5. Donny HathawayLive
I love the playing on it. I think it’s Willie Weeks who plays the bass on that record and he does a bass solo, which is never the most interesting thing, but he just plays on one note for ages and it’s great. But it’s all about Donny’s voice and his playing. I don’t know how recognised he is but for me he’s up with the greats. Maybe not as consistent as Stevie Wonder, but in terms of talent, definitely.
It’s a period of soul music that you’ve come back to a lot, and a lot of that music is very political. Do you ever see yourself going back to more political songwriting?
I have trouble with it because unless it comes to me naturally I’m not really interested – if I have to force it or think, ‘How do I write this?’ – especially if you’re talking about politics because it can sound so trite and obvious. But even if it came naturally I worry that I’d end up writing the same things I wrote 30 years ago. I still agree with those things, but I don’t want to be writing the same stuff. ‘You’ll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns…’ Isn’t that what’s still going on? Every time they fire a rocket at some poor fucker in the Middle East it costs us £850,000 and yet the NHS is going down the tubes. We’ve got people eating from food banks. What the fuck is that about in a country like this? So I’m angry about the same things that I was 30 years ago, which means either I haven’t moved on or politics hasn’t moved on.
