NEITHER FISH NOR FLESH TERENCE TRENT D’ARBY

TERENCE TRENT D’ARBY DECLARED 1987’S INTRODUCING THE HARDLINE... “THE GREATEST ALBUM SINCE SGT. PEPPER’S”, BUT HIS 1989 FOLLOW-UP, NEITHER FISH NOR FLESH, FARED LESS WELL, PROMPTING LEGENDARY CRITIC CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY TO SUGGEST “TERENCE IS THE WALRUS”. HIS BIZARRELY FLAMBOYANT SECOND LP NONETHELESS REWARDS REINVESTIGATION.

It’s a hot summer’s night, a couple of months before the release of Terence Trent D’Arby’s second album, bombastically titled Neither Fish Nor Flesh (A Soundtrack Of Love, Faith, Hope & Destruction). The preacher man’s son, former soldier and boxer – born Terence Trent Howard, known in the 21st Century as Sananda Maitreya – is hosting John Leland from the US-based Spin magazine in his plush Knightsbridge house, having earlier driven him to his North London studio to listen to the record. They returned home at 3am, where Leland will stay till breakfast, and the cover star’s still holding court while a patient publicist twiddles his thumbs on a nearby sofa.

“What is my destiny? How big is it?” artist asks journalist, if only rhetorically, as his next words confirm. “I’ll just have to wait... You’ll just have to wait and see. My destiny is not something that I can sum up in two pages. I think I know what it is, but some things are better left unsaid. I’m not saying this to take the heat off me, but I think there are a few of us around who will be used for something. Martin Luther King wasn’t an accident, Gandhi wasn’t an accident, Dylan was not an accident. Dylan was the drum major for a social movement. Those people who are destined to be read about in 2,000 years’ time are those that were in the right place at the right time.”

It’s 1989, and D’Arby – as we shall call him for history’s sake for this album – definitely believes he’s in the right place at the right time. Indeed, his audacity is Caesarean, up there with “It’s only hubris if I fail”. To some, such comparisons are rock star braggadocio, to others merely laughable, but it’s been forever thus. Early on in his career, he told NME that “I am a genius – point fucking blank.” On that occasion, the similarly bombastically titled Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent D’Arby topped charts around the world, going five times platinum in the UK and twice in the US. Who’s to say he’s wrong now?

D’Arby recorded his second album with four Top 20 UK singles under his belt, including the US No.1 hit, Wishing Well, as well as a Grammy and a Brit. Hopes at CBS were high, and the fact that he enjoyed pin-up perfect looks did no harm, while a voice part-Sam Cooke, part-Otis Redding, helped propel him towards superstar status. But D’Arby, typically, was doing his best to raise expectations further. He claimed To Know Someone Deeply Is To Know Someone Softly – which combined out of tune piano chords and rubbery bass before ending up like a Commodores tune – had been delivered in a dream by Marvin Gaye, and when he sang, on the frantically funky You Will Pay Tomorrow, “I used to rather be dead than humble/ But now I’d rather be dead than proud”, it was hard to imagine this was anything other than false modesty.

D’Arby was also unafraid of verbosely belittling his former work, even as he promoted his latest. “I can now see the first album for what it was,” he told The Guardian’s Adam Sweeting. “It’s like if Mozart looked back on his juvenilia, he’d go ‘Argh!’ where we might go ‘Wow!’... That album existed, as far as I’m concerned, purely to set me up for this one.”

What was this one, though? Leland coyly pronounced it “a showcase of creative

ambition, with D’Arby’s talents doing their best to keep up with his adventurousness,” and it certainly was, if not Mozart, then at least adventurous, as opening song Declaration: Neither Fish Nor Flesh’s rallying cry insisted: “I will not be defined”. But though D’Arby protested, he was frequently flippant – he referred to himself on the sleeve as “The Incredible E.G. O’Reilly” (E-G-O, geddit?!) – others were tiring of his bluster. In an impressive display of backhanded endorsement, Rolling Stone dubbed it

“his bona fide genius move, a self-produced, self-arranged and self-written musical statement that’s just as ambitious, brash and maddening as the boasts he’s made in interviews.” NME concluded, “the mouth has taken over and the music seems secondary.”

If his ‘daring’ was sometimes interpreted as dilettantism, D’Arby had the chops. Indeed, divorced from his often-absurd hyperbole, Neither Fish Nor Flesh stands up to scrutiny far better than contemporary coverage might have anticipated. Even Rolling Stone conceded: “You can call this album – or Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, for that matter – pretentious and overblown. But, however tangled their motives may be, D’Arby and Jackson are pushing themselves, taking chances, while most of their peers would be petrified.”

D’Arby would have liked this. Inspired as much by Brian Wilson – to whose eponymous 1988 LP he’d contributed backing vocals – as Martin Bernal’s controversial Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, he’d also appreciate ?uestLove’s more recent argument that the album “reinforced the benefits of maximalist production”. Because, if Neither Fish Nor Flesh is eccentric, it’s admirably so, though few will go so far as on D’Arby’s website, where it is anointed “the last record before the ‘Disney Generation’ was given possession of the music. Raw, vivid, uncompromising, riveting... a seminal influence on what would later be recognised as ‘Grunge’.”

Nonetheless there’s plenty to applaud. I’ll Be Alright and I Don’t Want to Bring Your Gods Down are gospel soul showcases and Roly

Poly playfully mimics Prince’s production, while

IF NEITHER FISH NOR FLESH IS ECCENTRIC, IT’S ADMIRABLY SO, THOUGH FEW WILL GO SO FAR AS ON D’ARBY’S WEBSITE, WHERE IT IS ANOINTED, “THE LAST RECORD BEFORE THE ‘DISNEY GENERATION WAS GIVEN POSSESSION OF THE MUSIC – RAW, UNCOMPROMISING, RIVETING... A SEMINAL INFLUENCE ON WHAT WOULD LATER BE RECOGNISED AS ‘GRUNGE’.”

This Side Of Love almost predicts The White Stripes and Billy Don’t Fall is an ode to tolerance, albeit lyrically clumsy. At times, too, the album’s almost avant-garde. I Have Faith In These Desolate Times pairs his extraordinary falsetto with harp and It Feels So Good To Love Someone Like You with sitar, strings and atonal scratches, while ...And I Need to Be With Someone Tonight closes things with an a cappella performance and what genuinely sounds like a fart.

It stiffed, of course. He insisted on releasing it for Christmas, with no pre-release singles, and to date it’s gone gold in the UK, where Introducing The Hardline... is five times platinum. D’Arby, naturally, still blames changes at CBS, even telling Q in 2001 that their “major breadwinner, who can’t be named at this time, made it clear if my second album was promoted, he’d take his business elsewhere.”

But, true or not, it clearly deserved better. Ostentatious? Sure. Over-ambitious? Most likely. But fascinating? Perhaps it won’t be read about in 2,000 years but, like it or not, Neither Fish Nor Flesh is unquestionably meaty.