Shabaka Hutchings, band leader of Sons of Kemet
Shortlisted Hyundai Mercury Prize album: Your Queen Is a Reptile
Album that inspired me: Grounation (1973) by Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari
I’m not sure if it’s just a folk legend or not, but the myth is that Duke Ellington went to Jamaica’s Blue Mountains in the late 60s or the early 70s, met Count Ossie, who formed the group the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, and gave them a couple of arrangements that were included on this album. I’m not sure how true it is, but I think that regardless of whether he did do it or not, it’s one of those albums that mixes very traditional Caribbean approaches to music and jazz.
Saxophone player Cedric “Im” Brooks features really prominently throughout the album, and hearing him play, it’s like Rastafari devotional music but with jazz improvisation and spoken word on it. There’s a lot of historical chanting, talking about aspects of history like Jamaican colonisation and the independence movement. And it was the first time I’d heard an album that had all of these things: traditional aspect as the basis of it, the nyabinghi rhythm, the very advanced jazz soloing in the midst of all this, and spoken word that reminds you of Gil Scott-Heron.
The first time I heard it was in college: [jazz double bassist] Gary Crosby said I really needed to check this album out. I hadn’t heard anything like it before, and it just blew me away. And as I’ve grown with it, I hear different things in it. At college, it was novel, it was something I could try to learn from. Whereas now, it feels like this is a seminal album and I hear more things, like the group interaction, the way the intensity and tension flows between them.
Even before I started Sons of Kemet, I was listening to it constantly. It wasn’t that I wanted to replicate the music specifically, but to replicate the atmosphere of the music, not as a commodity but almost for a devotional purpose. I was influenced by the atmosphere of it – I want to make something as epic as this sounds, in the same spirit. When I’m writing for Sons of Kemet, I want to write music that is in some way connected to the past, but is in some way looking forward.
Jonathan Higgs, lead vocalist and songwriter with Everything Everything
Shortlisted Hyundai Mercury Prize album: A Fever Dream
Album that inspired me: The White Album (1968) by the Beatles
Picking The White Album by the Beatles is not very original, but it’s a big fat classic. This album has a sense of amazing creativity. I remember reading that Paul McCartney said that when they wrote together, they never had a bad session. And that sounds amazing – as a songwriter, that never happens!
You can tell the whole record is festering with ideas. It’s insane, you can hear the fact that they’re writing continuously, it’s just pouring out of them, and that is so inspiring. On Helter Skelter, they accidentally invent heavy metal – it’s like, here’s heavy metal for you, bye! And every song seems to be written for a different set of instruments, like they’re so full of ideas and creativity that they just pick up anything, do something amazing with it, chuck it away and pick up the next thing. I love that.
My parents introduced me to the Beatles, and I think it was appealing because, as a child, there are so many moments that are quite scary, actually. There’s Revolution 9 on there, which, if you’re a child, is really disturbing with those disembodied voices and strange sounds. It sounds like people are in trouble. Even something like Helter Skelter or While My Guitar Gently Weeps, there’s a strange sadness and darkness to it. In Rocky Raccoon, someone gets shot and in Bungalow Bill, he shoots an elephant right between the eyes. It’s scary.
There are obviously moments of beauty, of silliness, of joy and so many emotions, but that feeling of “the world is a scary place full of unknown things” really comes to life on this record. As I get older, my ears change and I can appreciate why it was so affecting, and it makes me think about my own music and how I can steal their atmosphere. It’s very influential.
Kojo Kankam (AKA Novelist), grime MC
Shortlisted Hyundai Mercury Prize album: Novelist Guy
Album that inspired me: Boy in Da Corner (2003) by Dizzee Rascal
Boy in Da Corner inspired me to make my last album. I can’t remember the exact first time I heard it, but I remember how I felt. The beats didn’t sound like anything else. They put that album under the umbrella of grime but I still don’t think it sounds like the other beats that you’d affiliate with that music. It really stood out to me. I thought: I want to make something on that level.
It was one of those albums that was everywhere. You’d hear the songs on the radio – I used to listen to pirate radio when I was young and sometimes I might hear Dizzee Rascal’s bars. It wasn’t so much the lyrics or the things he’d talk about – I didn’t really care about that when I was younger – but the beats.
When I was making my last album, it was a big influence. It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to replicate the sound, but I wanted to actually be that fresh. I wanted to make something new, completely new. That was my main thing. When I was producing my album, I was thinking: how can I make something that doesn’t sound like anything else? If I’m making an album, I don’t listen to any other music. I’ve taken in so much music in my life already that I just want to let whatever is seeping out of my pores come out.
I’ve never met Dizzee Rascal in person but I have messaged him in the past to tell him: “I respect you man, and big up.” He was cool about it.
