Seal [1991]

In London’s Trafalgar Square, thousands of young people gathered to fight for their right to rave. Brightly colored tracksuits and baggy denim rippled in waves, as far as the eye could see. Demonstrators at this 1990 Freedom to Party Rally were protesting legislation aimed at kneecapping the acid-house bacchanals that had recently revolutionized UK youth culture. The stakes were high: “IF YOU DONT STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS THERE WON’T BE ANY MORE ‘SUMMER OF LOVE’, THERE WONT EVEN BE ANY MORE RAVES,” warned an all-caps flyer for the event, apostrophes breathlessly optional.

Despite the cold January rain, the mood was jovial. There were boomboxes, a bullhorn, a beach ball. Pirate station Obsession FM broadcasted live from the event. People danced in empty fountains and clambered atop the bronze lions sternly guarding Nelson’s Column. Later that night, revelers would break into a warehouse in the village of Radlett, near the M25 orbital—the motorway that had funneled so many convoys full of party people into the English countryside over the previous year—and there, despite skirmishes with police, the party would run until 9 the following morning.

Weaving through the London crowd were two young men who had nipped down to soak up the vibe. One of them was Adam Tinley, 22, better known as Adamski. Already deep in the rave scene, he had scored a minor hit with the previous year’s squelchy “N-R-G” and even appeared on the BBC’s Top of the Pops—the first instrumental act to play the show in a decade, by his reckoning. The other was Sealhenry Samuel, known simply as Seal, nearly five years Tinley’s senior but a relative newcomer to the swiftly evolving rave movement. The two had come to the protest to feed off its energy before heading back to Adamski’s studio, a 20-minute walk away, where they were laying down Seal’s vocals over Adamski’s beats. There, hunched over a Roland 909 drum machine, feeding floppy disks into an Ensoniq SQ-80 synthesizer, they channeled the energy of the moment into a song about freedom.

They made for a curious duo. Adamski, bearing a “fragile, little-boy-lost demeanor,” was a studio tinkerer and technophile who had played in Diskord Datkord, a Dadaist electro-pop group known for chaotic multimedia spectacles—a dog was sometimes involved—that often ended in nudity. Seal, on the other hand, was imposingly tall, with jagged scars on his cheeks and bits of tinsel woven into his dreadlocks, partial to musicians like Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, and, his favorite, Joni Mitchell. Seal had recently returned from a year-long stint in Asia; while the UK’s day-one ravers were necking their first pills in muddy fields, he’d been playing in funk and blues bands in Japan and Thailand. Upon his return to the UK, a friend, determined to show Seal what he’d been missing, had taken him to the Santa Pod Raceway for Sunrise 5000, an 8,000-strong rave where Adamski was holding court in an airplane hangar. The sound and the spectacle hit Seal with the force of an epiphany. (“I don’t think I really knew myself before then,” he would later admit.)

Seal had already been singing and writing songs for a number of years, multi-tracking instrumental parts into a Portastudio with just his voice. Now, he immersed himself in the rave scene, singing along to the DJ at the top of his voice while crowds swirled around him. Somewhere in the rush of ’89–there are multiple, contradictory versions of the tale, which isn’t surprising, given the blurry circumstances—Seal handed his demo to Adamski’s MC and flatmate, Daddy Chester, and the two soon met. On New Year’s Eve, “in a haze on the dancefloor,” as Seal remembers it, they decided to work together.

