This is the article that appeared in the UK Sunday Times Culture Magazine on Easter Sunday 25th April.
The jazz funk band were the 1980s sound of the suburbs — and of freedom for people living under tyranny. Pete Paphides hears their unlikely story
Something special Shakatak in 1984
From the far end of an empty restaurant it could be a younger Alison Steadman beaming at me as I advance towards her. When we finally meet, Jill Saward, the lead singer of Shakatak, exclaims: “You remind me of Elvis Costello! It’s probably your glasses.” Almost as soon as the words leave her mouth, she worries she may have caused offence.
She needn’t, though. Her band’s jazz-funk, sea-breeze sound fuelled a string of singles that, for suburban Eighties teenagers like me, were the nearest we got to a balmy evening in a Spanish resort, sipping something blue through a straw. Suddenly, I’m 13 again.
Perhaps you’re surprised that Shakatak are still going. Who, after all, listens to them in 2025? Well, quite a lot of people, actually. Five hours from now, Shakatak will play to a rapt audience in Canary Wharf, London, interspersing timeless ivory-tinklers such as Night Birds and Easier Said Than Done with songs from their most recent album, Eyes of the World. In their pomp, Shakatak made the Top 40 with five albums and six singles.
Shakatak’s Zelig-like knack of being present at huge geopolitical moments over the past 40 years is a delightful reminder that history has no regard for cool. In 1993 they were among the first bands to tour South Africa, after the UN lifted the economic sanctions that had been in place since 1963. On New Year’s Eve 1989 in Berlin, Shakatak played in the concert that marked the fall of the Berlin Wall. And over in Manila in the Philippines on the day President Marcos was toppled in 1986, guess who was in town?
To say this was never part of the plan is to imply Shakatak ever had a plan. The band’s keyboard player and main songwriter, Bill Sharpe, tells me he was inspired to get serious in 1970, aged 17, after attending the Isle of Wight Festival and “watching some of the all-time greats in their prime: Ray Manzarek with the Doors, Keith Emerson with Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Chick Corea, doing this unbelievable stuff alongside Miles Davis. I mean, that was a lifetime’s worth of inspiration right there.”
While Sharpe was finessing his chops over the ensuing decade, Saward was singing on dozens of all-time classics. If you owned any of those Top of the Pops copycat hit collections released in the late Seventies then you will be familiar with her early work. A typical day would involve a morning singing Lucky Number in the style of Lene Lovich and then channelling Kate Bush after lunch.
“You had to be resourceful,” Saward remembers. To ape Bonnie Tyler’s gravelly timbre, she would “do her first thing in the morning before I’d even had a cup of tea. We used to have this guitarist who was a real joker and one of the tracks we had to do was Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby with the simulated orgasm. He took it upon himself to do obscene things while I was singing. You don’t want to know what he was doing!”
Thailand’s king wrote a song with them, and Soweto vibrated to their beat
By night, Saward and the drummer Roger Odell were playing alongside other future members of Shakatak and the producer Trevor Horn in Bishop’s Stortford finest (and possibly only) jazz-fusion band, Tracks. She had no designs on being one of the household names she imitated for a living, but that changed when Sharpe played some of his tunes to the producer Nigel Wright, who told him British jazz-funk was having a moment. “You had Heatwave and Level 42 putting out records that weren’t so different to the stuff I was writing,” Sharpe says.
With Wright completing the line-up, the newly named Shakatak secured a record deal. Sharpe attempted to hold on to his day job, helping to produce John Peel’s nightly Radio 1 show. Sweetly, Peel put his friendship with Sharpe before his own musical tastes. “Whenever John presented Top of the Pops and we were on, he’d say, ‘And now, featuring my mate Bill Sharpe, it’s Shakatak,’” he recalls.
