The Intro

14 years after The Equals scored a UK number 1 with Baby, Come Back, its songwriter Eddy Grant scored another chart-topper with the sloping reggae hit I Don’t Wanna Dance.

Before

Edmond Montague Grant was born in Plaisance, British Guiana (now Guyana) on 5 March 1948. He later resided in Linden. Grant’s father was a trumpeter. Growing up, his parents lived and worked in London, and would send money back to him for his education.

In 1960, Grant and his brother Rudy (also a musician) were reunited with their parents in Kentish Town. He learned to read and write music while studying, and fell in love with rock’n’roll after attending a Chuck Berry concert at Finsbury Park Astoria.

Aged 16, Grant formed The Equals in 1964 when drummer John Hall suggested they start a band. Grant was lead guitarist and provided backing vocals, and they were joined by their schoolmate Pat Lloyd on rhythm guitar, plus Derv Gordon on vocal and his brother Lincoln, also on rhythm.

The Gordons were white while Grant and the others were black, which made The Equals the first notably mixed-race rock group in the country. But they had more going for them than this ‘novelty’. The Equals fused rock, pop, blues and ska like nobody else at the time, and they quickly gained a following in London, often suporting visiting US legends like Bo Diddley.

Grant wrote Baby, Come Back, which was originally a B-side to Hold Me Closer in 1967, but was promoted to become The Equals’ fifth single, and it climbed all the way to the top of the hit parade. He became their principle songwriter, and often their material would be political, such as Police on My Back, which was later covered by The Clash. Grant also wrote songs for the likes of Prince Buster and The Pyramids.

The Equals turned heads for a few years, presaging glam by experimenting with a flamboyant dress sense. Grant sometimes even wore a long blonde women’s wig. But in 1969 the whole band were injured in a car accident while touring Germany. Grant suffered the most, and decided to stop touring with the band.

Then in 1971, Grant suffered a heart attack and collapsed lung, and subsequently quit the band entirely. He decided to concentrate solely on production initially, opening Coach House Studios at his Stamford Hill home in 1972. Two years later, he began Ice Records (his second stint at running a label, after Torpedo a few years began previous). Production duties included working on albums by The Pioneers and his brother Rudy, working under the name The Mexicano.

In 1975, Grant released his self-titled solo debut album, but it failed to make any impact. Neither did the follow-up soca LP Message Man in 1977. That year is a fascinating one for Grant. Not only did he contribute to a new Equals LP – Mystic Syster – he also took up tapdancing and acting (at the behest of Norman Beaton, later the star of Channel 4 sitcom Desmond’s), and he also created some startlingly original music.

Under the name The Coach House Rhythm Section, he released the single Nobody’s Got Time. This remake of a 1975 track is house music, years before the term existed, featuring squelchy synths and a rhythm to light up dancefloors. And the B-side, a proto-instrumental called Time Warp, is even better. In 2010, Grant challenged Damon Albarn over the obvious influence of this track on Gorillaz’ Stylo. It was settled out of court.

In 1978, Grant melded his new electro and disco influences with pop, reggae and soca, and released his best album yet. However, Walking on Sunshine was only originally released in Africa and the Caribbean, because his UK audience had dwindled so much. The LP was doing particularly well in Nigeria, but at the height of its success, the government there banned exported records. This left Grant with more than 10,000 copies he couldn’t send over. He and his brother began selling them to UK retailers and disc jockeys, and when the banger Living on the Frontline began to get people dancing, Ensign Records agreed to release it as a single, and it charted at 11.

Shockingly, when the album was given a release by Virgin Records in 1979, it tanked, despite critical acclaim. The excellent title track failed to chart – although justice was served in part when Arthur Baker’s Rockers Revenge project released a brilliant version in 1982, which peaked at four.

In 1981, Grant finally scored a charting album in the UK with Can’t Get Enough. Its first single, Do You Feel My Love, climbed to eight. The second, Can’t Get Enough of You, reached 13, but I Love You, Yes I Love You, only scraped in at 37.

Ironically, just as UK success was finally coming, Grant left. He moved to Barbados and opened Blue Wave Studios, where he produced his most commercially successful album, Killer on the Rampage. The first single to be released was I Don’t Wanna Dance, which came together while Grant was waiting to go on stage while touring.

Perhaps Grant’s decision to leave the country makes more sense when you consider that he said in 2008 that it wasn’t neccessarily to be taken literally. He told The Daily Telegraph: ‘I Don’t Wanna Dance can mean that you don’t want to go out on the dancefloor or it could mean that you don’t want to go along with an idea. That’s how I try to write: you take it how you want, but I am basically a writer of protest’. And in light of the rioting that enveloped England in the early 80s, you don’t blame him for getting out.