One month later, back at Adamski’s studio and buzzing off the energy of the Freedom to Party rally, Seal selected an instrumental to sing over: a pounding, grinding staple of Adamski’s live sets that the producer had originally banged out in 15 minutes. It had the working title “The Killer” because Adamski thought the stabbing synths sounded like the soundtrack to a murder scene. But Seal’s presence—the powdery texture of his voice—softened the song. Empathy and optimism coursed through rave’s honeymoon phase, as new sounds and new chemicals promised a radiant pathway out of the grimness of Thatcher’s Britain. But Seal’s bluesy, searching entreaties had a pleading, bittersweet quality at odds with the day’s giddy tumult: “Solitary brother/Is there still a part of you that wants to live?/Solitary sister/Is there still a part of you that wants to give?” The song’s couplets were sometimes awkward, twisting platitudes into nonsense phrases that, from today’s perspective, resemble the output of an AI trained on ’80s power ballads (“Jaded hearts/Heal with time/Shoot that love/So we can stop the bleeding”). But even their clumsiness couldn’t drag down the song’s tender uplift, especially once Seal broke into his heavenly falsetto.

Since 1988, there had been no shortage of dance anthems in the charts—not just feel-good house tracks from acts like Inner City and Soul II Soul, but also headier, more esoteric cuts like 808 State’s blissed-out “Pacific State” and Humanoid’s paranoid “Stakker Humanoid.” But despite its ravey hallmarks—pistoning piano chords, flickering trance synths, and white-hot 909 snares—“Killer” sounded like nothing else at the time. Within six months, it would go to No. 1 on the UK charts and remain there for four weeks, an inviting and inclusive bridge from the underground to the airwaves. And though Seal’s name didn’t even appear on the cover, the song would serve as his launch pad. Just 50 weeks after “Killer” went to No. 1, he released his 1991 self-titled debut and ascended into the upper stratosphere of pop stardom.

Early press accounts painted Seal as a larger-than-life character, a sort of British Paul Bunyan—“a vast, almost monumental figure,” wrote one outlet. “Hands on hips like a fashion model, staring out with an Ancient Egyptian arrogance from behind his dreadlocks, he seemed to look down upon the world from a great height.” In one article he stood 6’1”; in another, 6’4”; still another pegged him at six and a half feet tall. He was said to have inherited his name from a Nigerian patriarch; sometimes, there was Brazilian heritage in the mix, except when there wasn’t. There were hints at a rough background—the mother who gave him up and then reclaimed him, the father who beat him; the squatted flat, the job flyering for sex workers. He’d studied architecture and electrical engineering, yet ended up cutting leather for a fashion designer on King’s Road—hence, perhaps, his own predilection for tailored suits and glistening animal hides.

Rumors swirled about Seal’s scars—they were the result of a bar fight, a wolf bite, ritual scarification gone wrong. He told one interviewer they simply appeared overnight, “at a time when I was dreaming a lot. Perhaps it was a cosmic thing,” he mused. (It later came out that they were a side effect of lupus.) He dated supermodels and played tennis with Andre Agassi and Boris Becker, his new neighbors in the Hollywood Hills. When he was laid low by pneumonia, it was double pneumonia. When he totaled his Range Rover, nearly careening over the cliff of a canyon, he climbed out the shattered sunroof and walked away unscathed. A SKI magazine profile tracked down the avid snowboarder in Whistler, where he bombed backcountry runs by day, and then, back in his cabin, serenaded the locals on acoustic guitar by the light of his fireplace. He rhapsodized about the pleasures of heliboarding, which suited him: Here was a person who, despite his colossal physical attributes, barely seemed to touch the ground.

But in contrast to these magisterial qualities, on his debut album, Seal is an ambiguous, mercurial entity—not so much a singer as a pure source of heat and light. For all the marvels of his voice, the music surrounding him is just as opulent; his singing is just one thread in a vast tapestry of crushed velvet, raw silk, and spun gold. (To paraphrase Project Runway host Heidi Klum, who was married to Seal from 2005 until 2012, it sounds expensive.) Seal is almost ridiculously luxurious: a mahogany wardrobe of strummed acoustic guitar, liquid fretless bass, jazz piano, glossy disco guitars, and gleaming Fairlight orchestral stabs. It is only tenuously connected to the dance music that launched Seal’s career, albeit held together by some of the most sumptuous synthesizer pads electricity is capable of generating. At the edges, tiny slivers of musique concrète—a peal of thunder, a bit of movie dialogue from a TV set tuned low at the other end of the room—seem to hint at the world outside, yet they have the paradoxical effect of cocooning us even deeper inside the album’s folds.

