Interview: Nicole Willis talks Repercussions and new directions
Repercussions were an acid jazz style band made up of Andy Faranda, Daniel Wyatt, Genji Siraisi, Gordon Clay, Jonathan Maron, and Nicole Willis. They formed in 1986 as a smaller instrumental group but grew their members over the next few years alongside a great live reputation. Repercussions released their debut single Promise on Mo’ Wax in 1992 before they signed to Warner Brothers and released Let’s Do It Again, a collaboration with Curtis Mayfield. Following their debut album Earth And Heaven in 1995, Warner Brothers dropped them, and Repercussions’ final album Charmed Life was only released in Japan in 1997.
Since Repercussions, Nicole has released several solo albums and has collaborated across many genres with groups such as Leftfield, Death Hawks, and Umo Jazz Orchestra.
Born in New York, but now based in Helsinki, Finland, Nicole has recently taken the opportunity to return to university and is finding new focus behind the scenes of filmmaking.
Repercussions were part of the Groove Academy scene, and I think most of the members also played in the band Groove Collective as well. Can you tell me how that all came about?
Yeah, it wasn’t everyone, but some of the members of Groove Collective played in Repercussions before Groove Collective came together. Repercussions was an instrumental group before I joined them and there was this point where they decided they wanted to work with some singers. So myself and Dana Bryant, we both started there and one of the tracks we first wrote, maybe it was the first track, was Promise. But anyway, the members of Repercussions were people who knew each other from Columbia University.
What were you doing before Repercussions? Were you singing before then?
I had been singing from the 80s onward, like when I was teenager we used to have this kind of youth centre called The Door and I started to sing there. I was also playing bass there a little bit, and I was doing some ballet dancing, but then I decided I wanted to do music. So it was very frightening, like I wasn’t always comfortable on stage. But my first gigs were maybe at Danceteria with this group Hello Strangers around 1985. Then I was in London for about a year in a project with my partner at the time, this Jim Wellman project which eventually became another group, a kind of more well-known group. But then I moved back to New York and I went on tour with The The singing some lead but mostly backup vocals. They were touring in Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, and I don’t remember exactly where else, and then I joined Repercussions.
I read that in 1992 Repercussions were performing at Groove Academy and Spike Lee saw you and wanted to sign you all to his label [40 Acres And A Mule MusicWorks]. Do you remember that?
Yeah, I mean New York is a really funny place, it’s so easy to meet these kinds of people and if you’re in some creative circle you will eventually meet all kinds of people. I have no idea how we met Spike, but I knew people who knew him, and he had his label where his main artist was Youssou N’Dour. It was a sub label that was distributed by Sony, and Sony felt like he went over budget with Youssou N’Dour and they closed the label. So he couldn’t sign us.
Then I think James Lavelle saw Repercussions at a Groove Academy gig as well when he was DJing there.
Yeah, Groove Academy had a party called Giant Step, after Coltrane’s Giant Steps, that was at S.O.B.’s in Tribeca. It was great to play S.O.B., we opened for a lot of incredible people and people are surprised now, like ‘Wow, you opened for Gil Scott Heron, I can’t believe it’. But at that moment nobody was really interested. I remember in the 80s we went to the Lone Star Café to see James Brown and I think there was like 5–15 people there. No one! It was strange because it’s James Brown. So there was this moment that this music wasn’t really happening anymore and I think Groove Academy really helped to bring it back and create this new scene. But I didn’t meet James Lavelle until it was already discussed that he wanted to release our record and we met at the office at Groove Academy.
The story goes that James Lavelle was going to sign Repercussions to a sublabel he was working with but then it fell through, and you guys said he should release your record himself if he gave the band £1,000. Does that sound familiar?
I would have to say as a vocalist, as a woman, as the only woman in a group of, not a huge group but sometimes there were seven or eight of us or whatever, these things were not something I had any decision making in. So, what you’re saying sounds vaguely familiar. But a bunch of men wanted to be leaders in this patriarchal territory of music so it wasn’t about me making any business decisions.
I was listening to the Promise 12” and I actually kind of prefer the B-side Field Trippin’. It always gets stuck in my head, but the writing credit has someone called T. Harris. Do you know who that was?
It’s Teddy Harris. He was a keyboard player for us for a while but his first calling is law and he was basically studying entertainment law during the time that we worked with him. He then became our attorney for the negotiations with Warner Brothers / Reprise and was our lawyer in the end.
A year after the Mo’ Wax single, Repercussions was signed to Warner Brothers, but the album didn’t come out until 1995.
Yeah, it’s hard for me to understand. 93 we would have been signed, 94 they would have done the Groove Collective album, and then they would have started ours which took a year to record.
And then the lead single was Promise Me Nothing, which is a new version of Promise. What was the idea behind reworking that song?
