I feared I’d kill Hamish

JBiA funkster worried that he was putting a legend at risk while making his new album

SINCE 2005, Barry Gordon has been keeping the funk flame alive.

First with James Brown Is Annie and now a new Scottish funk ’n’ soul supergroup, Barry Gordon & The Tomorrow Band, he’s even involved the country’s greatest export in the genre – Average White Band.

The late “Molly” Duncan produced the 2015 debut by JBiA. His bandmate Hamish Stuart produced their second album and has now produced Barry’s lockdown album Inside/Outside.

Was this project born out of lockdown and not being able to play with JBiA?

Yes, absolutely. JBiA tend to write together in the same room as it brings about the best results. So working remotely wasn’t an option. So I re-educated myself on how to use audio recording software, and decided to write a bunch of songs from scratch.

Did you think it would become an album?

At best, I thought I might end up with some concrete ideas to take into the JBiA rehearsal room at a later date, but the whole thing mushroomed into something else entirely.

I invited several musicians to contribute towards it (many of whom I didn’t know) and before I knew it I had an album’s worth of fully-fledged songs, complete with horn section, backing vocalists, guitar soloists – the whole shebang.

How did that work during lockdown?

I assembled a core group of six musicians – drums, bass, guitar, piano, saxophone, vocals – to get things going, six being the maximum amount permitted inside most of the rehearsal rooms I hired.

Then, when Hamish joined us for rehearsals, I hired a huge, well-ventilated arts warehouse in west Edinburgh (54EP) so we could bring in the additional horns, guitars, percussion.

This brought the numbers up to 12. For the studio recordings, we had to carefully work out who would be playing what, on what track, and on which day.

This took a lot of coordinating, especially as we could only have X amount of people in the studio at any one time. So the studio diary had to be strictly structured. There was very little room for changing things around.

Everything went according to plan – testament to the professionalism of everyone involved. In the end, we had a total of 20 people play on the album – one of us literally having to phone in their parts.

How are JBiA taking this project?

Side projects are part and parcel of being a working musician.

What did Hamish bring to the project?

From playing gigs with him, to talking to him at length about songwriting, to working with him in the studio on JBiA’s second album, I’ve learned more from him in one coffee sitting than anything I’d acquired over the previous 10 years. He’s worked with the best there is – still is – and lived to tell the tale.

He’s 71, though, and should have been shielding but was working in a confined space.

Did you have worries?

I was worried about him. He was our queen bee, so we had to protect him at all costs.

Being responsible for such a big, expensive project made me feel physically ill at points. I thought: “What if Hamish falls ill? What if he dies? I’ll be the one who killed off one of the most successful Scottish musicians of all time.”

It brought home that there was a pandemic and we had to be vigilant.

Hamish is one of the