How Labi got cut-up tips from Bowie

British singer-songwriter was briefly touched by the Burroughs Beat early in his career but then played a key part in feeding the US music industry with some irresistible samples

THIS IS A popular music story with only the most tenuous of Beat associations but hopefully worth sharing for a number of reasons. It’s a tale that includes an element of Burroughsian cut-up and then the remarkable adoption of a number of fragments of a different kind: hip hop samples.

Labi Siffre is a British singer-songwriter of African-Caribbean heritage who is widely known in the UK, certainly to pre-millennials, on the strength of two key songs – ‘It Must Be Love’ and ‘(Something Inside) So Strong’.

The first of these was a charming upbeat hit for the vocalist-guitarist in 1970 but then became a smash in Britain all over again when those irrepressible ska funsters Madness took it back into the Top 40 in 1981.

The second was a chart entry in 1987 and actually won a prestigious Ivor Novello award for ‘Best Song’ that year, the equivalent almost of a Grammy over here. But the piece took on a life beyond the pop firmament: it was adopted as an anthem of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa and, further, became a symbol of wider political resistance. Amnesty International has even used it in its own campaigns.

Siffre was born into a middle-class black family in Notting Hill, London, in 1945 but the colour of his skin and his genetic information – he knew from a very tender age that it was boys rather than girls who attracted him – meant that he felt doubly isolated growing up in the capital.

Just over a decade on, by his very early teens, he was aware of the race riots that would, in 1958, decimate his racially mixed neighbourhood and become a dark marker of societal division in English annals.

The street demos against the poorer Caribbeans who had begun to arrive on the ship Windrush at the end of the 1940s were conducted by a indigenous racist element which prominently featured those gutter brawlers the Teddy Boys, an early post-war British subculture which adopted rock‘n’roll but also harked back to the perceived glory days of Empire.

With a Nigerian father who had trained as a lawyer and a Barbadian mother, Siffre and family were able to move to a safer part of the city and escape the bricks and rocks, bloodied heads and broken glass, of those infamous street battles.

The subject of a fascinating new BBC documentary in the lauded Imagine series – it is subtitled This Is My Song, referencing an early composing success – Siffre emerged as a working blues and jazz guitarist in the 1960s and, by the early 1970s, had his first run of high-profile singles and TV appearances.

Today, at 76, he self-describes as ‘an atheist, homosexual, black artist’, an individual who was turned against religion by his private Catholic education, a man who enjoyed a near 50 year relationship with his same-sex partner and a performer of colour who continues to express his hard-held identity politics through a deep and sensitive creativity.

In 1972, a whole half a century ago, he was on tour and recalls an extraordinary evening when both he and David Bowie arrived in the northern English city of Sheffield concurrently, each playing gigs, as was the Scottish pop soul singer Lulu.

Siffre recalls how Bowie, performing his Spiders from Mars concerts, was staying in the city’s Hallam Hotel: ‘I was on the middle floor, Lulu was down below and David was at the top, and I got a call and it was David. He said, “I’ve heard you’re in. Come on up. Let’s have tea".’

He adds, “I’ve got a finished song, I’ve got the lyrics, and it was great and I’m pleased with it and then there’s the business of there’s always something that can be done. We sat on the floor with tea and biscuits and we did cut-ups!’

While it was never made clear if Siffre ever took a concrete lesson from the encounter and used the technique in that song or future songs, it is intriguing that Bowie, who had become fascinated by the theory of cut-up as a result of his interest in William S Burroughs’ radical approach and would apply it in his early 1970s lyric work, was generous enough to share his innovative rock writing concept with another musician.

Perhaps even more surprising though was the career renaissance that Siffre’s output would enjoy at the end of the century and into the next millennium, as his catchy melodic and insistent rhythmic devices captured the attention of US music-makers.

A string of hugely powerful operators on the rap scene picked up on elements from his back catalogue they could reapply in a hip-hop context. Jay-Z drew on a Siffre sample in his 1998 recording ‘Streets Is Watching’, then Eminem in his 1999 breakthrough smash ‘My Name Is’ tapped into the 1975 song ‘I Got The’ to provide the musical core of a global bestseller. Kanye West continued the pattern on his 2019 release ‘I Wonder’, borrowing from ‘This Is My Song’.

Siffre made a crucial intervention on the Eminem record, insisting that the sample would not be permitted unless sexist and homophobic phrases were excised from the song. He stuck to his principles and got his way.

‘I had got sick of “bitches” and “ho’s” and “faggots”. To me, it was just lazy writing. If you are going to dis anyone, dis is the aggressor not the victims. And so I asked them to remove the “bitch” and “ho’s” parts,’ he explains.

And I guess with that we can even backtrack to those cut-up strategies mentioned earlier: the tape loops and sonic manipulations that drive so much African-American music today might be regarded as aural cut ups, the reconstruction of fragments to construct new wholes, the very process that fascinated William Burroughs in text, sound and celluloid from the late 1950s.

Siffre, an original creator and a humane individual, a conscientious campaigner and a politico poet to boot, must be pleased, and probably also most surprised, that his long career has been touched by Beat through Bowie and Burroughs but that he has, in addition, been able to call the tune on the stylings of some of the biggest artists still performing on the contemporary hip hop scene.