Times are toug We want people to have fun and get away from it H. e t
THEY MIGHT NOT have had a hit single since 1987, but Kool & The Gang are a cultural phenomenon. Their songs are heard at sporting events, political rallies and, in the case of the irresistible 1979 smash Ladies Night, almost every hen party you’ve ever stumbled upon.
“They played Celebration when the astronauts were floating around in the international space station,” Robert “Kool” Bell tells me. “They played it when the hostages came home from Iran, they play it at the Superbowl, baseball, hockey, weddings.
“It’s great our songs are part of people’s good times.”
Renowned for their combustive live performances, the New Jersey band were perhaps tempting fate when they released their 1979 hit, Too Hot.
Bassist Bell smiles broadly as he recalls, “We played a festival in Houston, Texas, and the keyboard caught on fire during Too Hot. I’d say 95 per cent of the audience thought it was part of our act!
“We had to get fire extinguishers and put the fire out and they were still cheering.”
Later, at a festival in Milwaukee, the band brought new meaning to whipping up a storm.
“We were told, ‘You guys had better get off the stage – there’s a tornado heading towards you’.
“And you could see it coming... We got off that stage.”
Robert, 73, is the last surviving member of the original Gang who broke big in the UK with Ladies Night. “We used to be the Magnificent Seven, now all of my partners have passed,” he says softly. “I’m the last man standing.”
Drummer George “Funky” Brown, their chief songwriter, died last November aged 74, three years after Robert’s younger brother, sax-player Ronald.
But their unique blend of soul, funk and jazz sweetened with pop sensibility refuses to die. Robert’s latest line-up – “the Magnificent Ten” – play the Love Supreme festival in July.
But what would he have done if his musical career had crashed?
“My grandfather was a mechanic and my grandmother told me he would have me under the car with him when I was four years old,” he recalls. “We were living in Youngstown, Ohio. We didn’t move to Jersey City until I was ten.
“When I was eight, I made my own motorbike. I took the motor from a lawnmower and attached it to a bicycle frame, then installed a carburetor to slow it down.
“So I could have been a mechanic, or I could’ve been a boxer. My daddy was a boxer.”
A good one too. Bobby Bell was a Golden Gloves champion and a top five rated featherweight.
Robert sparred with him in the ring when he was nine, but never saw any of his 152 bouts.
“Papa was a rolling stone – we didn’t see him that much.
“Our father and mother broke up when we were 8 and 9. We didn’t even see his fights on TV.”
The Bell brothers were still at school when they formed their first band The Jazziacs.
By coincidence their father was living in New York in the same apartment block as the legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk and befriending stars like Dizzy Gillespie.
Jazz icon Miles Davis frequented the gym Bobby trained in.
“He wanted to spar with my father. My father refused. He said, ‘Miles, if I hit you wrong and bust your lip, you might not have a career!’” The Jazziacs honed their funky craft using empty paint cans as percussion instruments.
“You got a different sound, depending on how much paint was in the can,” Robert explains.
“Jazz was a big influence. My brother was into John Coltrane, Dee Tee” – alto-sax player Dennis Thomas – “was into Cannonball Adderley, George Brown dug
Philly Joe Jones, keyboardist
Ricky Westfield was into Herbie Hancock.
“We used to rehearse in a church hall with a little stage room.”
Trumpeter Robert “Spike” Mickens and guitarist Charles Smith completed the line-up.
After starting as the opening act at their local jazz club, they gigged professionally in the Soul Town review – “playing twice a month as backing artist. We learnt Motown songs, James Brown songs. We had to back up about ten artists in a weekend.”
They also shared bills with rising comedy stars Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby.
By 1967 they were Kool & The Flames, but changed their name to avoid clashing with James Brown’s Famous Flames.
“Our first gig as Kool & The
Gang was at the Apollo theatre in Harlem, New York, with Willie Sister & The Mighty Magnificents,” Robert recalls. “And they blew us away. We had to go back to Jersey and sort ourselves out.”
In 1969 they released their self-titled instrumental debut LP on their manager’s De-lite label, breaking big in the USA with their 1973 single Jungle Boogie.
Incredibly they wrote that, Hollywood Swinging and Top 5 R&B hit Funky Stuff in one very creative session.
“We were still in our 20s doing shows in Jersey, teenyboppers chasing us after gigs! We
They honed their funky craft by using empty paint cans as percussion instruments
thought we’d made it!” James ‘JT’ Taylor joined as lead vocalist in 1979, in time for Ladies Night, a song inspired when Robert and his late wife Deborah were enjoying New York nightlife.
“We were hanging out and I noticed some of the hot clubs were having ladies’ nights. I had the title, George wrote the music, and the record was huge.”
Part of its lyrics, ‘This is your night tonight, come on, let’s all celebrate’ inspired Celebration.
“My brother said: ‘That’s another song!’ ” They went on to notch up two Grammy Awards, 31 gold and platinum albums and 18 UK hits, seven of them Top Tens.
“If someone had told me at the start that we’d sell 70 million albums, I would never have believed them.”
ROBERT’S career highlights include supporting Elton John at Wembley Stadium in 1984 and playing 48 shows with rock idols Van Halen in 2012.
“Some people thought it wouldn’t work, but we connected to lots of women in the crowd.
“When we got to Ladies Night and Get Down On It, they were out of their seats.”
Fans still get over-excited. He chuckles at the memory of a larger lady who climbed on stage pre-covid and accidentally felled their singer. “Funny things happen all the time.”
Their largest audience was
2002’s concert for AIDS awareness in Kenya, when they played to half a million people.
Kool & The Gang will be inducted into the Rock’n’roll Hall Of Fame in October. “It’s been 60 years,” says Robert. “We finally made it.”
They were playing around 100 gigs a year before the pandemic, and bounced back in 2022, doing 20 European shows in just 22 days. And they’ve played with orchestras too – Hamburg’s Night Of The Proms that year, and the Hollywood Bowl last July.
“I take more rest these days, but we’re still going,” he says.
“We’ve got UK festivals in July, then Germany and Spain.”
Appropriately enough for the band behind Celebration, they have their own champagne brand – Le Kool, launched with Maison Paul Berthelot – and a residency at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino – “formerly the Hilton, the home of Elvis Presley”.
Bell is also working on a documentary and “a possible musical, and after that, the last thing would be to make a movie of our story. The downside is the rest of the gang aren’t here to see it.”
And it was wife Deborah who came up with the idea for Robert’s Kool Kids Foundation, which raises money for inner city school music programmes.
They met as teenagers and raised two sons, Hakim and Mohammed, who are now the president and vice president respectively. Kool is CEO.
He’s also working on solar energy projects with former baseball pro Dusty Baker. But there’s no preaching in their music.
“Times are tough, but in that hour we’re on stage, people want to have fun and get away from all that,” he says.
“We get all ages at our shows and that’s a blessing, man.”
Kool & The Gang perform at this year’s Love Supreme Festival, at Glynde Place, East Sussex, July 5-7
‘‘ If someone had told me at the start we’d sell 70 million albums I’d never have believed them...