Edmond Montague Grant is a Guyanese-born British singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. Noted for his genre-blending style and socially conscious lyrics, he is the creator of the musical genre known as ringbang.
real name: Edmond Montague Grant
labels: Epic Records, Ice Records
genres: pop music, reggae
plays: guitar, voice
member of: The Equals
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Edmond Montague Grant was born in Plaisance, British Guiana (now Guyana) on 5 March 1948. He later moved to Linden. His father, Patrick, was a trumpeter who played in a band called Nello and the Luckies. He has a younger brother named Rudy, who is also a musician. His parents lived and worked in England while he was at school, and they would send money back to Guyana for his education. In 1960, he and his brother joined their parents in the Kentish Town area of London. He attended Acland Burghley Secondary Modern in Tufnell Park, where he learned to read and write music. He became an avid fan of American musician Chuck Berry, and decided on a career in music after seeing Berry perform at the Finsbury Park Astoria.
A self-titled solo album released in 1975 made little impact, as did the proto-soca album Message Man, completed and released in 1977, on which Grant played all the instruments himself. "Hello Africa", a song from the Message Man album, is considered among the very first soca songs ever recorded. Grant began incorporating elements of rock, pop, soul, calypso, and African music into his sound. His breakthrough as a solo artist came two years later with the album Walking on Sunshine, which spawned the UK top 20 hit "Living on the Frontline". He returned to the charts in 1980 with the top 10 hit "Do You Feel My Love", the opening track of Can't Get Enough, the 1981 album that gave him his first entry in the UK Albums Chart. The album included...
Grant is known for his unique style that blends various Western, African, and Caribbean musical traditions. Grant's music is primarily classified as reggae rock and soca, but his sound has blended various musical elements, such as pop, electro-pop, funk, disco, soul, calypso, ringbang (which he invented), and world music elements such as African polyrhythms and samba.
"Electric Avenue" is a song by Guyanese-British musician Eddy Grant. Written and produced by Grant, it was released on his 1982 studio album Killer on the Rampage.
In the United States, with the help of the MTV music video he made, it was one of the biggest hits of 1983. The song refers to Electric Avenue in London during the 1981 Brixton riot.
The title of the song refers to Electric Avenue in the south London district of Brixton, the first market street to be lit by electricity. According to Grant, he first became aware of the existence of the street during a stint acting at the Black Theatre of Brixton. The area is now known for its high population of Caribbean immigrants. At the beginning of the 1980s, as identified by the Scarman Report, tensions over unemployment, racism and poverty exacerbated by racist policing culminated in the street events now known as the 1981 Brixton riot. Grant, horrified and enraged, wrote and composed a song in response to these events. Shortly after, Grant left the UK to live in Barbados, and his most recent batch of songs was lost during baggage...
Filmed in Barbados, the song's music video helped it to gain popularity in the United States. In the early years of MTV, the network ran music videos almost exclusively by white artists and was criticized by famous musicians, such as David Bowie, for not having black artists on the network. After Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" aired and was highly successful, MTV scrambled to get other black artists into their rotation. Once "Electric Avenue"'s video aired, it did not take long for the song to climb up to the No. 2 spot on the Billboard Hot 100.
The original B-side to this song was a non-LP track titled "Time Warp", itself a stripped-down instrumental of "Nobody's Got Time", originally released in 1977. The 45 sold more than one million copies in the United States, earning a platinum certification. It was later re-issued with "I Don't Wanna Dance" as the flip side.
Grant initially released it as a single in 1983, and it reached No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart. In 1983, Portrait/CBS decided to launch the single in the US, where it spent five weeks at number two on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart and hit number one on Cash Box magazine's chart. "Electric Avenue" was a hit on two other US charts: on the Hot Black Singles chart, it went to No. 18, and on the Dance/Disco Top 80 chart, it peaked at No. 6. It was nominated for a Grammy Award as Best R&B Song of 1983 but lost to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean". Jamaican singer Bunny Wailer stated that "Electric Avenue" inspired the song "Electric Boogie", which he wrote for Marcia Griffiths in 1982.