Rudder teams with SuperBlue

Singers record track for Carnival show

By Terry Joseph
February 07, 2006

Among this season's greatest surprises is a brand-new collaboration between the incomparable King David Rudder and eight-time road-march champion SuperBlue, who slipped through the social cracks a few years ago and has since been the subject of a mixture of derision and pity.

The two former champions teamed to record one of the 23 cuts on the soundtrack of the musical The Brand New Lucky Diamond Horseshoe Club, stage version of which, produced by Rudder and Tony Hall and starring Errol Sitahal and Rhoma Spencer, has its gala premiere tomorrow night at Queen's Hall.

Speaking yesterday to the Daily Express, Rudder said he heard stories about SuperBlue and traced him to a house in St James where the latter was hard at work, recording with Len "Boogsie" Sharpe. "He wasn't doing any of the things people have been saying he is doing full-time. He was working," Rudder said.

"I decided to put him on the soundtrack because we need to remind Super that, whatever the current circumstances, he is an integral part of this whole music scene," Rudder said. "We must provide him with opportunities for participation. There was also the reality that his daughter was on the soundtrack and we couldn't do that and leave him out. It would be precisely the wrong signal.

"Finding him working told me he is not shying away from putting out the effort. This might not change anything but we cannot stay on the side and not make every effort to include him as part of the contemporary music scene. Let us try and fail, if it comes to that but to fail to try is to be part of the problem," Rudder said.

Interestingly, the title of the track on which Rudder collaborated with SuperBlue is "Stepping on the Serpents Head", a subliminal message for anyone addicted to psychotropic substances, commonly referred to by Satanic soubriquets.

"I have every confidence that when people hear the song it will raise their pores," Rudder said. "Both the song and the larger situation speaks of a man struggling with personal demons. I have experienced the drug problem at close range, seeing a relative consumed by it and I know you can't do anything but make the victim feel a sense of belonging and, as I have seen, it works sometimes. You never know."

"For all that is said about people not wanting to help themselves, we need to recognise that it is not as easy. It is a personal decision that the victim has to make and, from what I have seen, apparently more difficult than other major life decisions but it remains our social and brotherly responsibility to try to work with and rescue the fallen among us," Rudder said.

"It is a very heavy album - no baby steps on this one," he said. "The remake of "Lady Sheila" with Singing Sandra will probably be bigger than the original version."

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