like “Dirty Water,” “Three Time Loser” and “The Walk,” many find an inevitable comparison of the Inmates with the early rhytnm and blues Rolling Stones. The band aren’t quick to deny that similarity, but they do point out the similarities and the differences.

“We don’t really sound like them,” says Gunn, “though it is nice for us to be told so. The way we arrange songs is similar to the Stones... We try to get two guitar parts which complement each other: But it’s not a conscious thing. We’ve got a five piece band, and we’re doing material that maybe had brass on it originally, so we arrange the guitar parts around that.”

“I think it’s because people like to pigeonhole a band so they can describe them,” says Ben. “We’ve got the same line-up as the Stones, and we do spngsthat they mjght have done in the 60’s. It’s a comparison on that basis, really.”

What seems also to be similar about the bands is that the Inmates harken back to a time when bar band music was respected, a time when music was meant to be enjoyed with a pint in hand and your feet dancing. A time when you didn’t need an "$1000 stereo to hear what the music was about. In fact, they make music that probably sounds better on a cheap phonograph...more like the sweaty, raucous feeling the band gives outlive. ' ,

Though Gunn feels “it’s going to be hard for Americans not to feel we didn’t contrive this thing,' because there are so many •contrived bands in America,” I beg to differ. With clubs opening every day so music lovers can hear something a little real, their resurrection of bar band R&B is most fortuitous. Many of Us grew up with that style blasting away at the local dances. If the Inmates help bring it back, we can only thank them.

“You can take almost any major artist today,” concludes Gunn, “Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac... They were all in rhythm and blues bands, and that was when we started to go see groups.”

It’s too early to tell if the Inmates will go as far as the aforementioned. But if they inspire a few more kids to play R&B a couple years down the line, they’ve done their duty for rock’n’roll.