I guess we all felt like it was a strong one. But the fact of the matter is, there wasn’t really enough writing going on, from my part, to really focus on other things. I mean, there were definitely some tracks on the album that were newer, but it was a funny moment for me because as a musician I didn’t really have any confidence. So maybe I was having some creative blocks associated with that. I’m not sure. But that’s how it went.
Why did the album take so long to come out?
You know, there was a bidding war from the labels between A&M and Warner, and then there was Gary Katz presenting himself as our producer. We decided to go to Warner and were signed for half a million, but while recording it started to be very clear that it would take a really long time when Gary took four months to record drums. Nobody was playing along with the drummer, the drummer was just kind of playing by himself without any vibing with the band. So that was four months and there was a realisation that we had no control of the situation. It was supposed to be a co-production between Gary and the band and I wanted to be more creative in studio, to just try to improvise on the mic with the headphones in that environment. But quite quickly they were like ‘No.’ So I had to record the vocals in the way that I had been doing them already for the past whatever amount of years and that was kind of sad for me.
We went through our budget, and then some, and the budget ended up going to 1 million. So what could have taken six months took a year, what could have taken maybe even four months, three months, took a year. Then, we had been signed by an executive, the CEO of Warner Lenny Waronker, and at some point he left and went to DreamWorks and we were dropped.
The next album came out only in Japan in 97 on Pony Canyon. Did you guys have a good fan base there?
When the first album Earth and Heaven came out we did a lot of touring in Japan. We played in three or four different venues just in Tokyo alone, which is kind of a difficult thing to do. After we were no longer signed to Warner we signed to Pony Canyon and they expressed interest in working on an album together. We kind of got back together to do the album, but in actuality we weren’t working as a unit anymore. Everybody wanted to do their own productions, and there were several productions with different vocalists and several people writing. I tried to make it so that most of it was me, but in the end it ended up being quite evenly split up amongst the producers and was starting to look more like Soul II Soul with several singers and several things going on. But I think Pony Canyon were disappointed I wasn’t singing on everything.
I was also reading about the Crown of Brahma album that was recorded with Daniel Wyatt, Charles Stella, and yourself for Rawkus Records and then it just didn’t come out. Do you know what happened with that?
Rawkus dropped us. They said, ‘You’re taking so long and this is out of fashion already’. So not everything is roses. I don’t want to be negative or anything, but that’s just what happens.
Skipping ahead quite a bit, your most recent album was 2019’s My Soul Sensation and I saw that you had another album you were working on with Niko Linnamaa last year too.
Yeah. We haven’t released anything from the writing that we have been doing but we’ve been working together a lot. I think the thing that’s been interesting about the COVID situation was that, when all the gigs were cancelled, and everything wasn’t happening anymore, I started thinking about what I can do with my time and I started to do some studying. So at the beginning of last year, I started to take a lot of courses and then I worked for a film production company, and I’ve just been doing other things.
So you’re working on different things at the moment, but is music still something you want to work on?
I’m not sure. Maybe not? I don’t know. I would say the music industry is a territory that’s patriarchal, and I am getting a little bit bored of butting heads with men. But really, I want to use my brain in different ways and I think it’s more important to just try to make films and find out what my role is in filmmaking. I enjoy production because you’re just doing everything, like writing content, scouting locations, or picking up cars and just running around town or on the set doing whatever.
Is that exciting to be doing something so different?
Well, I mean I started to be interested in film production when I was living in New York, and actually I have an interesting story. I was managing at this very nice restaurant that was in the Flatiron District in Manhattan where quite a bit of the customers were celebrity folk of some sort who lived in the area. Sometime after Repercussions had been signed Spike came in and had brunch and I sat down and talked to him for a little while. I said that I wanted to work in the film industry, and he says “No, no, you have to keep singing. Your gift is your voice.” And I remember feeling super disappointed. Like, I just felt, wow, this is where they see women in the industry. Also, he was always pointing out that production companies don’t hire black people and when I have my productions I’m gonna hire entirely black crew. So I felt this person, who was able to see the marginalization of black people, couldn’t see the marginalization of women. Because he could have offered me some kind of opportunity and he didn’t. It made me sad that people just feel women should be singers, and then someone else should produce it, and someone else should negotiate it, and someone else should have control. And even if the woman tries to take control, they will try to minimize your effectiveness in being in control. It’s just been so much like that, and I refuse to think that I’m the only woman that has experienced that. I think that it’s just typical.
Do you think things are changing though?
Not that fast in music. I think people have tried to leverage that your opinion matters less if you’re a woman, even though you’re writing 50% of the song. People literally try to reduce your effectiveness. So yeah, I don’t want to sound bitter because it’s not a bitterness. It’s a fact. It’s a reality and that is the way the industry is. I could easily just be like flowers and daisies, but I’d rather tell you the truth. •
Keep up to date with Nicole Willis at nicolewillis.com
This article was originally published in The Shadow Knows Issue #3, July 2022. Buy the fanzine here or read more at our website.
