Paul Young U.K. Soul Man

Paul Young U.K. Soul Man

DEPARTMENTS

by

Sylvie Simmons

At the end of the day nothing in pop music matters much anyway except the lead singer of the Shangri-Las. But there’s a space where an opinion should be and they’re paying me to differentiate, so:

In the greeting-card aesthetic of pop there’s still an occasional Hallmark. Among the women in fishbowls and buttocks in shorts and boys in dresses you can camp under. once in a while you’ll find a pop singer who's simpiy that. A pop singer. And as po^^jngers go, Paul Young, with his raw-edgea soul voice, popstar-vulnerable with not a trace of whinge, is one of the better ones. (The best, according to the British Phonograph Industry, who awarded him top male vocalist prize earlier this year—something the little girls have understood since No Parlez, his first solo album, came out and sold over three million copies.)

He’s 29 and looks younger, six-feet-two and looks smaller, except for the hands, enormousrflibdsjTiore suited to gripping a wrench thanlW^cron|aone. He worked in an auto factory at*od^j0ae,j3ut still can’t fix a car; he used to imf Presley in front of the mirror, but still curl his lip; he writes songs, but up till now has generally chosen not to. A nice fellow, Paul Young. He’s got the sort of looks of Paul McCartney, the sort of manners of Cliff Richard, moves like Tom Jones tangoing with P.J. Proby, and sounds like Marvin Gaye and Paul Rodgers in a Dusty Springfield soundalike contest. A firm handshake, pleasant smile, big-brotherly manner that encourages you to ask anything, only the answer you’ll get is as uncontroversial as the most professional diplomat’s. “I don’t really like to air my views that much. Yeah, I come over as nice on a lot of things, because I don’t go around slagging people off, I don’t suppose,” says the man Boy George called a Cornish Pasty (mass-produced meatand-veggie pie; Young actually comes from Luton, Bedfordshire). “I’m quite shy I suppose, though; I don’t particularly like th^Uaction that I get—apart from the time tnal^^pjkaae^nd that’s the bit I enjoy, that’s the"biY^0fcyK^i the QTips, that’s the reason I’m aOTng^pa^ and anything else that comes along wim it I’ll go along with, but that’s as far as it goes.”

The reason for this particular bit of attention is a new album, his second as a solo artist. The Secret Of Association, it’s called, and it’s been a pretty well-kept secret for a while. Due last summer, then fall, then Christmas, it popped up in the spring, the delay blamed on the continuing success of No Parlez (“I don’t think I’m successful enough,” Paul told me in the U.S. at the time. “I find myself getting really frustrated and thinking, ‘I’m not going to get out of this place until I know everybody’s at least heard it.’”) then on the difficulty writing and accumulating material and getting it perfect and finally on the real problem: throat ailments. The pie problem that had plagued his CBS lison Moyet. The same prosed with David Bowie backstage at Tina Turner the other day. Two weeks into his U.S. tour, Young’s throat started playing up; with his usual show-must-go-on attitude, he carried on touring, and when it finished so did his voice. He lost the top six notes of his voice, thought he’d lost them for good, and spent a good deal of time and money with a London specialist. The doctor, good man, recommended plenty of alcohol and a relaxing holiday. Instead, time healed all wounds, and time gave him the opportunity to write five songs (co-written with the keyboard player in his Royal Family band, Ian Kewley) for Secret. The rest follow the No Parlez pattern, original versions of cover songs he likes and thinks have been overlooked— like “Soldier’s Things” off Tom Wait’s Swordfishtrombones album which, Paul smiles, “will probably upset the purists, Joy Division one on No Parlez,” ^ ^ sound. “But that’s

the point, or r^f^l^nioally we go with what feels right, but if of the song has a big production or something, we’re likely to try it the other way around, strip it right down.

“I don’t think a song should be done one way. I think it’s interesting to see what people can get out of it. It’s only like people reading Shakespeare—there are some fantastic readers and they put it across really well, and they do it in different ways. I get a kick out of arranging other people’s songs and everything.”

Ask Paul Young who’s the best on the planet and he says, without hesifa tion, Bobby Womack. Ask him if there’s anybody he’d like to be, besides Paul yng, and he says, a bit more tatingly, Bobby Womack. But it wasn’t all that long ago he aspired to be Paul Rodgers.

“I was knocked out by him. I only got to hear of him through ‘All Right Now,’ and then I found out that that was nothing like the rest of their stuff, so I went out and bought all the Free albums—I’m trying to decide if there’s a favorite there;

I think the second album and Fire & Water, because his singing’s great on it. He had a depth of voice that I’ve never really -ahflard before—a really round souncl^Most PaukRodgers fans wound up in heavy metaPoaM^f|Eauiyoung gravitated to rhythm and blue^'Bsfcause obviously the thing I liked about Paul* Rodgers was his influences, for what went on before. Every person he spoke of, I’d go out and buy, and when Free split up there wasn’t any other blues bands or rock bands that interested me. Everybody else went over to the rock field and I went over to the soul field, and I wish he had, in a way.”

