Billy Ocean interview

Born in Trinidad and raised in East London, Billy Ocean stole hearts around the world before plunging from view. Now he's back with a tour and a new album 'Because I Love You'.

• “Muu–uum?!” says the boy yanking urgently at his mother’s elbow. She’s trying to clap because the most successful black, British male artist of all time has just strutted onto the stage in St Albans and has started to sing his breakthrough hit “Love Really Hurts Without You”. But the child has important information to convey. He presses on with: “Mum! Mum!” until he finally gets her attention. “What?” “*It’s Davy Jones!*” She looks at the man on stage, catches my eye and all three of us burst out laughing.
• With a tangle of wild, grey dreadlocks splashing out across his face as he bounces and sways like a man at sea, Billy Ocean does look an awful lot like the betentacled character from the Pirates of the Caribbean films. And, rather like the fictional pirate, Billy Ocean stole hearts around the world before plunging suddenly from view at the height of his fame. And now he’s bobbing back up to the surface, following his 41 date nationwide tour with his first new album in fifteen years.
• When I meet him in his manager’s office a few days after the tour he’s looking less piratical. The dreads are tucked neatly under a brown woollen cap. He’s reading a bible and sipping tea. And still glowing from the reaction he got on tour: “When you’re older and wiser a lot of the ego has gone out of the window. And you realise you’re doing a public service in making people happy – as a musician you can give people something a doctor, a lawyer, a politician cannot give them that. It’s not scientific. It’s spiritual – a good feeling. And although you don’t know them personally, the audience are like your friends. They were dancing, smiling, singing all the words. kids on their shoulders. man!” he shakes his head, “If I hadn’t done it I would have died thinking no one wanted to hear them old songs any more!”
• Them old songs include hits like “Suddenly”, “Caribbean Queen”, “When the Going Gets Tough (The Tough Get Going)” and “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car”. They made a transatlantic star out of the boy who was born in Trinidad and raised in East London from the age of seven. “I guess my music has combined the influences of the Caribbean – the calypso my father used to sing and the steel pan – with the American and British sounds and faster beats we heard on the radio, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Reggae stuff.”
• “My first instrument was a little blue ukele,” he says. “And I was taught to play that by a blind man. When we moved to England I had to leave my steel pan behind in Trinidad. Along with my lovely dog, a brown and white mongrel named Federation by my father who hoped for federation within the Caribbean.” He was “always messing around in the music room at school” and although he was determined to make a career out of his passion, his mum insisted he learn a trade. “So I went to work in Savile row as a pattern cutter.” But he got the sack when Annie Nightingale played his first single on Radio One. “I thought my bosses would be impressed,” he laughs, “but I was out next Friday.”
• Success was initially thrilling for Ocean. He loved the clothes and the crowds. One of his happiest memories is making the video for When the Going Gets Tough in 1986 – the theme from The Jewel in the Nile starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. But he found the scale of his fame in America quite overwhelming. “Success can create more madness than happiness,” he says. “And nobody will tell you to stop. I didn’t experience burn out but I can see how it destroys energy, peace, the desire to make music. I had young children who were growing up away from me and I was growing up away from them. I had to get out and it was the best thing I could have done because I didn’t lose my love of music. I’ve still played in my steel pan band at the Notting Hill Carnival every year, but among 60 other players where it’s nice not to be the star.”
• Now the kids are all grown up, Ocean has built himself an idyllic studio in Grenada where his father was born. And it was here he recorded the new album “Because I Love You”. “I can sing overlooking the turquoise sea,” he says, “then go out for a swim and go into the village for a couple of pints of cold Guinness then go back to work.” Nice work if you can get it, I say. He laughs. “I hope you can hear the sunny, laid back mood on the record.” You can. Rippling with steel drums, beach beats and oozing with the synths and saxs, it will certainly warm the nostalgic hearts of those with a soft spot for 80s soul – for funk-tinged ballads in praise of “my lady”. “I just hope it makes people happy,” smiles Ocean, “That’s what it’s all about.”
• Billy Ocean “Because I Love You” (Aqua) is release on April 6th