Interview: Kid Creole

Ask anyone old enough to have grown up in the eighties and they’ll sure remember Kid Creole. He was the zoot-suited roué who lit up the charts with a string of tropical pop singles; a suave cartoon pimp who played ringmaster to a saucy circus that struck gold catching the escapist zeitgeist of the era. In fact, so successful were Kid Creole & The Coconuts back then that Princess Diana hired them to play a private show. But that was then and this is now. The Kid, born August Darnell, was making magazine covers and scooping honours here at a time when dressing up and a little silliness was not just accepted but expected, and now his act is too often remembered as folly – and that just ain’t right. His Rogers & Hammerstein-go-mambo antics were more than fatuous jive; he was no less than the James Brown, the Sly Stone and the Cab Calloway of his day – and if words won’t persuade otherwise, a new compilation album might.

Going Places: The August Darnell Years is, as the man himself puts it, “a trip back to the roots, before the commercialism and all the ridiculousness happened – reflecting the early writings and recordings of August Darnell”. Covering the little documented years of his career between 1974 and 1983, and some rare and brilliant songs cut therein, it proves him a songwriter, producer and entertainer who played many unsung roles in a series of musical revolutions, most of which came about by chance. It is, as he succinctly puts it, “quite a story”.

Darnell was born in the 1950s, not in Canada as biographies suggest, but in The Bronx. “My older brother Stoney and I were born under a lucky star,” he fondly recalls from his second home in Sweden. “We had the magic of good upbringing because we didn’t think one musical style was any better than another. We were, shall I say, egalitarian. We loved all music equally; we loved soul and James Brown and Motown, but we also fell head over heels in love with The Beatles! Back in The Bronx, our contemporaries were thumbing their noses at The Beatles and thinking we were sick to like them, but my brother and I said, ‘Please, music is music. It’s universal,’ and we were lucky to have that attitude thanks to our parents. Stoney, his whole life was about music – he was the man in the family who knew his destiny. I always thought my destiny was acting – to be a serious thespian. I actually went to college majoring in drama.”

When August got his draft card for Vietnam, however, he made a smart move and switched to English: “There was a shortage of English teachers and I became exempt, thank God. My brother did something opposite; he went down to the draft board and pretended to be crazy – and it worked. They don’t want crazy people in the army.”

Around 1975, Stoney and August (who’d always dabbled in music a little) pulled together a sultry soul group, Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, featuring vocalist Cory Daye and Sugar Coated Andy, who would later become Kid Creole’s nutcase sidekick, Coati Mundi.

“The Savannah Band got signed to RCA right off the bat,” he remembers, still with some amazement. “Isn’t that unbelievable? The home of Elvis Presley; one of the biggest labels in America. We cut an album in the basement of a home studio in New Jersey and it sold millions. A gold record with our first album and a number one single, ‘Cherchez La Femme’ – what a way to start a career! That spawned everything that came after it; that was the catapult for the rest of our lives. Had it not been successful, I would probably still be a schoolteacher today.”

New band gets signed to RCA. Good fortune? Perhaps. But it goes on. They get a manager, and not just any manager. “We got Tommy Mottola,” he enthuses, “who became the president of Sony; who later discovered and married Mariah Carey; who was instrumental in signing Gloria Estefan and Beyoncé.”

As the seventies draw on, further serendipitous activity ensues: Savannah Band members join in-house groups for labels such as Sugar Hill and thus play on some the first ever hip hop records. Darnell himself writes and produces disco tracks (such as Machine’s ‘There But For The Grace If God Go I’ and Ron Rogers’ ‘Don’t Play With My Emotions’) that would become the backbone of house music’s birth. If it was going off in New York, he was in on it.

“We did all of that stuff, man!” Darnell beams. “There was one community of musicians back then called The Bible – that’s an important fact – and when you’re growing up in The Bronx and you’re thinking, ‘Where do we go, what direction we headed in?’ you all get together. It wasn’t about, ‘How much we getting paid for this session?’ In those days it was, ‘Hey can I play on your record? I got ma bass in the car, I’ll pull it out, let’s go in and do something!’ It was an extraordinary period in New York, but when you’re living it, you don’t realise it. Then when you look back and document it, you think, ‘My God, look at what came out of that.’”

After Stoney split up the Savannah Band, August took a sabbatical in Montreal and conceived the Kid Creole character that would forever consume him. Pennies from heaven rained heavier still. Michael Zilkha, heir to the Mothercare Foundation and owner of the cult ZE label, bankrolled the Kid Creole act (including Coati Mundi, the trio of gorgeous Coconut girls and all) and drafted him in as in-house producer, where he worked magic at the forefront of the no wave movement. ZE was partnered with Island Records, and its owner, Chris Blackwell (discoverer of Bob Marley), fell for Kid Creole, pushing the band into Europe and beyond. Before they’d even had a hit (and they’ve had many, including ‘Stool Pigeon’; Prince even wrote one), they toured the world, heralded as delivering one of the greatest live shows ever. “Luck, destiny, fate,” Darnell muses. “You couldn’t write a script like that.”

Now in his fifties and still touring the globe (in between annual stints in the smash musical Oh What A Night), the insightful and indefatigable showman still takes very little credit for his success. “I’m saying, yes the talent was there, but we were no more or less talented than the next guy struggling,” he offers with disarming pragmatism. “It’s great to be lucky in this game, but in order to be in the game you must understand that you can’t get frustrated when you don’t win. My favourite quote of all time is, ‘The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,’ and that is the truth. You don’t have to be the best singer, songwriter or dancer, you just have to be in the graces of the planets when they’re all aligned. And we’ve had an incredibly illustrious career based on being in the right place and meeting the right people.”

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