“We recorded it in the kitchen!” How the China Crisis Made a Black Man Ray | culture

Gary DalySinger, songwriter

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 making music with a synth, drums and a four-track Tascam Portastudio. Brian Eno has inspired me a lot. I’ve seen the phrase “Voices Found” in the credits of his album. The idea that any sound could be included in a recording struck me as magical. I just took a microphone out my bedroom window. Black Man Ray began as an ambient number with an intro featuring the voice of a boy she recorded singing in the street below. After all, he actually appeared in the opening bars of our song The Highest High.

Black Man Ray has the classic sound of China Crisis, but our producer Walter Becker did a great deal of work on it, as he did on all the tracks on our third album Flaunt the Imperfection. Virgin Records were keen to follow the success of our single Wishful Thinking and would bend Walter’s ear and ask him to focus on songs that looked like potential hits. We recorded Black Man Ray at Parkgate Studio in Sussex – in the kitchen! I have a vivid memory of that, mainly because Walter had sesame seeds in the pan, and he was toasting them. Coming from a working class family, I had never seen anything like this before.

There’s something very 80s in the intro to the song, but there’s always been a huge amount of melody in our compositions. Even before Ed or I start singing, there’s a keyboard playing Wishful Thinking, Red Sails and Papua. A lot of bands at the time didn’t do that.

People find the title and lyrics of Black Man Ray ambiguous. Being interested in photography, I obtained a copy of Creative Camera magazine which contained an article on the surrealist Man Ray. His name intrigued me. But the song was completely autobiographical about being in a band, so the title was like Ray Charles singing about his life. Again, it’s Eno’s idea of ​​singing obscure, italicized lines that seem to mean something in themselves, buried among the rest of the lyrics. There is an element of truth there, but it is not a long and winding road.

Eddie LundonBacking vocals, songwriter, guitar

After our US tour, Gary and I decided to take a break from each other and work separately on songs for Flaunt the Imperfection. The first time I heard Black Man Ray was a rough version Gary played with me on a beautiful summer day in his mother’s garden. I could hear its pop potential immediately, it was so melodic and catchy. But that’s always been the way our songs start when one of us writes the basics, has the inspiration, builds around a certain melody, and only develops into the sound that eventually becomes recognizable as “China Crisis” when Gary and I get together.

One of the best parts of Black Man Ray was where I joined Gary, who sings the lead vocal, harmonizing on the chorus: “Ye-es ye-es, I might be wrong.” This section is truly anthemic and irresistible to sing along to. It’s the part of every live show that unites our audience and reminds us why we love what we do so much.

While we were in the US, our label Warner Brothers asked us who we would 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 next door like Gary Katz. These words came back to Walter Becker who, it turns out, was actually a fan of the China crisis. He flew in from the US to meet us and we hit it off right away. An absolute perfectionist and difficult taskmaster, he was very precise in his instructions, insisting on multiple takes.

At one point he mentioned how Blackman Ray reminded him of the Beatles. I think he was mostly referring to the arrangement, intro, verse, chorus and repetition, followed by a middle eight, then a double chorus and an outro. But when two lads from Liverpool heard him say that, well, you can imagine how that would have felt.