MAMBO NASSAU LINER’S NOTES BY VIVIEN GOLDMAN :
The further adventures of Lizzy Mercier Descloux… the vagabond poet, artist, and musician—a transplant from Punk Paris to New York’s Lower East Side for her first album, 1979’s Press Color―moved on to the Bahamas for her second, Mambo Nassau (1981).
The futuristic, distorted disco feel of Mambo Nassau―dissonant, moody, or blithe―makes adventurous dance floors of the world its natural habitat. Here is the sound of cosmopolitan transience that does not flaunt allegiance to one specific terrestrial location but exults in everywhere.
The shift in ambiance and environment, away from the all-night round of clubs and dives and scenes of downtown Manhattan to a tropical island, was one Lizzy sought, along with her Svengali/manager/sometime lover, Michel Esteban, who had engineered the duo’s first great escape to Manhattan in 1978. Their love affair began in Paris, when Lizzy was an art student who lived with her aunt and uncle in a tiny apartment in the quaint, soon-to-be-gentrified Rue des Halles. Her neighbor across the road was Michel Esteban, and his pioneering, buccaneering punk store, Harry Cover, selling bootlegs, 45s, and t-shirts, flew the flag for punk outsiders amid the tasteful expanse of French BCBG (Bon Chic, Bon Genre good taste.) Together, Lizzy and Michel founded a punk paper, Rock News, finally moving full-time to New York.
Lizzy was swept along in Michel’s partnership with British entrepreneur and aficionado Michael Zilka when they co-founded ZE Records. Thus, Lizzy will forever be configured alongside the zany creative of that label, such as Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Was (Not Was), and James Chance and the Contortions, all surfing the No Wave in their own individual ways.
She became variously friend, muse, and lover to some of the people at the core of the milieu; she engaged with people like Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Amos Poe.
“Since 1975, we had spent seven years in New York, and it felt like the end of a cycle,” says Esteban. “We wanted to get out of Manhattan and move towards Africa. We needed new adventures and change. Mambo Nassau was our next stage.”
Lizzy’s aesthetic was a good fit for Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point Studios. Nassau itself is an oddly neutral corner of the Caribbean, existing in a bit of a bubble outside of the other islands so often rocked by social and political conflict. Riding smoothly on the golden carpet of offshore and private banking, Nassau is the discreet Switzerland of the region.
“If you are used to some cultural density, Nassau is an island where you can get easily bored with the blandness of the place,” observes the Paris-Gabon artist Wally Badarou, synthesizer innovator.
“Nassau was a no man’s land with no real identity,” declares Michel Esteban. “There was more of an identity in the studio than on the island. The studio had a vibe.”
Thus, in this tabula rasa, blank page of an island, Mambo Nassau crept, crawled, then danced into being.
“On our first album, we didn’t know anything about recording. We were just in love with music, and we did things very instinctively. Our producer Bob Blank generously treated us as if we were musicians, though we were amateurs,” recalls Esteban. “The one thing we were always sure of was our taste. But by the second album, if you’re not stupid, you learn. And Nassau was where we developed.”
Indeed, Mambo Nassau displays a new assurance and focus, indicating that Lizzy had settled down in the studio and was less skittish with the microphone―a trait that photographer Seth Tillett (a love of Lizzy’s in New York) noticed she initially shared with Debbie Harry when she first started out with Blondie.
The album’s assertive range of tracks represents the spontaneous combustion between Lizzy, Wally Badarou, and another sound supremo of the African diaspora, the Jamaican engineer Steve Stanley.
“We wanted to make post-colonial music, a new sort of hybrid mulatto music,” states Michel Esteban. “There was an African music scene in Paris but not so much the New Wave sound we were also into. But interest started to grow there in artists like Fela and King Sunny Ade.”
Paris was generally at the epicenter of these musical experimentations, a phenomenon embodied by Badarou, the doyen of Afro-Paris musicality, an adept at making synthesizers speak new languages. He remembers, “What was happening in those days was that Brian Eno got very enthused with African rhythms and got the Talking Heads immersed in that kind of sonic scenery.”
So Lizzy’s yearning for a pan-African connection, representing some non-ephemeral authenticity and myriad newly available, inspirational, re-energizing rhythms, was part of a zeitgeist. This flighty, fickle disc, then, is a time capsule of an explosive musical moment in which Lizzy played a part.
Mambo Nassau’s blithe hop and skip through styles is like a tour of Lizzy’s musical DNA. The album embraces more than the expected mutant funk, disco, and punk. The soundtrack fantasia of Nino Rota played with on “Milk Sheik” is also a pastiche of Bavarian brass band oompa-oompa music. Lizzy swings on the cool near-noir cocktail jazz chanson of “Les Baisers d’Amants,” singing with a friend, the popular DJ Philippe Krootchey (he and Lizzy died the same year, 2004).