The credits boast a remarkable array of talent stretching back through funk, soul, and hip-hop, among them bassist Doug Wimbish (of Living Colour, Tackhead, the Sugarhill Gang Band), drummer Keith LeBlanc (Tackhead, Little Axe, the Sugarhill Gang Band), percussionist Paulinho da Costa (a session player with credits on Thriller and Purple Rain), drummer John Robinson (Off the Wall), and keyboardist Guy Sigsworth, who wrote and produced for Madonna, Britney Spears, and Björk. Wendy & Lisa, of Prince & the Revolution fame, sat in on “Whirlpool.” At the center of this gauzy web was chief dreamweaver Trevor Horn, who had signed Seal to his ZTT label after “Killer” topped the charts.

In the 1980s, Horn had emerged as one of the most innovative producers in pop music, putting his maverick instincts and vertiginous high tech in the service of artists like ABC, Yes, Grace Jones, and Pet Shop Boys. Horn often gravitated toward big personalities, provocative themes, and camp aesthetics; his work with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Art of Noise might be seen as a kind of spiritual precursor of PC Music and hyperpop. By the late ’80s, Horn was wading dangerously deep into shlock: Consider Simple Minds’ overstuffed 1989 album Street Fighting Years, or Rod Stewart’s schmaltzy cover of Tom Waits’ “Downtown Train” the same year. In Seal, however, Horn found an opportunity to pursue his most atmospheric interests, extending the lush, HD sound-sculpting of Propaganda’s A Secret Wish and Art of Noise’s “Moments in Love” into ambient pop cross-cut with new age and jazz fusion. Where Adamski’s “Killer” had been a hit in Ibiza’s clubs (he and Seal had performed live at Amnesia’s 1989 closing party, in fact), the largely un-clubby Seal represented the full sweep of the idiosyncratic style known as Balearic beat—a sunset-soundtracking strain of chillout that sheltered everything from 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” to Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” beneath its shady umbrella.

Though Seal had already written some of the album’s songs on guitar, in Horn’s hands, the material became far more ornate. “The Beginning,” the album’s most straightforward club-centric cut, opens the record on a deceptive note; its rushing snares and snub-nosed FM bass don’t sound too far off from what New Order did on the Ibiza-influenced Technique, just the year before. But Horn manages a more multidimensional sense of space; light-years stretch between the string pads, funk guitars, and layered percussion. New sounds and new variations appear around every corner; two-thirds of the way through, he throws in a completely superfluous eight-bar key change just because he can. From the first moment we hear Seal arcing upward across the stereo field, it’s clear that Horn knew exactly how precious this particular instrument was: As extravagant as the song gets, he never crowds out his singer.

After the uptempo “The Beginning,” the music mellows. Many of the album’s best moments are its most chilled. “Deep Water” begins by pairing a gentle electronic bossa-nova beat with acoustic guitar and slide guitar, like a country-soul reimagining of Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks; halfway through, there’s a false ending, and a swirl of backmasked guitars gives way to a crisp proto-trip-hop beat. (Soul II Soul producer Nellee Hooper, of pre-Massive Attack collective the Wild Bunch, consummated the trip-hop connection that year with his own slow-motion remix of Seal’s “Future Love Paradise.”) “Wild” begins with an errant, overdriven guitar chord before practically melting into a pool of iridescent keys and electric bass. The song’s changes make a breathtaking showcase for Seal’s harmonic facilities. Even “Crazy,” the album’s biggest single, is exquisitely laid back, weaving trance synths, wakka-wakka guitar, and a new jack swing-influenced beat into a billowing backdrop for Seal at his bluesiest. The restraint is no mean feat, given that the song was inspired by nothing less than the falling of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square massacre, two years before.