Review

Grant’s sole number 1 being I Don’t Wanna Dance is somewhat baffling. Granted (pardon the pun), he was so ahead of his time in the late 70s that it was always unlikely that anything from Walking on Sunshine would become a hit single back then. But I Don’t Wanna Dance, while not without some awkward charm, is not number 1 material. It makes me think of Stevie Wonder’s only solo number 1, I Just Called to Say I Love You. An average tune, unrepresentative of an idiosyncratic artists’s typical material, some how capturing the UK’s imagination.

It would seem that record buyers in the latter half of 1982 just couldn’t get enough of commercial reggae (although to be fair, this single also made it to the top in other countries too). After all, this was the third number 1 of this type, coming hot off the heels of Musical Youth’s Pass the Dutchie and Culture Club’s Do You Really Want to Hurt Me. But this is an unremarkable and slight number 1, and it’s frustrating to know his next single would have been so much more deserving.

In the video, Grant tries to prove the ‘no man is an island’ theory wrong, by mostly miming from exactly that (which seems to have been made from a chunk of a house) while his romantic interest stares at him from a distance. There’s clearly been a row and Grant definitely doesn’t want to dance with her. But by the end, they’re sat facing each other on this strange island, and nothing is resolved. It’s marginally more interesting than the song.

After

So yes, I Don’t Wanna Dance outperformed the far superior follow-up Electric Avenue, released in 1983, as it peaked at two. Grant’s most successful melding of styles was catchy as hell and had a message. Some of my earliest memories involve strutting around my house to this 7-inch, aged three to four. In my head, Grant was singing about a futuristic street that was, erm, cool. Actually, the track refers to a real street, which was the first market street in Brixton to get electricity, and the race riots.

Electric Avenue was his last UK charting single for five years. In 1984, his would-be title track to blockbuster adventure film Romancing the Stone was cut, so it bombed. His lowest moment, I’d wager, was taking part in Prince Edward’s ill-fated TV special The Grand Knockout Tournament in 1987.

But you can’t keep a good man down, and a year later he was back in the charts with the anti-apartheid hit Gimme Hope Jo’anna. It reached seven in the charts and I recall a summer in which I totally missed the point of the song and sang it at my cousin Joanne incessantly.

Grant branched out from making hits once more. He became a music publisher and a nightclub owner, and his studio was used by huge acts including The Rolling Stones, Sting and Cliff Richard. He still released albums though, and will have dome well from the royalties for the 1994 number 1 cover of Baby, Come Back, recorded by Pato Banton featuring Ali and Robin Campbell of UB40.

In 2000 Grant invented a new genre – ringbang, which he said was an attempt to combine all rhythms that have originated in Africa. A year later, Grant returned for the last time to date with a remix of Electric Avenue, which reached five. Proving he wasn’t without a sense of humour (but possibly in need of money), he recorded a parody of Gimme Hope Jo’anna in 2004. Gimme Yop Me Mama was used in adverts for the yoghurt-based drink Yop. In 2008 he performed at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday concert.

Grant made the news in 2020 when he sued US President Donald Trump for unauthorised use of Electric Avenue in a presidential campaign video. In 2024 the court ruled that the ruling shitbag had to pay Grant damages, and the case was settled out of court.

The Outro

Grant is an underrated artist, who has spent decades making music on his terms, and crossing boundaries confidently and with panache. He doesn’t really get the credit he deserves, although his more leftield electronic music is rightfully given its plaudits by DJs and fellow artists.

The Info

Written and produced by

Eddy Grant

Weeks at number 1

3 (13 November-3 December)

Trivia

Births

14 November: Scottish footballer Stephen Hughes
27 November: ‘Political activist’ and racist Tommy Robinson 
30 November: Boxer Tony Bellew

Deaths

16 November: Comedian Arthur Askey/Architect Peter Yates
19 November: Physician Leslie John Witts
20 November: Civil servant John Redcliffe-Maud, Baron Redcliffe-Maud
21 November: Spiritual healer John Hargrave
26 November: Actor Robert Coote
28 November: Ulster Unionist MP Hugh O’Neill, 1st Baron Rathcavan
2 December: Comedian Marty Feldman

Meanwhile…

28 November: Opinion polls show the Conservative government has an approval rating of up to 44% and is well on course for a second successive electoral victory, 13 points ahead of Labour. Support for the Alliance has halved in the space of a year.

2 December: The Queen’s Park by-election is held as a result of the death of the sitting Labour MP Frank McElhone. His widow, Helen McElhone, holds the seat for Labour.

3 December: The film Gandhi is released. It would win eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.