'A TALE OF THREE CITIES'

A Guy Called Gerald is a pseudonym associated with many things. Depending on your taste in music it may take you back to a time of bussed out acid house and warehouse parties, or perhaps it will lead you to recollect a series of pioneering drum and bass tunes. Or you will equate the name to a man who creates a vast array of music from ambient grooves to Minimal techno. A man who constantly pushes the boundaries to create new sounds and new movements that are beyond classification. Whatever your musical knowledge of Gerald Simpson, he has almost certainly been a constant influence on the British dance music scene for the past 20 years.
 

With his latest release, an album entitled 'To All Things What They Need,' Gerald both taken his sound onto the next level while at the same time throwing a glance back to his past. What results is a beautiful mixture of thumping basslines and acid beats, surrounded by a fluffy duvet of leftfield chill. Each tune blazes a kind of poetic trail through your soul and takes you on a journey through the politics, beliefs, loves and many lives of its creator. "I would say it's very deep," says Gerald. "It's a little bit luxurious and has a nice relaxing start for an LP. I think it might take you into a space in your Head where you might wanna get up and move around for a little while, then it will take you back don and leave you with a thought. Then the next time you play it, you might hear a totally different thing.

Boxing Clever

"It's very much a move towards trying to break out of the genre thing really," he continues. "I was going to places and people were saying, 'Oh A Guy Called Gerald —drum and bass!' And I was thinking, 'Yeah I do drum and bass but throughout my entire life I've made all sorts of electronic music.' When I started I was doing what you now call house, you know. In a way it gets a bit frustrating being put into a little box."'

The album draws its influences from the three places Gerald holds closest to his heart. He first started work on the album two years ago in London, after returning from a four-year stint in New York. Gerald had been quite content living in the U.S. until the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. After that moment things became a little too crazy for him to take. "After September 11 happened one of my friends advised me to put an American flag in my front window," explains Gerald. "Because if you weren't patriotic, the President even said it; if you're not with us you're against us,' and people were actually being killed. The day after it happened a Sikh, he wasn't even Muslim, got murdered in the street just because he had a turban on.

"There were all these stop checks and if you didn't have your passport on you, you could be arrested for being a vagrant. I was like —wow- it's like one of those old Nazi films or something, and I'm living in it! It was all these little things that made me think this is a really scary place. One morning I woke up and saw buildings burning and people running, and the next day after that you could smell the burning and the next month after that and the next year and it didn't get any better and that's why I left. I was really upset about it, I mean I went there for an experience and I got one!"
 

Breathing Space

After returning to the UK, he spent a lot of time hanging out with his old pal Finley Quaye, who also happened to be working on an album. They each decided to contribute to the other's work and on Gerald's album, a track called ‘Strangest Changes’ was the result. "I'd not done any work with him for ages, and it was a good way of bonding with him again and building our relationship back up,” explains Gerald. "It's totally different to `Finley's Rainbow', which was the first track we made together back in 1995. Finley wrote the lyric, 'we make the strangest changes,' and I thought that would be a really nice lyric for the LP and we just built the whole song around it."

A year ago Gerald relocated to Berlin after feeling suffocated by the commercialism in this country and what he calls "a lack of space to breathe and think." There he has found more freedom for creativity and has come to love the artistic air of the city. "It's a crazy place, stuff is going on 24 hours a day," enthuses Gerald. "I'll be working at five a.m. and decide to take a break outside an' chill. Then get out there and there's some full on dance company doing some amazing dance, and then there's someone painting something over on the wall in the corner. No one watching, they're just doing it for the sake of creating something! It's really nice."

The Voice Of America

Although the album is heavily influenced by places Gerald has at some point called home, there is at times a quiet political undertone to this LP. 'American Cars' and 'Millennium Sanhedrin' in particular illustrate his distaste for the world's number one superpower and its influence over certain countries. For the latter track Gerald enlisted the vocal muscle of Philly-born poet Ursula Rucker, who has also collaborated with 4 Hero, Josh Wink and Little Louie Vega to name but a few.

Although Gerald had spent time in the United States, he didn't feel qualified to put his opinions about the country on paper. "I have all these emotions about it [the U.S.] but there was no way I could actually say them, it wouldn't have come out right," he explains. "I needed an American voice, giving their version of what's going on over there and Ursula was, for me, the voice of America. I had wanted to work with someone who had that spoken word kind of voice for ages, so it was a perfect marriage. She had been hoping to do some work with me for ages and I love her stuff, it really makes you listen. I could have gone on about the subject for days and made 10 LPs and not been able to hit it on the head like she did."

To sum up, yet again A Guy Called Gerald has delivered another ear extravaganza for us to pore over for years to come. Long may his good work continue.

‘To All Things What They Need’ is out now on !K7. See www.guycalledgerald.com for more details.