Lucy Pearl – ‘Don’t Mess With My Man’

Back when I was folding and selling shirts for a living, which took up one of the longest summers of my young adult life, I spent quite a lot of time with the general manager of the shirt company who now works as a runner in TV. With up to ten hours a day stuck in an overheated warehouse with nothing to do but iron and hang new product on racks for catalogue shoots, we had plenty of time to listen to music. I’m always curious to see what other people really love listening to when they’re trying to forget they’re at work, so after a few days, I let Luke plug his iPod in and show me his world. It turns out the guy, who had said very few polysyllabic words to me since I’d started at the office, was actually a massive ’90s R&B fan. And by far his favourite record, one which, if I recall correctly, he said he used to blast as a young kid like me when he was cruising through summer streets, was the one and only self-titled album by Lucy Pearl. Until I was let go a few months later (evidently being left handed and lazy doesn’t help in a shirt factory) I reckon I heard this record 100 times. Luke’s eyes literally beamed when he started talking about it. He knew every member of the band, their previous histories and how they’d come together. I was astounded. And I also really, really liked the groove on ‘Don’t Mess With My Man.’

As far as supergroups go, you’re more likely to find them in rock than hip-hop. Though artists in this space are more open to collaboration (indeed, the likes of Kanye and friends make entire albums this way), they don’t really get together for longer-term projects that haven’t already begun. The Fugees, for instance ,would not be deemed a supergoup, but the Goodie Mob, which featured Cee-Lo and a revolving door of his Atlanta friends, would have. Same for A$AP Mob and Odd Future, though again, the foundations are already pretty much there. With Lucy Pearl, it was actually a throw-everything-in-the-blender moment. If you take stock of their previous affiliations, the band was one part Tony! Toni! Tone! (in the form of instrumental prodigy, Raphael Saadiq), one part En Vogue (Dawn Robinson) and one part A Tribe Called Quest (Ali Shaheed Muhammad, turntablist and producer par excellence.) And what’s better, D’Angelo came up with the idea, and was going to be in the group too. Talk about guns blazing.

Though they all existed in a similar time and space, the experiment that was Lucy Pearl could have easily backfired. Indeed, the only evidence of why they broke up after releasing such a stellar album in 2000 has been cited on various Internet message boards as ‘ego problems’. Instead, it produced a sprawling, diverse record of neo-soul grooves, funk bass, late-80s pop vocals and hip-hop beats. If Tribe was about sampling and Toni! was about live instruments, Lucy Pearl met comfortably at the halfway point, cueing in authentic sounding drum tracks while Saadiq manned the latin-jazz acoustic guitar strumming and that excellent, tasteful slap-bass (yes, it is possible) figure. As for Dawn, well, she did what she’d always done best, perched that little bluebird of a voice neatly in the high end of her register and pumped out melodies that seemed made for sing-a-longs. Where other tracks on the album (don’t tell Luke that) defaulted to love jams or obvious New Jack Swing nods, ‘Don’t Mess With My Man’ synthesised the best of a bygone era and what would be happening next in the realm. Think about how similar the harmonic structure seems to Justin Timberlake’s first solo hit, ‘Like I Love You’, for instance. Lucy Pearl were way ahead of their time, and yet totally of their time, too. This one’s for Luke. Great music comes from the strangest of places.

Lucy Pearl – ‘Don’t Mess With My Man’