The Artists on the Frequency — the station's own singers, bands and sound systems. One act at a time; pick a name to hear who they are.
Devon St. Clair
Grove-born, Carnival-raised — the grown soul of West London, 1991.
Devon St. Clair was born in Ladbroke Grove in 1968 to a Grenadian mother and a Trinidadian father — Carnival people, sound-system people — and grew up with the Grove's reggae and the family's Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway and Roy Ayers records under the same roof. He taught himself the piano, then the bass, then most of the rest, and drifted from the sound systems to the West London soul all-dayers and the Sunday jazz-dance sessions where a new British soul was being made out of rare-groove crates and live musicianship. A cult independent 12" in 1990 was a pirate-radio staple before it was ever properly released.
He records mostly alone, in a back room off Meanwhile Gardens, layering Rhodes, Wurlitzer, Hammond and bass himself — which is why nobody else quite sounds like him. The songs are the Grove: rain on the Westway, Saturday on Portobello, the Sunday session as church, the tower block and the sky above it. Over it all, a honeyed tenor that sits behind the beat and lifts into falsetto only when it has to.
Key tracksStay the Weekend · Sunday Sermon · Concrete and Sky · Meet Me on Portobello
- Roots
- Ladbroke Grove / Notting Hill, W10–W11, West London
- In the lineage of
- Omar, Roy Ayers, Donny Hathaway, the West London jazz-dance sessions