Soul band Red Express return with new album, 59th Street

Bishop’s Stortford-born musician Bill Sharpe is a founding member of ’80s jazz-funk hitmakers Shakatak. He was also a key part of Red Express, a six-piece soul band which regularly gigged in and around Cambridge nearly 50 years ago.

Bill wrote a number of songs for Red Express – he is also the main songwriter for Shakatak, whose original line-up are still going strong after 42 years – and over the last few years, the original members of Red Express got together to record eight of them. The tracks were then mixed at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, near Bath.

The album, titled 59th Street, was released on July 28. Speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his home near Bury St Edmunds, Bill says of Red Express: “This is the band I was in before Shakatak, and also our guitarist Keith Winter was in Red Express as well, and we were sort of mid ’70s to late ’70s – for four or five years we played pretty much all around Cambridge.

“It was kind of a soul, jazz-funk kind of thing, and our singer [Dennis Andrews] was from Chicago.

“We had quite a following at the time and I’d written pretty much all of the songs we used to play. We used to do a few covers but then we started doing original material, and we’d been talking about recording them for posterity really because obviously it’s not a well-known name at all…

“But it was just a nice thing to do, so a few years ago we recorded the songs, and then we went down to Peter Gabriel’s studio, Real World, which is a lovely residential studio.

“We went down there for a week and mixed the tracks, and the record company that releases all the Shakatak stuff and other stuff I do agreed to release the album.

“It was not necessarily for commercial reasons, it was just a nice thing to do – but as it turned out, I think it turned out better than we expected.”

Back in the day, Red Express, whose singer now lives near San Francisco, played on a trailer at the first Strawberry Fair in Cambridge and also supported Elvis Costello at Trinity College.

They shared the stage with Darts, Landscape, and the Humphrey Lyttelton Big Band and were regulars at Cambridge’s Alma Brewery, the Grad Pad, Raffles, and the Great Northern Hotel.

They did a Masque Ball at the Railway Hotel in Bishop’s Stortford, and the Triad Arts Centre, and even got dressed up – well, sort of – for several of Cambridge University’s May Balls.

Bill, who has also worked with the likes of Gary Numan and ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke of Motörhead, says the band may do a gig in September or October but nothing has been finalised as of yet.

“I just thought it might be nice to spread the word, mainly around Cambridge,” he notes, “and so hopefully a few people might be interested in it. It was nice to spend time together [as a band] and reminisce.”

Bill adds: “Thinking about all the times we had, Cambridge had quite a good music scene – we’ve seen that through the years, quite a lot of big-name bands have come out of Cambridge, but our little era was mid-to-late ’70s.”

59th Street is now available to buy on CD and download. For more on the band, visit redexpress.net. For more on Shakatak, go to shakatak.com.