Love & Purpose

My new compilation celebrating British Soul Music

Hey everyone

It’s been a while since I posted anything here - 6 months it seems, which has flown by. My job has become a lot more demanding this year, and in turn my own creative endeavours have had to take a back seat. Whilst I have been silent on here, I have been working on a host of things behind the scenes, including the main reason I’m writing today - my brand new compilation ‘Love & Purpose’.

This is an idea I’ve had in the back of my mind for almost five years now, so it’s very exciting to finally see it come to fruition. It’s a celebration of British Soul Music in all it’s forms; 12 tracks selected from the past 40 years, taking in Street Soul, Lover’s Rock, Neo Soul and more. Last week I was lucky enough to join Gilles Peterson on his BBC 6Music show - we talked about the compilation as well as looking back at 20 years of our label First Word Records. Gilles is a great broadcaster and it was really fun to have a fairly free-form conversation about soul, broken beat, the trials of running a record label and losts more besides. You can check out our conversation over on BBC Sounds (link here).

If you’re intrigued to check out the comp, tonight I’ll be hosting a listening party over on our Bandcamp page - it kicks off at 7pm UK time. I’ll be sharing some stories behind the tracks I’ve selected and would love to hear your suggestions for your favourite UK soul cuts too. Sign up for your spot, and pre-order the vinyl just here. I’ve added my liner notes to the comp below - hopefully it gives you a little insight into the process behind the album.

That’s all for now - I hope you enjoy the record. I’d also recommend you check out the other releases we’ve got at First Word right now, as it’s a pretty exciting time for us as we enter our third decade in the business. We’ve dropped albums from Takuya Kuroda, Amanda Whiting, Quiet Dawn and Essa already this year and this autumn is looking equally exciting with releases from Allysha Joy, Kaidi Tatham, Tall Black Guy and a couple of newcomers lined up. I hope you dig them.

I’ll be in touch again soon - next month I have a couple of events to announce that I’ve particularly excited about, so stay tuned…

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It’s now 25 years since I started sharing music publicly. At first it was DJing; in bars, then clubs and eventually on the radio. Five years later I took it a step further with our label First Word Records that has become my primary focus over the past two decades. I’ve thought a lot lately about why I’ve chosen to channel my love of music in this particular way and it invariably comes back to a very simple impulse. For me, the discovery of great music was never enough - I always wanted to tell other people about it too. I was never one to cover my record labels in the club, or closely guard the knowledge I was lucky enough to uncover. I’ve always felt that good music demands to be shared.

From early on I got a particular kick in uplifting music from the cities that shaped me, be that from my childhood on the outskirts of London or my early adulthood in Leeds and the regular trips to Manchester and Sheffield in search of fresh sounds, old and new. I love championing British music, from UK Hip Hop and Broken Beat in the early 2000s, to the new wave of Jazz that has come to prominence in more recent times. It’s easy to trace the roots of these scenes outside of the UK, but wherever the music originated from, there’s something special to me in the British take on these sounds. The colonial legacy of Britain created uniquely diverse cities - and the music that came from those immigrant communities was equally singular. From the pain and struggle that the various peoples who ended up on these shores endured came a joyful expression that could not be contained.

A track like ‘Dazzle You’ (from cover stars Dazzle) captures this specifically British sound as well as any other. The blend of bass-heavy beats and the sweetest vocals that define the street soul sound is one that was birthed in the estates of Manchester, Birmingham and London. Record labels with photocopied black and white logos came and went, dreams were committed to tape and shared on pirate radio stations, in car stereos and at house parties. It’s the optimism of the sound that particularly appeals to me - the sound of any summer from the past 40 years from artists who in some cases only recorded a handful of songs.

There’s a lot of street soul on this album, as well as a dose of lovers-rock, some neo-soul and alternative RnB - but every track has the influences of those mid-80s sounds stitched into its DNA. It’s those threads that inspired me to compile Love & Purpose. Disc One (Love) is focussed on artists who were active pre-2000, whilst Disc Two (Purpose) shines a light on newer artists who are carrying the torch for the previous generation. So the Carl McIntosh produced ‘Feel’ by Ruth Joy sits alongside the throwback boogie of Lynda Dawn, and Children Of Zeus’ modern lovers rock classic ‘Hard Work’ rubs shoulders with Omar’s evergreen ‘Ghana Emotion’. It’s important to pay homage to those that paved the way, but that needn’t be at the expense of the next wave of talent. Celebrating both of these generations of artists is essential if we want the future to be as abundant as the past.

There’s no Children of Zeus without Loose Ends, no Lynda Dawn without Sade, no Purpose without Love. I hope that tracing those links gives you as much joy as it does for me.

Gilla, London June 2024