Music interview: Hamish Stuart on finding a new kind of funk after Average White Band

Touring with Paul McCartney rekindled the love of live music in Hamish Stuart after the break-up of Average White Band. Picture: Roger Goodgroves/REX/Shutterstock

Hamish Stuart appears to be heeding the sentiments of Let’s Go Round Again, one of the biggest hits by his former group the Average White Band. Stuart provided the sweet soul tenor to Alan Gorrie’s funky baritone during the Dundonian band’s 1970s heyday, going on to work with or write songs for American soul legends Chaka Khan, Aretha Franklin, Quincy Jones, Diana Ross, Ben E King and Smokey Robinson, tour with two Beatles, and also front his own Hamish Stuart Band.

But he has lately come full circle with the appropriately named 360 Band, playing again with his erstwhile AWB compadres, saxophonist Malcolm “Molly” Duncan and drummer Steve Ferrone, who instigated the project when he invited his former bandmates to join him for a performance at his induction to the Drummers Hall of Fame in Los Angeles.

Stuart and Duncan, neither of whom have been involved with the incarnation of AWB which has been going round again since 1989, were the only two who could make the gig, and found that playing together once more was a bit like riding a particularly groovy bicycle. Before they had even arranged another gig, the offer to record an album was floated and 360 is the silky, satisfying result, redolent of their funky prime when a group of pasty London-based Scots gained recognition in the homeland of soul and funk.

Stuart had been gigging for a number of years when he moved down south from his native Glasgow in 1969. The core of the Average White Band was already in place when he was invited to join a few months in. “I learned more in the first year of the band being together than I had in the last five or more. We’d all cut our teeth but then it became something deeper. It wasn’t a bunch of virtuosos, some were more talented than others, but musically it really worked. Bands that are special, it is about the chemistry.”

The key to AWB’s eventual breakthrough was their decision to up sticks and move to the US, landing initially in LA, where they were able to achieve the authentic R&B drum and bass sound they were looking for. “We found a little studio that Earth Wind & Fire had done their first album in, and the same engineers,” remembers Stuart. “We weren’t trying to imitate, we were trying to emulate.”

Stuart knew that they had hit their mark on their first US tour, opening for BB King in front of a predominantly African-American audience at the Kennedy Centre. “We went down a storm – it was the first real indication that we were being accepted.”

The group were duly signed to Atlantic Records, joining one of the most enviable soul rosters in the industry. Atlantic executive Jerry Wexler made the shrewd move to release their debut single for the label, a supremely funky instrumental called Pick Up The Pieces, to black radio stations in a blank sleeve, creating a playful sense of mystery around the group name. It went on to top the charts in the US, even generating a reply song, Pick Up The Pieces One by One from James Brown’s JBs, calling themselves the Above Average Black Band. It remains the band’s signature tune, cropping up regularly on film and TV soundtracks – most recently on Gardeners’ World of all things.

“It’s funny being a singer in a band that’s best known for an instrumental!” laughs Stuart. “But it’s lovely to know that it’s still there and Monty Don is walking around his garden with his dogs while Pick Up The Pieces is playing in the background.”

However, just as AWB were enjoying their greatest success they were hit with their greatest tragedy, when original drummer and band linchpin Robbie McIntosh died of a drugs overdose at a Hollywood party. “He was the guy that I wanted to play with more than anybody,” says Stuart. “He was inspiring and soulful and very funny, he was a larger than life character and he drew people to him.”

Stuart has revisited those bittersweet times on the 360 track Too Hip. “It was something I started writing when I was thinking about how we started out and we didn’t have two pennies to rub together, sitting in that house in Hollywood, the blankets over the window, writing the songs that would change everybody’s lives irrevocably.”

Stuart’s journey began playing in soul and pop covers bands in Glasgow. Both his parents sang, his mother going on to work with Jimmy Logan. “And then The Beatles came along and that was it,” says Stuart. He bought his first guitar and would painstakingly work out the chords to the songs on the early Beatles albums. Like many of his generation, the cover versions on those albums were also his introduction to the exotic world of American soul and rhythm’n’blues.

Years later, Stuart would work with both Paul McCartney, playing guitar in his touring band in the late 80s and early 90s, and as bassist for Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band. “Those strange little curves that life takes, who would have thought?” he says.

By this point, Stuart had carved a niche writing songs for the likes of Chaka Khan and George Benson, but he credits McCartney with rekindling his love of playing live.

“When the Average White Band broke up in 1982, I didn’t know what to do with myself because I’d been in bands from aged 15. I’d got married and my son had just been born, so it was a good time to be at home,” he says. “So when the call came from Paul I didn’t know how I would feel about going on the road again but I realised how much I had missed playing live. It felt really natural. Paul’s really easy anyway – there’s no big I am. I fell in love with the guitar again and have been ever since.”

360 is released by 3MS Music on 18 August