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He didn’t model himself on Roagers, he says. “I didn’t model myself on any one person. Singing, I modeled myself on loads. I’ve got lots of different stuff in my record collection—obviously a lot of soul, because that’s where the singers are.” Names are tossed around: Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, Joe Tex, Tom Jones, James Brown. “I discovered I kept doing really good gigs on a healthy diet of James Brown while I was doing the first British tour. But then I also go through phases of like watching Mick Jagger and picking up the good bits that I think he does. Everybody’s got bits that you recognize them for, styles and things like that, and I can watch then and take them in and see what I like in it and then they all get mixed up.” And come out as Paul Young? “Yeah.”

He started playing piano at eight, “stopped at 14 because I didn’t like it,” and didn’t start playing seriously in bands till he was 17. “I didn’t turn professional till I was gone 20, so that’s a late start. I wish I’d made a serious start at being a musician when I was 17 or 18, not 20,21.1 just would have been younger and had a bit more fight in me I suppose.”

His first real group was called Streetband; his best was an animated R&B eight-piece called the Q-Tips. But all along he was making money re-boring carburetors in an auto factory, “so I could afford to buy a guitar, amplifiers—l was a bass player then-because I obviousiy didn’t earn anything out of playing gigs. What did I do? Work in a test department where you take the—what’s it called?—carburetoi out, test it for fuel consumption and put it back.” He was a much better Q-Tip than a factory worker. And the Q-Tips were a much better band than given credit for.

“I think a lot of people were unfair to the QTips. A lot of the English press saw them when they first started, formed their opinions on them and didn’t change them as time went on. When they were calling us a covers band, we had seven originals and four covers on the first album! I still remember reviews where one reviewer said, why do we do covers of songs like ‘Uncle Willy’ and it was one of ours\ That’s what bugged me. The success thing never bugged us while we were all together—we were having too much of a good time; we didn’t care if people didn’t buy our records, they were coming to gigs.” And they were playing 250 of the things a year. “We were enjoying ourselves then. It was only when it looked as if the band was going to have to split up and we knew that we were getting into hard times that we started saying, ‘Well why didn’t anybody buy the fucking records?’ They’re good—not great, just a souvenir of the gig almost. That’s what I wanted to put right when I did my solo stuff. I’d always done the live thing first and never made good records.”

So does he consider himself more a singer, say an interpretative singer like Linda Ronstadt, than an entertainer, like Tom Jones, then?

“I think more Tom Jones—I definitely don’t see myself as doing anything remotely connected with Linda Ronstadt! I like Tom Jones.” Did he learn to do the splits from him? “No,” he laughs. ’’I’ve never seen Tom Jones do the splits. I don’t know if he can! No, P.J. Proby that was.” He’s pretty deft at doing the splits onstage, as well as dancing niftily— something for which you wouldn’t credit this big man with his unrockstar-like clothes—while gathering up undies scattered around him.

“It’s not very nice to say, because I don’t know how seriously knicker-throwers regard throwing knickers, but you tend to laugh about it, especially seeing as if we get anything like that I tend to throw it at the drummer, because when he’s going like this,” (arms flail up and down like a wind-up monkey) “he’s got nothing to take the bra off his neck! We just take it lightheartedly. You never take anything like that seriously, not for a minute.” It can go to your head though, can’t it? “Not mine.”

Nowhere near as big as his hands is Paul Young’s head. No boasting about Band-Aid or BPI awards, no slagging of colleagues. He’d wanted to gather a bunch together for The Secret Of Association—he’d written harmony parts for Chrissie Hynde, Annie Lennox, Bobby Womack and the Chieftains, but record biz politics got in the way; as for the other sort of politics, “I don’t know enough about it; I’m a singer.”

And he would have been happy singing in the Q-Tips if that band had stayed together, he says; no great need to be a pin-up.

Although the little girls no doubt helped the new album to the top of the British charts, things look like changing for Young as far as image and audience are concerned. His girl backing singers, the Fabulous Wealthy Tarts, have left him, replaced by three black male singers—taking away some of the pop element and substituting it with a more mature, soul sound. “I suppose it does sound like I’ve grown up a bit,” says Paul. “Maybe I will lose some of the younger audience, but that’s life—you can’t worry about being commercial, you’ve got to move on. I think this is a better album than No Parlez, otherwise I wouldn’t have put it out.”

Why do the little girls fancy him? “I don’t know,” he says, and when pushed, “Maybe it appeals to them that I’m more,” he hesitates, “normal than a lot of pop stars.” And very sensible; even if he had to be restrained by his manager recently from taking up parachutejumping.

So is Paul Young, Best British Male Vocalist, going to stay around a while, or is he just another English sports model speeding down pop history’s highway and blowing a gasket two miles down the road?

“I’d like to grow old gracefully, be a Tony Bennett or something like that, where you’re a singer, you can still get up there, but you don’t have to run around the stage and keep doing the splits for the rest of your life. But you can still choose songs and write the occasional good song and be known as a singer; and that way you can keep your career going in the same way that songwriters can.” ^