‘We recorded it in a kitchen!’ How China Crisis made Black Man Ray
Ed and I had just come off a long tour of Europe and North America supporting Simple Minds and needed a break.I immersed myself in music-making with a synth, drum machine and a four-track Tascam Portastudio.I was very inspired by Brian Eno.I’d seen the words “found sounds” on his album credits.The notion that any sound could be included in a recording struck me as magical.
I just held a mic out of my bedroom window.Black Man Ray started out as an ambient number with an intro featuring the sound of a boy I recorded singing in the street below.In the end, he actually featured in the opening bars of our song The Highest High.Black Man Ray has that classic China Crisis synth sound, but our producer Walter Becker did a huge amount of work on it, as he did on all the tracks on Flaunt the Imperfection, our third album.Virgin Records were keen to follow up the success of our single Wishful Thinking and would have been bending Walter’s ear, telling him to focus on songs that sounded like potential hits.
We recorded Black Man Ray at the Parkgate Studio in Sussex – in the kitchen! I have a vivid memory of it, mainly because Walter had sesame seeds in the pan, toasting them.Coming from a very working-class family, I’d never seen such a thing.There’s something very 1980s about the song’s intro, but there’s always been an awful lot of melody in our compositions.Even before Ed or I start singing, there’s a keyboard trilling away on Wishful Thinking, Red Sails and Papua.A lot of bands at that time didn’t do that.
People find the title and lyrics of Black Man Ray mysterious.Being interested in photography, I had a copy of Creative Camera magazine which had an article on the surrealist Man Ray.His name intrigued me.But the song was quite autobiographical about being in a band, so the title was like Ray Charles singing about his life.Again, it’s that Eno-esque idea of singing oblique, enigmatic lines that appear to mean something on their own, buried among the rest of the lyrics.
There’s an element of truth there, but it’s not The Long and Winding Road.After our US tour, Gary and I decided to take a break from each other, working separately on songs for Flaunt the Imperfection.The first time I heard Black Man Ray was a rough version Gary played me on a lovely summer’s day in the garden of his mother’s house.I could hear its pop potential right away, it was so melodic and catchy.But it’s always been the way our songs start out with one of us writing the fundamentals, having the inspiration, building around a certain melody, and only evolving into the sound that’s ultimately recognisable as China Crisis when Gary and I come together.
One of the best parts of Black Man Ray was where I joined Gary, who sings the lead vocal, harmonising on the chorus: “Ye-e-s ye-e-s, I could be wrong.” That section is anthemic really and irresistible to sing along to.It’s the part of every live performance that unites our audience and reminds us why we love what we do so much.While we’d been in the US, our label Warner Brothers asked us who we’d like to work with to produce the album.We mentioned the likes of Richard Carpenter and Steve Winwood, and said we’d love to work with some of the classic Steely Dan adjacent team like Gary Katz.
Word of this got back to Walter Becker who, it turned out, was already a fan of China Crisis.He flew over from the States to meet us and we hit it off immediately.He was an absolute perfectionist and hard taskmaster, very precise in his instructions, insisting on multiple takes.At one point he mentioned how Black Man Ray reminded him of the Beatles.I think he was mostly referring to the arrangement, the intro, verse, chorus and repeat, followed by a middle eight, then a double chorus and outro.
But for two young lads from Liverpool to hear him say that, well, you can imagine how that would have felt.The 10th Anniversary edition of China Crisis’s Autumn in the Neighbourhood album is now available on vinyl and CD from Last Night from Glasgow
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