Compass Point Studios itself is a personality in this record. Although Chris Blackwell, the founder of Compass Point, was mostly “off the island” when Mambo Nassau was being recorded, young Jamaican engineer Steve Stanley was part of the crack team of sound people and technicians kept on call by Blackwell, who released this album on his Island label. For Stanley, Lizzy’s sessions were one current in a big river of music, steadily flowing through Compass Point’s relaxed yet productive compound.
“Nassau was a kind of a vacation spot
where you work and you don’t feel pressure. It was very nice,” says Steve Stanley. “The beach was there so you can stop, take a little break, dive in the ocean, and come back to work. I didn’t like the ocean and I was always working, but the clients loved it. I would stay and finish the work while they dive in the ocean, so when they come back everything would be ready.”
The music that emerged from Compass Point was characterized by a zany, individualistic brio. Resident clan godfather was Robert Palmer, the suave blue-eyed Northern British soul man—he lived over the road. The Tom Tom Club, a.k.a the Talking Heads’ rhythm section of Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, often kept a cheery funk groove going in the little expat community. While Mambo Nassau was being made with its international crew, Jamaicans Grace Jones and Sly and Robbie were recording in Studio B next door.
“Steve Stanley, I would say, was Mambo Nassau’s real producer,” declares Wally. “The catalyst to the energies. It could even just be because of his use of body language.”
“Lizzy was like Grace Jones,” remembers Stanley, laughing over the line from Kingston. “They both liked going for a swim then coming straight into the studio with bare feet!”
The easygoing atmosphere was appropriate for Lizzy―the Compass Point sound is famous for sonic fun that teases and flirts and winds up sticking around on the dancefloor for decades. Stanley chuckled as he remembers how Lizzy used to wear red boxing gloves wherever she went and punctuate her conversation with a punch. “Playful, mind you!” he adds. “Everyone have to watch out when she comes! Lizzy was a nice person, good to get along with. And she was always professional and prepared in the studio, a very quick worker.”
Wally Badarou was adept at grounding Lizzy’s fanciful flights into solid yet surprising tracks. “Transforming raw material—just a groove, drum and bass, some sonic riffs―into something that could be shaped as a song was often my contribution to 1980s bands like Level 42,” explains Badarou. His stamp is clear on some of the Mambo Nassau’s most popular tracks, “Lady O K’pele” and “Five Troubles Mambo,” which he co-wrote.
For the unusual project, Badarou revved up from zero. “I was approached to work with Lizzy while I was playing with Grace Jones. I had no preconceived ideas what I was going to be facing; I did not know what Lizzy was all about, that she had a substantial underground following and existence,” Wally remembers. “But she looked nice to me, she was interesting to talk to. Lizzy was lovable.” By the time Badarou got to Nassau, he found the sessions well under way. “It was more discovering the material in what they already had,” he explains. “Because I was new and fresh, I could bring something that they hadn’t thought of and let the track become a real tune.”
“In this period, I mainly worked on the Prophet 5 synthesizer. It was a permanent ping-pong thing as I would devise a sound, knock it about on the keyboards, and Steve would say, ‘This is great,’ and Michel and Lizzy would say, ‘Keep that,’” Wally continues. “I improvised most of what I did. If Lizzy felt for it, she would lay down a guide vocal; that’s how we worked. She would feed from the musicians in terms of rhythms and I would bring the synthesizer parts in afterwards. We were in a permanent writing and co-writing situation. I was only concerned with music, but Lizzy had an idea of what she wanted her whole album to talk about.”
Mambo Nassau did speak to many mavericks enamoured of Lizzy’s free spirit. Nonetheless, sighs Michel Esteban, “It didn’t sell, though it worked well with critics. We never were commercial.”
This reissue includes bonus tracks like “Mister Soweto” that Lizzy cut in Paris with a new personal and professional involvement, British producer Adam Kidron. The intention was to use these tracks to get a deal from CBS that would permit Lizzy to record in the real Soweto. It is a glimpse of a time in which Lizzy was expanding musically, even beyond Mambo Nassau. On the ambient exploration, “Corpo Molli, Pau Duro,” Lizzy taps into a more supple vocal, and she rides the South African inflected rhythms with a newly easy abandon. Her performance of Marley’s “Sun Is Shining” is Lizzy at her most soulful.
She seems to taunt the musical establishment on the closing track, a P-Funk infused jam over which Lizzy shouts, “Don’t you try to stop me!”
The demo tracks worked. Michel, Lizzy, would indeed travel to apartheid South Africa and record Zulu Rock in 1983—and Lizzy would actually get to experience her first acceptance by the pop charts…
…but all that is in the next installment of our journey with the intriguing bohemian multi-media artist, Lizzy Mercier Descloux.
Vivien Goldman
Jackson Heights, 2014