Now a very well-preserved 71, Saward recalls the confusion of female co-vocalists who expected to be placed centre stage in the newly famous band. Instead, Shakatak’s de facto leader, Sharpe, took his lead from Brazilian tropicalia pioneers such as Gilberto Gil and Sergio Mendes, where, he says, “the female vocal is quite passive, no vibrato. Jill loved that music too, so she understood why you weren’t necessarily going to have the singers out front.”
The group’s first tour of Japan was met with pandemonium. Schoolgirls cornered them as they travelled on the bullet trains, Sharpe recalls: “For some reason, [they] wanted to caress our guitarist Keith [Winter]’s hair.”
Saward adds: “We stepped on stage [in Tokyo] and when they raised the curtain, thousands of people rushed the stage. We had no idea!”
“And so we obviously did the old joke — pretending to look behind us to see what the fuss was,” Sharpe says with a smile.
Shakatak were given short shrift by the critics, but were having too much fun to care. Joan Collins requested them as guests on a BBC special and registered her surprise when she discovered they weren’t American. Thailand’s jazz-loving former king Bhumibol Adulyadej was such a big fan that he summoned the band over to write a song with him. Even now, when they play Thailand, Sharpe says they do “a Shakatak-style arrangement of one of his songs as a sign of respect”.
Duetting with the jazz-soul singer Al Jarreau on their single Day by Day, they realised he was more nervous about singing with them than they were. In 1984 they were invited to record an album at Château Miraval in the south of France, in a studio set amid vineyards owned by the French pianist Jacques Loussier (and later by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie). The band enjoyed his wine so much they asked to take some home and were told that, unfortunately, they had drunk it all.
Unbeknown to them, more than 6,000 miles further south, the sound systems of the Soweto township in South Africa were vibrating with Shakatak songs. The Specials may have gone to the trouble of writing a song about Nelson Mandela, but after the cultural boycott was lifted, Shakatak were among the first bands asked to kick off the celebrations. “We stayed for a long time,” Saward says. “We hosted workshops in Durban, in Johannesburg and in Cape Town, chatting to local musicians. And they’d say, ‘Oh man, your music really helped us.’ They even had dances to go with certain songs — a Streetwalkin’ dance and an Invitations dance.”
Sharpe proffers a theory that it’s the apolitical nature of Shakatak’s music and its “element of escapism” that makes it so popular with people living under oppressive regimes. Perhaps that explains why they were in Manila when Marcos was ousted. “It sounds dramatic, but I don’t think we felt unsafe, did we, Jill?” Sharpe recalls. “We were confined indoors for the main part,” she replies.
“That’s true,” Sharpe says. “But the people who booked us were the People Power Revolution, who booted Marcos out. Everyone had to wear yellow because it was the symbolic colour of the anti-Marcos movement. Lovely people.”
In 1999 Shakatak got the call to perform in Berlin but the show was an anticlimax. “It was more of a rave crowd,” Sharpe says, “We had to drink our way through it, obviously. Still, I got to sit next to Boris Becker on the flight back.” It turns out that the former Wimbledon champion is a Shakatak fan too. “We talked about tennis and jazzfunk and fell asleep,” Sharpe says.
A quarter of a century later the band take a no less relaxed attitude to the business of entertaining their fans. As the remainder of Shakatak arrive for tonight’s gig (every member dates back to their first single), they trigger a flurry of quips about the danger of breaking with tradition and actually rehearsing.
Shortly, a room full of diners will down their cutlery and clap along to hits that sound as fresh as the mint in their mojitos. The multitasking Saward will flit amiably between microphone and congas, pausing only to trill her flute on Invitations. Then tomorrow it’s back to Sardinia where she and her husband, Chris, live most of the time. She confides: “I always fly back from Stansted. The guy in charge of customs is a Shakatak fan, so I get waved straight in. The first time it happened, my grandchildren were there and they were so impressed.”
And why wouldn’t they be? The guy in charge of customs at Stansted is only confirming what Joan Collins, Boris Becker and the late king of Thailand already knew.
Shakatak are on tour until Dec 12