Darker than blue

A touching portrait of Curtis Mayfield, one of America's great

performers, is to be broadcast next week

EVERY now and then you'll be driving round with the radio on and some

DJ, usually an old one who has not yet been sacked by Radio One, will

play it. It starts with a strident, brass intro which takes your breath

away, makes you shiver no matter how many times you hear it. And then

Curtis Mayfield sings and, for three minutes at least, everything is

fine with the world. Move On Up is that kind of song. It is also a sad

reminder of a tragedy which robbed the world of one of its greatest

musical talents.

In September 1990, Curtis Mayfield was tuning up to play an open-air

benefit concert at Wingate Field in Brooklyn. As he walked on stage, his

guitar strapped around his shoulder, there was a sudden gust of wind. It

brought down a lighting scaffold on top of him. Mayfield remembers

little about it. He came to lying on the stage, unable to move his arms

and legs. He was rushed to hospital but no amount of treatment could

improve his condition. His spine had been snapped. Today he remains

confined to a wheelchair, paralysed from the neck down, a quadraplegic

with no hope of recovery. He is unable to sing and he cannot write down

even a note of music.

Now, for the first time, a documentary has been made about Curtis

Mayfield. Omnibus (Tuesday, BBC1) traces both his career and the

influence he had on black soul music over a 30-year period. For producer

Anne Elleston and writer/presenter Caryl Phillips it is a labour of

love. They are acutely aware of the contribution which Mayfield made to

popular music.

''I got the idea to make the programme when I read an article about

Mayfield in Rolling Stone,'' explained Elleston. ''I've always been a

great fan of his music but I hadn't realised that he had been involved

in that accident. I also didn't realise how many current artistes were

re-recording his music and that he had been so influential.''

She then approached black writer Phillips (who was short-listed for

last year's Booker Prize) whom she knew shared an interest in Mayfield's

music. He was able to persuade the performer to give his first major TV

interview since his accident.

''The tragedy is that he can't write because he doesn't have the power

of his hands and yet he remains an immensely resilient character with a

wonderful spirit,'' added Elleston.

The documentary is a sincere and often touching portrait of one of

America's great performers. In a remarkable career which spanned 30

years he was a singer, a songwriter, a guitarist, an arranger, a music

publisher, and an astute businessman.

Mayfield, now aged 52, was born and brought up in Chicago's notorious

Cabrini Green area. He bought his first guitar at the age of eight and

wrote his first hit song -- Gypsy Woman -- when he was 12. He was

greatly influenced by his early exposure to gospel music and, before he

left school, he was already attempting to make the classic synthesis

between the sacred and the profane, between spiritual music and soul.

His career really took off when he formed the vocal group, The

Impressions, in the early 1960s with his childhood friend Jerry Butler.

Their role models were performers like The Coasters and Sam Cooke.

Indeed, Mayfield took his distinctive high tenor, almost falsetto, vocal

style from Cooke.

Butler, still a solo performer but now more closely associated with

Chicago politics, says of him: ''People say that Curtis is perhaps a

black Bob Dylan. I would say that Bob Dylan is a white Curtis

Mayfield.''

In the late 1960s Mayfield left the Impressions and embarked upon a

solo career. It co-incided with the rise of the civil rights movement in

America. Much of his work, songs like People Get Ready and Choice of

Colours, were taken up as, not so much protest songs, but more as

anthems for the movement. His songs were acutely political but they were

also very positive. They were an inspiration to a generation, capturing

the optimism of the time and preaching the virtues of black

consciousness.

His prolific output also touched on other issues which were important

to blacks. There was a disproportionate number of blacks and poor white

Americans sent as cannon fodder to Vietnam. Mayfield reflected upon

their plight on their return from the war with songs like Back To The

World and We Got To Have Peace.

By the time Mayfield started making solo albums, in the early 70s, the

black perspective in America had changed. The Martin Luther King era was

over and blacks had begun to develop an attitude. According to Caryl

Phillips, this was best illustrated by the so-called ''blaxploitation''

movies of the time, like Shaft and Superfly. Mayfield agreed to write

the music for Superfly but he was uncomfortable with what he perceived

to be the movie's glamorising of the drugs culture. It was, he said,

like ''a cocaine advert''. So the songs he wrote for Superfly were like

a counterpoint to the message of the movie, uncompromisingly anti-drugs

poems like Pusherman.

Throughout the 70s his lyrics raged, not only against drugs, but also

against the increasing violence of the black community and about

homelessness in America's urban housing schemes, the projects. He was,

in effect, the antithesis of today's rap artists with their negative,

destructive messages. The irony is, of course, that many of these young

performers were greatly influenced by his music. Indeed, the last thing

Curtis Mayfield recorded before his accident was a re-working of

Superfly with rap star Ice T.

Today Mayfield is confined to a wheelchair in his home in a quiet

suburb of Atlanta, a home he shares with his second wife and six of his

11 children (songs were not the only thing at which Curtis was

prolific).

In his interview, Phillips asks him about the frustration of not being

able to write or perform. Although he can converse he cannot sing; his

diaphragm does not function properly. He replies: ''At the moment I'm

just keeping it all to myself. I hope in the very near future, with the

hi-tech technology and voice computers, that I can find a way to get

back to writing and preparing compositions.

''I have ideas but if you can't jot them down then they fade like

dreams.''

Does he get lonely? ''Of course I get lonely, simply because of not

being able to get up and out of here. I've been an independent person

all my life. But things could always be worse,'' he says.