Andrew Roachford and the Immaculate Soul Musician

Andrew Roachford is bringing his Then and Now Greatest Hits tour to New Zealand in May 2025, and Red Raven had a chat to him recently. The man who channels James Brown and other Soul greats prior to every performance.

I was intrigued by this. Apart from single Cuddly Toy which became a huge hit in the UK on re-release in 1989, I knew little about him. It was all Stone Roses and Britpop at the time.

He has performed here only once in 1995. When Roachford was the band. Within ten years of that he became the solo artist.

Approaching forty years in the industry and he has been granted a rare Royal honour, an MBE. The Beatles got theirs in 1965 following the big bang of Beatlemania.

Roachford was born in that same year, in London to parents of West Indian descent.

22 years later he was debuting his first band, and within a year they were touring and supporting the likes of Terence Trent D’Arby and others.

Yeah, but what happens in between?

Raised in one of the musical meccas of popular music. He was a sizeable fish rapidly, but the city is an ocean for arts and culture.

The centre of the British Empire is now the butt of liberal angst for being colonisers and slavers. Some of that is true.

The same white colonists embraced the Black music culture of America in the Fifties, when it was seemingly moribund in the mother country, and that included the black population.

Artists like Muddy, Wolf, BB et al all thanked the Beatles and Rolling Stones for their artistic and financial revival.

So it was that a young Londoner boy listened to his parents record collection. It would have kicked in by ten years old.

Mid Seventies and before Punk. Black music was still under heavy church and hard Gospel influence. Evolved from the Sound of Young America to Black Power.    

Funk was created when James Brown attempted to break the tyrannical power of the beat. A similar sense to the Be-Bop jazzmen laying into melody.

There is little or no Funk in Roachford. But there are the foundation blocks of Gospel.

Anyone who listens to Aretha is listening to this, he says.

If you listen to the first three tracks of his current album Then and Now, All the Love We Need, Wonder Woman, Almost There, there is the same style and voice that was on the early classics like Only to Be with You, Lay your Love On Me and This Generation.

The voice has not aged at all over the long haul.

He can sound like classic era Motown and latter-day Michael Jackson when he first came under Quincy Jones.

He admires Otis Redding but sounds deep Southern Soul Stax like Sam and Dave.

His is a truly diverse career, sadly that term now has fashion chic connotations.

Mid Seventies and he would have been a fan of melodic Prog bands like Genesis and ELO.

He joined Mike and the Mechanics in 2010. On the flipside, another Genesis alumnus Phil Collins got to dogpaddle in Motown elevator music.

Roachford tells me his live shows are markedly different from studio versions. That is the first thing people tell him often.

Studio production means a smoothing out of rough edges. He tells me that raw tracks without embellishments and you can hear the Blues phrasings.

He has embraced the hardest working man in show bizz ethic. As much an entertainer as an artist.

Constantly performing in Europe. In America people think he is a native Southerner.

What happened in 2020 and the Silence of the Music?

It hit him like all the other artists from the UK and Europe. Roachford is more stoical and philosophical about it.

He tried streaming. It lacked a certain human organic element. A part of the soul was in suspended animation.

Music will always be at its core, performing in front of one or a thousand people, in a room or a field.

We talked a little about reproducing the live aspect on record. The Ska, Rocksteady and Reggae from Jamaica all draw their roots from Americana, especially the offbeat of New Orleans. The Land of 1000 Dances.

We agreed one of the best to capture live performance in a recording studio was Toots and the Maytals. The original trio and across several producers.

Roachford has commented on the current state of the music industry, and especially the effects of streaming. He feels that the industry has always been dictated by technology, and this time is essentially no different.

The invention of the vinyl plastic single brought it first to radio, then to homes as a commodity.

As an older working musician, what he senses most is the difficulty that young performers would have to try and make a career in the industry. The clue is in the rapidly changing nature of media.

Mainstream media is in the death throes, moaning and crying because who would have thought that lifting of restrictions and independence of thought would be a winner?

Andrew Roachford will be bringing his eagerly anticipated show to Auckland, at the Tuning Fork on Wednesday 28 May 2025. Then Wellington at San Fran on Thursday 29 May 2025.

Rev. Orange Peel