Unfortunately, Seal’s lyrical gifts were not necessarily up to such grandiose themes. The chorus of “Crazy”—“We’re never gonna survive unless/We get a little crazy”—was meant to capture the yearning for freedom that triggered the world-historical events of 1989, yet it’s essentially “YOLO” stretched out over 17 syllables. Seal’s frequent paeans to freedom were never exactly “Redemption Song,” and sometimes they could be asinine, even offensive. (From “Crazy”: “Crazy yellow people walking through my head/One of them’s got a gun, to shoot the other one/And yet together they were friends at school.”) Even at their most affecting, Seal’s lyrics often don’t stand up under close inspection. “Show me the way to solve your problems and I’ll be there,” he pleads on “Show Me”—an empathetic sentiment, perhaps, but hardly the most proactive.

Seal seemed aware of his limitations as a songwriter, opting not to print lyrics on the album’s sleeve. Occasionally, he could hit upon a truly stellar hook, of course. The chorus of “The Beginning” (“Music takes you round and round and round and round and rou-ound/Hold on to the love”) doesn’t look like much on paper, but the way he delivers it is thrilling: working away at each repeated syllable like a carpenter lovingly sanding down a beveled edge. Many of the record’s most successful songs are those where Seal simply lets the sound of the words take the lead: the snake-like twists of “Wild laces with diamonds in your hair/When you smile you make my world resolve, and you take over”; the plaintive assonance of “Jade, a shade of pain and then we die.”

In interviews, Seal professed his admiration for Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser’s evocatively nonsensical writing; he might have done well to take her lead and wander further into the realm of indecipherability. He has said that “Whirlpool” was the album’s most personal song for him, an attempt to come to terms with the spiral of self-doubt that followed the success of “Crazy,” yet he expresses more in its wordless introduction than in any of the song’s tortured metaphors. Cooing his way through the opening cadenza, he sounds like he’s pulling spirits out of the air, wrangling stray emotions with every blue note.

In general, Seal could stand to be more ambitious, more idiosyncratic, flat-out weirder. Moments like the interstitial passage at the midway point of “Deep Water” hint at paths the record could have taken, the ambient remix album that exists in an alternate universe. Seal and Horn come close on the closing “Violet,” a melancholy ballad that posits Seal as a kind of surrealist Balearic torch singer. There have been times, locked in its swirl of synth pads, fretless bass, and jazz piano, that I’ve been tempted to declare it the most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever heard. Behind its sentimentality and its simplicity lurks an incredible vastness, one made all the more compelling by the bits of movie dialog woven almost inaudibly into the mix. (From the 1987 film The Sicilian: “Why should they come? I was supposed to die back there, but I didn’t!”) The mind reels at what he might have done had he gone further down that path. Instead, in 1994, we got “Kiss From a Rose,” the first step on his reinvention as the adult-contemporary star that he is today.

I don’t know what “Violet” is about; the writing is too vague, too convoluted, to scan in any meaningful way, though Seal manages some lovely images—a “violet unicorn”; a request to “take my tears and wash the sunrise”—along the way. But that hardly matters. Seal may have idolized literary writers like Dylan and Mitchell, but you don’t come to Seal for poetry; you come for that voice and the way it navigates Horn’s productions, like a bird surfing springtime’s swirling air currents. Much the same way that “Killer” fed off the energy of the Freedom to Party rally, Seal drew sustenance from the spirit of that volatile era: It is idealistic, unfocused, and beautiful in its innocence. When I listen to the album, I imagine Seal caught up in the maelstrom of Sunrise 5000, light glinting off the metal tips of his dreads as he towers over fellow dancers’ heads, singing along to techno at the top of his lungs. Whatever the words were, they were lost the moment they melted into the air—he was just one more element in a vast, multi-sensory explosion of color and texture, a voice giving voice to something beautiful.

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