Lynden David Hall had come and gone, and most of us had barely noticed.Let’s hope that Hall’s new album, The Other Side, gets a better hearing, because, like him, it’s really something special. The 25-year-old south Londoner is the best (and just about the only) thing to happen to British soul music for a generation or more. While comparisons with American Nu Classic Soul may be odious, Hall is in no way inferior to the lauded D’Angelo, whose long-awaited recent album went straight to the top of the US charts. He sings like an angel, plays almost everything on the album himself – including a wonderfully bluesy guitar – and looks like the fashion plate he already is. His songs deal with traditional soul subjects such as love won and lost, absent fathers and the thin line dividing sanctity and sex in an utterly compelling way. There’s even a number on his debut album, 1997’s Medicine 4 My Pain, about metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls (it’s called “Do Angels Cry?”). Hall also has a sense of humour; “Sleeping with Victor” on the new album appears to be about a ménage à trois with a girl and a vibrator.And heard live with his own band, Lynden David Hall is almost entirely convincing.
On the opening gig of his national tour last year, in Brighton, in a nervy date missing a bereaved backing singer and with his long-absent father in the audience, Hall wasn’t just good; as Graham Greene wrote of the film debut of Ingrid Bergman, you could see the star quality twinkling off the highlight on the end of his nose. But worryingly, the debut album didn’t do as well as it should have (although it still shifted 100,000 in the UK). Its original cover was withdrawn as being too dark and was replaced by a bright yet moody new one, whose corporate identity is continued in the new album’s cover-shot.To garner further support, Hall was sent out as a support act with Simply Red – which some might see as a poisoned chalice. It was hard not to feel that if Hall had been signed to an independent label, his abundant virtues would have won more credibility Instead, they courted the danger of seeming hyped. But to its credit, EMI appears to be giving Hall, if not its best, then its second-best shot for the follow-up, which is equally good and a nicely organic continuation of the appeal of the debut.In an interview at Home a couple of hours before the showcase, Hall proves enagagingly serious about his work. He’s shy and talks quietly, explaining that although he learnt what he knows about Seventies soul by listening obsessively to his father’s record collection – heavy on Sly Stone and the Ohio Players – he has since lent a songwriter’s ear to a much broader range of sounds.
He cites Joni Mitchell’s Hissing of Summer Lawns and even Bob Dylan as influences, revealing as he does so a trainspotter’s eye for detail. He likes the vibes-player Victor Feldman’s contribution to the Mitchell album and the work of the session guitarist Cornell Dupree with Aretha Franklin and Joe Cocker. When, as a teenager, he first taught himself to play guitar, he would listen to albums by Sly, Al Green and Marvin Gaye over and over again, learning the overall feel, the guitar and keyboard parts and the vocals incrementally, as if he were a safe-cracker lending an ear to the tumbles of some secret combination.What got him into music in the first place was, he says, a legacy of bad-boy business (an experience recalled on the first album’s “Livin’ the Life”), after being expelled from school at the age of 14, for fighting. “It was all about just wanting to be real and about how I deal with being a black man in London,” he says. “I think that people think that kids get expelled and they’re just automatically going to be bad or whatever, which is very easy and a trap I could have fallen into.
But in my heart I had some positive energy, and I was trying to find that. When I was 14 and 15 I know I felt very lost and that all there was to do was to roam the streets. There was nowhere to go to channel everything that I had to see or feel. But I just sat there and experienced some things that helped me to stay together.”The new experience was the archetypal soul singer’s epiphany. “I don’t believe in any particular religion, but I believe in God totally,” Hall says.
“I don’t believe in coincidences, but at the time I experienced this – the realness of the energy – music came into my life at the same time. I don’t think about it too heavy; I just know that both of them are real, music and God. You don’t want to analyse it; just to let it flow.”The album’s meditation on the burden of sons abandoned by their fathers is real enough, but in his conversation, if not in his songs, Hall underplays it. “My mum and dad split up when I was about five, and I didn’t see my dad for a while after that, and then later at weekends,” he says. “Then, when I was expelled from school I ended up living at my dad’s, which was where I started listening to his records Now, I get on with him better than ever before.