James Brown in China in February this year. Photograph: Eugene Hoshiko/AP
This note was added 17 May 2010: James Maycock has asked us to point out that this article is a paraphrasing of a telephone interview he gave to a Guardian journalist.
I went over to Augusta, Georgia to film James Brown in January 2003 for a documentary I was working on. We were all in this suite in our hotel, when suddenly he burst into the room and within two seconds he'd shaken all our hands. Then he rounded on the director and started giving him the hardest time - 'Who do you think you are, making a documentary about me?' etc etc. That's the way he tested people - he did it to terrify people, to show who was boss.
After that first introduction, we all sat down and ate in this funny old Georgian hotel, as if nothing had happened. He talked a lot and seemed totally magnetic.
James Brown always stayed close to where he was brought up, by the state line between Georgia and South Carolina. We were there for a few days. We had to dress smartly and call him Mr Brown at all times. He took us to his old school and also to the brothel where his aunt brought him up - not far from the mansion he was then living in just across the border in South Carolina.
It was great to get that close to him, but he was unfathomable. He was quite a contrary man and very paranoid - unsurprisingly, considering everything that happened to him. His mother abandoned him when he was four and he did not see her again until he was 25. There was great bitterness there about the way she had treated him.
What he achieved was phenomenal - he came from the poorest of backgrounds, taught himself, and ended up changing the course of black American music, twice. First, when he put the emphasis on the first beat and created funk. And then again, much later, and almost unintentionally, with hip-hop. The way he wrote music - that repetition - was so ripe for sampling. A lot of people would argue that without James Brown rhythms, it would have been much harder ever to create hip-hop.
He was way ahead of anyone. He was on the top of his career, at the cutting edge, for 12 to 13 years. In the 60s, in America, there were three musical kingdoms: Stax, Motown and James Brown.
Yet he was not a great musician in any way - he could play the drums, the organ, but you wouldn't call him a virtuoso. His band members used to joke about his music playing. He would laugh about it, too.
What he had was this great innate understanding of music. He was an amazing performer, a great singer, magnetic on stage, and he surrounded himself with brilliant musicians. He was a great risk-taker too. In the end, though, it was his deep understanding of music and of its structure that made him a complete one-off.
Interview by Clare Margetson. James Maycock was the researcher on James Brown: Soul Survivor.
