Alexander O’Neal
Criticize 3.0 Resurrection Records, 2017
Soul legend Alexander O’Neal’s Hearsay was a defining moment in ’80s R&B: its cutting-edge electronic production courtesy of Jam & Lewis epitomised the electronic funk sound or the era and foreshadowed new jack swing’s arrival at the end of the decade. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the record’s release, the now UK-based Alexander re-recorded the album as Hearsay 30, and Future Music took a trip to his new home of Manchester to find out how he created a new version of the classic Criticize with producer Alexander Johnstone.
Why revisit Hearsay now?
AON: “My manager came up with the idea of doing Hearsay again. I was kind of apprehensive, like ‘I don’t know about that!’ He said ‘Alex, you’re doing the same songs in the same key at the shows’. So the challenge has been coming back into the studio. The studio is not one of my favourite places because it’s too contrived for me. That’s why I’m so fast, I’m trying to get in and out of there! I’m trying to get mine and get on. I’m not like the guys who make the studio a party. They want to have a party and girls and the whole nine, but I’m outta there so fast.” AJ: “I want that!”
AON: “You can have that after I leave. Maybe you do! I had never heard of anyone ever re-recording an album that they did, especially 30 years ago. I’ve heard a lot of different recordings of great artists who I admire, like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett; every time they recorded a song, someone was recording it so they had the capability of putting it out as a single. But I’ve never heard of anybody re-recording an album. That was much more enticing to me, the fact that we were going to put a twist on the music and some of the vocals and stuff like that, and the approach was going to be different. That’s what excited me the most.”
“There was so much sampling in Hearsay - but sampling was a brand new thing in the ’80s. To be able to do it tastefully like they did was phenomenal. I mean, whoever gets there first is going to be the one to enjoy all enjoy all the spoils, it’s as simple as that!”
The album sounds very different to the original version, it’s much more live-sounding and gritty.
AJ: “Alex was doing this kind of music when he first started, and I wanted to tap into his influences from the ’70s, before the Jam & Lewis stuff.”
AON: “One of the brilliant things about what we did was, we came in and we actually had fun on each song. Every night Alex just kept reassuring me that I could do it. So when I get in there and I get a certain part and certain songs intimidate me, I’ve got to figure out how to transpose my way out of that, to something that’s the equivalent of what I recorded 30 years ago. That was the challenging part for me, making the transformation.
“Some things I did deliberately because it was better. I knew that I wanted to put a couple of twists on it, but I wanted to be as accurate as I could with the delivery of the vocals because the fans that know this stuff and grew up on it, they don’t want to be thrown to the side lyrically… I don’t think that would have been the right approach for us.
“So we kept the lyrical content in conjunction with the first lyrical content of the first Hearsay, but we made the whole thing grown up and mature.”
So you’d have recorded the original differently given the chance?
AON: “I don’t think I’d have done it that differently, because when you’re working with great producers like Jam & Lewis... I did have the luxury of not having to worry about giving the best vocal effort that I could, I didn’t have to deal with the technical aspects. But in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, where bands played everything, all the drums were live, all the horns were live, everything. There was so much sampling in Hearsay – but sampling was a brand new thing in the ’80s. To be able to do it tastefully like they did was phenomenal. I mean whoever gets there first is going to be the one to enjoy all enjoy all the spoils, it’s as simple as that! The first thing I would have done: I wouldn’t have put my voice that far back. If my fans really heard my voice like they should have heard it on all of those songs, then we probably wouldn’t have re-recorded it! I can’t express how important working with band people again is to me. When you take the music out of the music dog, it just becomes blank. You don’t know how important it is to have the musicians that come in to give it that live feel. When I come in and I hear a guitar player that I don’t even play with tearin’ Criticize up, doing something different, I’m like ‘Oh wow, I love that’, but 30 years ago that just couldn’t happen.”