Having the balls to call your debut album Club Classics, Volume One is one thing, but reissuing it a decade later as a special 10th anniversary edition - the way you would with a Beatles or a Dylan album - is quite another. If the band in question weren't the premier exponents of British soul music, you'd be justified in calling the arrogance police, but then I suppose Soul II Soul have made enough of a contribution to the musical canon to warrant releasing a classic album the second time around.
For many people, Soul II Soul provided an entree into the whole club/dance scene and Club Classics is as much a nostalgic representative of that scene as The Queen Is Dead is of white indie music or Straight Outta Compton is of rap - or, might I add, Brothers In Arms is of Volvo-driving, squash-playing AOR dilettantes. At the time, Club Classics was the fastest-selling album within the Virgin Group (this was before the EMI take-over), and went on to sell five million copies world-wide.
Grammy, Soul Train and Brit awards virtually threw themselves at the album, and almost any soul/rap/R'n'B collective around today will name-check Club Classics as a fairly pivotal piece of work, if not a downright influence. Perhaps it's no surprise that no old skool club night is complete without Back To Life (However Do You Want Me) getting a run out on the turntable. There's a lot more to the band and album than that hit, though; a quick glance in the trivia file finds that the band were responsible for arranging the artist formerly known as Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U.
The main creative impulse behind the band was Jazzie B who, alongside multi-instrumentalist Philip Harvey and all-round genius Nellee Hooper (the man who shaped the sound for Massive Attack, Bjork and Madonna), was a veteran of the 1980s warehouse scene. In their own words, they "came together as a sound system, to build musical careers for people who had been less fortunate within the musical and artistic realms", a less than subtle swipe at how black musicians were treated.
When they were initially signed to a Virgin offshoot called Ten Records, it was for a one-off singles deal only, but when the company heard the calibre of songs like Fairplay and the mighty Feel Free, Soul II Soul were quickly ushered into a studio to record an album. Club Classics was an aptly-named collection. With Jazzie B providing the songs, Nellee Hooper providing the beats and loops and Caron Wheeler and Do'reen providing the vocals (not to mention the services of the wondrous Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra), a blueprint was laid down and black British music found its saviours. Always operating as a collective, Soul 11 Soul, in a move highly reminiscent of what the Wu-Tang Clan are doing now, set up a number of allied "projects" run along co-operative lines which included a film company, some shops, a talent agency, a clothing line and a record company. They also became "must have" producers with Fine Young Cannibals and Neneh Cherry enlisting their services.
For a while they had it all - the music, the style and the attitude - but while they were busy attending to all of the band's myriad operations, something was lost on the musical front and the follow-up album Volume 11: 1990 A New Decade was poorly received, despite the fact that it entered the charts at number one and featured contributions from Courtney Pine and Kim Mazelle.
Two more albums followed and then they were dropped by Virgin. When last heard of they had re-signed to Island and are still producing music (Jazzie B also did his production CV no harm by producing James Brown's Universal James album). Soul II Soul were a classic case of right place, right time and are now duly logged in the record books as "one-album wonders".
Club Classics Volume One (10th anniversary edition) is on Virgin.
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