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Aura Lewis - Full Experience |
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AURA: We finished the tour in Africa and Jimmy invited me to come back to Jamaica with him because he was ready to do the album "Bongo Man". But on the way, we passed through London and this is where I met Bob Marley and Lee Perry. One day Jimmy took me to Island Records, it was during the time when Bob and Lee were doing 'Punky Reggae Party'. I went into the studio and Lee Perry says "Hey, you know man, I'm looking for a singer. We're doing something downstairs and we've got Candy McKenzie and we need another vocalist". Jimmy Cliff said "Here's Aura, she sings with me and we just came back from Africa". That's how I met Lee Perry. It was at Island records' studios, with Bob Marley for 'Punky Reggae Party' and 'Keep On Moving'. I think I met the Clash at the same time, because Lee was co-producing their album or something. It was a very interesting and exciting period. So we did the session. Since I was on my way to Jamaica, I was obliged to leave, even though I had a lot of interesting offers to stay. I went to Jamaica to wait on working with Jimmy on this album and Lee Perry came back from London to Kingston. He had the Congoes "Heart of the Congoes" album, he had just been trying to make a deal with Island records. 
When Lee came back to Jamaica, I was working with another girl at the time, a black american girl
called Pamela Reed. Together we did a lot of backing vocals on a lot of Lee's pro-ductions like
'Disco Devil' and on 'Curley Locks'. We found ourselves working more and more for Scratch.
We were looking for somebody to produce an album, because I was trying to put together this project
which was Full Experience. It was my idea of three girls, three black women, one from Africa,
one from the Caribbean and one from black America, like Full Experience meaning the full black
experience. This was my dream.Rhen I met Candy in London, she's from Guyana and she played keyboards and sang. When I heard that she was coming I thought "this is a great opportunity to put this idea in motion". I had spoken to Lee about it and you know Lee, all these pretty women, he thought yeah, why not? One day, Pamela and I went to him and he heard some of the stuff we were working on, so he said "Hey, let's do it!" I had put together eleven songs and we had chosen a couple of African songs - one in Swahili-, really the first time that African songs had been done to reggae, if I do say so. We did this album in a wonderful environment. Lee Perry got the musicians together, but in the middle off all this work, as usual, little aspects started coming in to create confusion. First there was Lee Perry's crush on Pamela. Black Ark was in the same yard as his house and there was (his wife) Pauline and the kids and everything. That was one side. Then, on the second side, Candy had a big crush on a certain musician. That was creating a lot of havoc on the musician's family side. So you can see a lot of bad vibes started coming on the scene because of this. I was trying to keep everything straight just until we finished the record. Candy didn't want to do her songs because Island was going to back her to do an album of her own ... anyway, we finished the recording of the eleven songs. By this time, I was afraid to leave the master tapes at Black Ark because I had learned a lot of things. Since I had been working with Jimmy Cliff, I asked Jimmy if he would help me pay for the masters and pay Lee like a producer. Then he and I would do an agreement for what we would do with the music after that. I don't think Lee Perry appreciated that. With all the vibes that had started to go on with the thing, with Pauline saying all the time it was going to be a flop, I felt like maybe I would just take the master and do a deal with Jimmy. | |||
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