In the late 80s there was a man. A black daredevil with dreads. Prince, Muhammad Ali and Sam Cooke rolled into one package.
His sexy appearance on a tv show called the Tube aroused a nation. He came through the tube to give us gravel voiced sexy days.

His alchemy was wrong. Unlike Kravitz who took from Lennon, Hendrix and Marley WHOM EVERYBODY IN THE WHOLE WORLD LIKES. The Ali ego stokes the Prince genius incites the Cooke appetite for destruction.

This is his story. The story of Terence Trent D'Arby

—

I woke up last night, not in a cold sweat but in a stone groove. The acetate of Terence Trent D'Arby's Neither Fish Nor Flesh was still spinning on my turntable. It was making a most frilly buzzing.

My silk sheets slipped off my aching muscles as I got out of bed and walked across my concrete floor to the Technics deck and almost lifted the needle.

I looked up at London, looking at me. We were both naked in front of each other. The sun was about to come up and the lady of the Thames looked nervous and unready for humanity. Her lights were half on.

Come on London. You can do it. You got TTD on your side.

London saved my life. I paused and did not lift that needle. And then I heard the child’s voice within the trippy buzz.

Back in New Orleans I had attended a voodoo funeral. The band hit a high note that never ended. I don’t mean it seemed like it never ended. I mean what I said. The coffin went in the tomb and the brass band lowered their horns but the note hung in the air. And there was a soft voice in it, the essence of that sad girl who used to sell me bangles and never complain that I never wore them.

People who knew voodoo nodded and left but I was a young soldier on leave and all I knew about Voodoo was pins in dolls. I stayed by the tomb for hours listening to that voice, sure I heard snatches of songs I would write one day. But when I finally walked away, mad with thirst, the notes were snatched away. ‘You have to work for it, honey child.’

The acetate was singing at me now. I pulled my hair back and put my face close to the needle.

Diamonds are voodoo. Only diamonds are hard enough and multifaceted enough to hear other worlds. I heard a legend that some free men would sneak in the slave camps of Sierra Leone just to live their lives hammering at the diamond faces and surrounding themselves in other, kinder worlds.
The needle hummed at me.

It told me everything I needed to do to make my album a great success. It showed me the world where my face was known by all and my voice flourished and found the exact marriage of gospel and junk I had been looking for. I saw an amazing concert in the forbidden city where each terra-cotta soldier had been replaced or -dare I imagine- recarved in my own image.

I lay on a couch with a woman who I adored, looking out over our island. She resembled me intensely. She had no navel.
The sound carried the images, like a cassette carries a computer game.

There was not much I had to do to achieve these goals. Remove a couple of tracks. Don’t ship at Christmas. Study humility. Change the title.
Tiny things.

Things I didn't really care about.

Until the voodoo told me not to do them.

“Voodoo voices are for dead men,” I sang in a slave chant style again and again, then I kicked the Technics on the floor, got back on my futon and spent the night in silk dreaming of a complete life with the voodoo bangle girl.