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15 авг 2025
LIVING COLOUR's VERNON REID Shares 'Beautiful Bastard' Single From Upcoming Solo Album 'Hoodoo Telemetry'
If you've followed the beats of his half-century career, you'll know Reid as an artist who paints in every color. Depending on the era you dive into and the album on your turntable, you'll find the New York polymath pinballing between jazz, metal, punk, funk, electronica and hip-hop, cutting heads with collaborators as eclectic as Mick Jagger and PUBLIC ENEMY, endlessly shedding his skin yet always speaking his truth.
Globally celebrated as a giant of electric guitar (he was recently hailed by Rolling Stone amongst the top 50 players of all-time),Reid's Grammy Award-winning records with alt-rock trailblazers LIVING COLOUR still sound as fresh and fierce as when "Cult Of Personality" hijacked the Billboard chart in the late '80s. But to take the pulse of the zeitgeist as he sees it — and hear his fearless musicality in microcosm — you need only drop the needle on his new solo album.
"Hoodoo Telemetry", considers the 66-year-old of this kaleidoscopic 14-track opus, "is like a piece of my all-over-the-place mind. It took me a while to start this record because I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, managing my time with all my other projects. I was also in different spaces with these songs: some are new, others are reclamations of material from a long time ago. But suddenly, I found the focus and it was very clear to me: I gotta do this now."
The overdriven funk bassline and glistening soul of first single, "The Haunting" finds Reid tipping his hat to a fellow chameleon ("I'm a huge Prince fan and there's some of who he was in that song's DNA"),before the scratch 'n' glitch of the brass-driven "Bronx Paradox" salutes the New York neighbourhood's greatest musical export. "I wrote that in tribute to DJ Logic," he explains. "Everybody considered the Bronx a wasteland, a warzone. But with hip-hop, those kids created the final original music of the 20th century."
"Hoodoo Telemetry" isn't a linear piece, but a thrillingly tangled tapestry of genres, collaborators and material from different time periods. Its energy and chaos seems to reflect and challenge what Reid considers the "tumultuous."
LIVING COLOUR, Reid's best-known band burst into bloom on a New York live circuit that was more fluid than ever before or since. "We had an ecology of clubs to play at, from CBGBs to the Cat Club and the Ritz," he recalls of the first steps of a solidified lineup featuring Corey Glover (vocals),Muzz Skillings (bass) and Will Calhoun (drums).
Carried by word of mouth, the tinderbox was already set to explode when the patronage of Mick Jagger sent the band over the top, THE ROLLING STONES singer manning the desk for their demos. "He worked on 'Glamour Boys' and 'Which Way To America?'" explains Reid, "and he was a great producer. He really coached Corey along. But it was so fundamentally weird that he entered our lives. I didn't know where to put my hands."
Seizing his opportunity, Reid threw everything on his mental jukebox at LIVING COLOUR's deathless debut, 1988's "Vivid". "You had 'Broken Hearts' on the same album as 'Cult Of Personality'," he points out of a tracklisting where anything could happen. "We might be playing metal one moment then writing a country song with hip-hop the next. Or 'Funny Vibe', which is like prog-folk informed by KING CRIMSON."
Sailing to No. 6 on the U.S. Billboard chart — and ultimately double-platinum status — "Vivid" proved adventurous music could still sell by the ton. The following year, a support on the STONES' "Steel Wheels"/"Urban Jungle" tour bumped their profile — and gave Reid a close-up glimpse at the rock 'n' roll super-league. "Backstage on that STONES tour they had all the parlor games — I remember Bill Wyman kicking my ass at ping-pong!" he recalls.
Alongside LIVING COLOUR's six albums and counting, Reid has worn a thousand different hats since those breakout years, whether producing Grammy-nominated albums for the likes of Salif Keita, composing hit movie scores or lending his guitar skills to a who's who, including Janet Jackson, B.B. King, Tracy Chapman and Mariah Carey.
No doubt, it's these competing demands that mean Reid's solo career (which began with 1996's "Mistaken Identity") has lain dormant since 2004's "Known Unknown". "But with everything that's been happening, suddenly I had a focus," he says of the febrile context to "Hoodoo Telemetry". "Y'know, the world is a ball on a pendulum. It swings. Right now, we're living through unprecedented times, and not just in America."
In hard times, "Hoodoo Telemetry" doesn't have the answers. But to play Vernon Reid's breathtakingly ambitious new album is to hear every shade of humanity and question where we are headed next. "These songs are looking at the past through a different lens, then looking forward," he concludes. "Like, 'Where is this going and how are we getting there? Are we driving the bus or are we passengers in this self-driving vehicle into the future?' That's the space that 'Hoodoo Telemetry' is really exploring…"
Track listing — CD/digital:
01. Door Of No Return
02. Freedom Jazz Dance
03. Good Afternoon Everyone
04. The Haunting
05. Bronx Paradox
06. Or Knot
07. Dying To Live
08. Politician
09. Black Fathom Five
10. Beautiful Bastard
11. Meditation On The Last Times I Saw Arthur Rhames
12. My Little Zulu Babe
13. In Effigy
14. Brave New World
Track listing — LP:
A1. Door Of No Return
A2. Freedom Jazz Dance
A3. Good Afternoon Everyone
A4. The Haunting
A5. Dying To Live
B1. Politician
B2. Black Fathom Five
B3. Beautiful Bastard
B4. My Little Zulu Babe
B5. In Effigy
Photo credit: Justin Borucki
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