Feature ¦ Chaz Jankel - The Forgotten Man of Pop

Although not totally oblivious to Chaz Jankel until recently, I must admit that after having done some research and reading on him I've found out some very interesting facts about the man behind a whole heap of 80's classics.

Having read through the earlier piece on Ian Dury again, I just happened to delve into the Blockheads side of the Dury story a little, to see what influences they brought to the table...

To many people he is largely known as Ian Dury's groovy sidekick in the Blockheads (an ongoing love affair). Jankel trod manfully into Dury's life during the collapse of Ian & The Kilburns and was at the Ian Dury & The Blockheads, acting as the mercurial Londoner's sidekick, songwriting partner and musical director. If Dury brought the rock and the roll to their music, then Jankel delivered the jazz and soul (his earliest influences being Lee Dorsey etc)

But there is another side to Jankel: that of a songwriter, solo performer and thanks to cult club hits like "3,000,000 Synths" and "Glad To Know You", an underground dance hero. Working alongside studio wiz, Phlip Bagenal, who not only engineered many of his best works, and with whom he also founded Eastcote Studios, Jankel was responsible for some of best and most experimental dance records to come from these shores. Predictably, Jankel's work received much less attention than it deserved in the UK mainly because he was white and from London at a time when most dance music fans regarded anything that wasn't black and from a Bronx ghetto as somehow inferior.

"It’s wonderful. Every time I get an email from someone saying something like: “I always wondered who recorded ‘Glad to Know You’,” it amazes me. I never realized how excited people got about those songs. When you’re writing, you’re obviously doing it with an optimistic spirit, but you don’t know who is actually buying the records. Most of my stuff was written before email existed, so I never found out who my real fans were."

Perversely, it was largely the championing of his work by African-American DJs in New York and Chicago in the 1980s that led to the re-evaluation of Jankel's work in Britain and the subsequent release of this excellent compilation. Jankel's first solo collaboration was with veteran songwriter Kenny Young (who co-wrote Under The Boardwalk) whose lyrics had been inspired by a recent and controversial Japanese movie called Ai No Corrida.

It eventually ended up in the hands of Quincy Jones, and it was enough to win a deal with A&M, which eventually yielded five albums (and, bizarrely, no hits).

"I loved Ian dearly but he was very demanding and intense. I needed time to express my other musical ideas, which weren't so English; music that was more Latin and jazzed out."

Whatever Jankel's music lacked in commercial sales it certainly made up for in underground kudos. Glad To Know You, co-written with Ian Dury (and later covered by Kitty Grant - one of my favorite all time tracks), was a huge club hit in the USA, spending 6 weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100. One of his final efforts as a major label artist was You're My Occupation, featuring Brenda Jones on vocals, the best song on his fifth (and unreleased) album, finally getting a proper release after over 20 years.

It was often on the 12-inch releases where Jankel could really let loose and have some fun (not least with some of the wacky song titles) and from where many of the tracks for this compilation are drawn. Rêve de Chèvre (Goat Dream) is a dubbed out version of Questionnaire, shorn of its melodic content, driven by a skeletal rhythm and plaintive piano figures, while the brilliant 3,000,000 Synths is an experiment in the unnecessary overuse of the Oberheim. To Woo Lady Kong is a jazzy reggae reading of Glad To Know You, with Chas's raucous organ added as a knowing lick on the fade out.

Although most of the songs included here were recorded over 20 years ago it sounds strangely fresh as though the wheels of fashion have circled once more towards what we might call Chasworld. This is partially to do with how criminally underplayed and undervalued his solo work is but it also reflects the influences of a lot of the dance scene's young bucks. These days Chaz's work is being re-worked by who else but Todd Terje, and also the likes of Hercules & Love Affair. Having been asked about what he thinks of the current dance music scene here's what he had to say:

"I do listen to dance music, but not that much. There are a lot of acts out there now, guys like Mark Ronson and Groove Armada, who are essentially club acts performing with live bands and I suppose that's what I was doing all those years ago," he offers by way of explanation. "It's club-funk with a rock edge and that's where I was coming from, too." It is, we'd have to say, where he is still coming from a few decades and many grey hairs later. I wasn't familiar with Hercules, but had heard of Todd Terje. I am interested, though, as I’m getting ready to start my own album soon. I think it’s important I know the context of what I’m making. I don’t go to as many clubs as I used to—I hardly go out at all."

So keep an eye out for future works of Chaz Jankel, the forgotten man of disco all those years back.