Paul Hardcastle, Smooth jazz Artist

This week’s Featured Artist is a musician who is more comfortable working behind the scenes than being at center stage.  Over the years he has created dance club and smooth jazz hit songs that have made him popular among Smooth and adult contemporary jazz listeners worldwide.  Meet music producer, songwriter, andkeyboardist – Paul Hardcastle 

Born in London, England

Genre: Smooth/Contemporary jazz, Pop, Freestyle, Ambient

While he is unquestionably a talented keyboardist, Hardcastle’s first love seems to have been studio equipment.  As a teenager, while most of his peers were imitating the licks of their favorite electric guitar heroes, Hardcastle was tinkering with tape recorders and other gadgets.  His love of sound equipment eventually led to a job as a stereo salesman. In 1980 Hardcastle acquired his first synthesizer.  He quickly landed a spot as keyboard player for the band Direct Drive, effectively ending his career in sales. With Direct Drive, Hardcastle got his first taste of dance club success, scoring a handful of minor hits on the British underground dance scene, including “Time’s Running Out” and “Don’t Depend On Me,” both released by Oval Records.  Direct Drive also provided his first contact with vocalist Helen Rogers, with whom he continued to collaborate well into the 1990s.

Following the breakup of Direct Drive, Hardcastle joined forces with vocalist Derek Green to form the funk band First Light in 1982.  Signing with London Records, First Light quickly produced two hit singles. Both “Explain The Reason” and “Wish You Were Here” cracked the Top 20 on the U.K. dance charts.  In spite of this success, Hardcastle grew frustrated with his lack of control over his projects.  Of his experience with London Records, he recalled that “it was a total disaster.  It was a constant battle of ‘do this, do that,'” according to a 1985 Billboard magazine article.  Hardcastle’s solution to the control problem was to start his own label, appropriately named Total Control.  His partner in this endeavor was the popular club DJ Steve Walsh.

With full power over his own product now in hand, Hardcastle continued to crank out dance hits in his native England, including the singles “Guilty” and “You’re The One for Me.”  Two instrumentals released during this period under the Total Control banner, “A.M.” and “Daybreak,” also gained Hardcastle a following among the electro-funk crowd.  The success of these minor hits paved the way for the release of “Rainforest,” the single that made Hardcastle a genuine force on the international dance music circuit. Initially recorded as the theme song for a television special about the British hip hop scene, “Rainforest” eventually rose as high as number 41 on the British pop charts.  The song was released in the U.S. in early 1985 by Profile Records, and was soon a dance hit on both sides of the Atlantic, selling nearly half a million copies worldwide.

The success of “Rainforest” created a lot of demand for Hardcastle’s services as a studio technician, and he mixed or produced tracks for, among others, the groups Third World and Pigbag. He soon signed with Chrysalis, and within a couple of months put out the recording that would make him a household name. After watching Vietnam Requiem, a television documentary about the Vietnam War, Hardcastle was deeply moved by the fact that the average age of a U.S. soldier in that conflict was 19, compared to 26 during World War II.  The program inspired him to create his biggest hit, “19,” which made use of samples from the documentary’s soundtrack, though well-doctored with all manner of electronic effects and scratch techniques.

“19” rocketed to number one on the British charts, and also reached the top spot in 13 countries.  Despite the subject of the song, Hardcastle insisted that his motives in making it were not political. Rather than railing against the war, he maintained that he was merely trying to point out the tragic situation of the young men who fought it.

On the heels of “19,” Hardcastle released two more singles, “Just for Money,” featuring the voices of acting superstars Sir Laurence Olivier and Bob Hoskins; and “Don’t Waste My Time.”  Both singles reached a wide dance-oriented audience,

All three singles were included on Hardcastle’s album Paul Hardcastle, released on Chrysalis in November of 1985.

During the second half of the 1980s, Hardcastle concentrated his efforts on behind-the-scenes studio work on other musicians’ projects.  He produced records for Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and worked on remixes for a number of artists, including Barry White, D-Train, and Five Star.  Hardcastle also remained active as a composer, writing original scores for several films and television projects, including a new theme song for the British TV series Top of the Pops.  In 1990 Hardcastle took another stab at forming his own label, Fast Forward Records, on which he released the single “Swing” by the Def Boys. That record eventually reached the Billboard Top Twenty, and was a major hit in Europe.

In the 1990s Hardcastle reinvented himself as a light jazz composer andkeyboardist, a big jump musically from his days as a scratchmaster.  The first step in this new career phase came in 1990, with the release of an album on Motown by his new group Kiss the Sky.  Next, Hardcastle collaborated with his old cohort Helen Rogers and with saxophonist Gary Barnacle, who had recorded with the likes of Tina Turner, Elvis Costello, and Phil Collins, to form TheJazzmasters.  The trio released the album Jazzmasters on the independent JVC label in 1993, and it quickly gained substantial airplay on both contemporary jazz and R&B radio stations.  The video for one of the album’s songs, “Sound of Summer,” also saw much exposure on VH-1.  Jazzmasters eventually spent more than a year hovering near the top of the Contemporary Jazz Albums charts.

With the release of a solo effort, Hardcastle, in 1994, the artist cemented his position as a major force in urban contemporary jazz, with his unique hybrid of light jazz and soulful R&B.  Like Jazzmasters, Hardcastle spent weeks among the top sellers in its genre.  Hardcastle continued to capitalize on his renewed stardom with follow-up albums in the mid-1990s, Jazzmasters II and Hardcastle2, as well as ongoing projects with Kiss The Sky.  With three separate outlets to suit his varying creative moods– Jazzmasters for contemporary jazz with an R&B groove, Hardcastle for his slightly more experimental work, and Kiss the Sky for the rougher, more urban end of his output.
by Robert R. Jacobson 

Biographical information courtesy of Paul Hardcastle website

http://www.transformeurope.com/paul_hardcastle/paul_hardcastle_biography.htm