In the years that followed Billy Valentine’s first brush with fame – when he and his brother John scored a breakthrough with their Reagan-era protest song Money’s Too Tight (To Mention) – the veteran singer made peace with life away from the spotlight. “There were periods when ‘Billy Valentine’ wasn’t needed,” the 73-year-old humbly reflects today, via video call from his home in Los Angeles. “It just wasn’t my time.”
But that all changed in 2020, as the pandemic took hold and the US was engulfed by chaos. “On television, I saw George Floyd being killed, I saw Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets, I saw President Trump holding a vigil in front of a church,” Valentine remembers, reciting the events like scenes from a fever dream. “Nothing made sense.” He takes a breath. “I felt truly scared.” But this dire confluence was also a “perfect storm” that shaped and guided his remarkable comeback album, Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth, and renewed his sense of purpose. “I finally had something to say,” he says. “I’m a messenger. That’s my calling.”
Valentine had started out as an entertainer. His parents ran a nightclub in Columbus, Ohio, Club Faces. “I’m one of 13 children,” he says. “My sisters tended bar, my brothers and I held down the bandstand.” His beloved older brother Alvin had escaped to a regular gig as an organ player in Hackensack, New Jersey and invited a 15-year-old Billy east as opening act at Leon’s Cocktail Lounge. There, Valentine studied at the feet of the touring soul greats playing Leon’s en route to Harlem’s Apollo theatre. By the early 70s, Valentine was touring the midwest singing with soul-jazz group Young-Holt Unlimited, but was hungry for more. “I met this pool-shark named Jack White, who played exhibition matches on the college circuit,” remembers Valentine. “He made good money and was booked for the next five years.” White hired Valentine to be an opening musical act, enabling Valentine to relocate to California, bringing his brother John along as guitarist.
The pair quickly secured work with the national touring company of The Wiz, the Tony-winning, all-Black “super soul musical” reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, and cut their earliest records as the Valentine Brothers, including a disco version of Sound of Music. “Given our name, we pursued a theme of love songs,” Valentine says. But this was hardly a unique selling point in a crowded soul market, and a dose of economic reality inspired them to change tack and write Money’s Too Tight (To Mention). Unlike the unctuous balladry of their first album, this gritty protest-funk “reflected our real lives”, Valentine says. “We’d just been laid off from The Wiz and the rent was due!”
Released in 1982, Money’s Too Tight (To Mention) chronicled all-too-familiar scenes of poverty, singing the blues of those starving under Reagan’s trickle-down economics. “John and I were growing up, and starting to feel things about our country, about the situation,” Valentine remembers. “The Reagan years saw poorer communities suffer. Taxes were rising on us, and the rich were getting richer, and Black people were being oppressed by law enforcement … Something needed to be said, and I tapped into the social commentary of the 60s, of the Last Poets, of Donny Hathaway.”
Channelling the soul and funk Billy had grown up on and the nascent hip-hop scene in New York, the anthem “was all over radio. We knew we’d tapped into something real – it felt like the right song, at the right time.” The song’s message transcended borders – Simply Red covered it as their debut single in 1985. “The Iron Lady was ruling with an iron fist in your country, so you all knew what we were singing about,” Valentine adds. “Mick Hucknall certainly sang that song like it was his.”
But while Hucknall enjoyed chart success on both sides of the Atlantic, the Valentine Brothers struggled to maintain their success. They had cut Money’s Too Tight for an independent, and when bigger labels swooped in to rerelease it, the label-owner held out for a sum so princely none of the majors were willing to meet it. Lacking major distribution, the single stalled outside the Billboard R&B Top 40, let alone the main pop chart. “That hurt us,” says Valentine. The brothers subsequently signed to a major label, but never regained their momentum. Reagan was still in office when they released their swansong 1987’s Picture This.
Billy subsequently began a songwriting partnership with Bob Thiele Jr, whose father was a key figure in jazz, running Impulse! Records; producing Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus; and founding the Flying Dutchman label, home to Gil Scott-Heron, Gato Barbieri and Lonnie Liston Smith. Billy and Thiele Jr sold songs to Ray Charles, Bonnie Raitt and the Neville Brothers, while Thiele Jr got Billy work singing on demos other songwriters would send prospective clients. When Thiele Jr became a TV producer, he enlisted Billy as vocalist on soundtracks for TV shows such as Boston Legal and Sons of Anarchy.
And when, in 2020, Thiele Jr relaunched his father’s dormant Flying Dutchman label as an imprint of Acid Jazz Records, he didn’t think twice about who he would make his first signing. “Billy’s got the most amazing voice,” he says. “He’s a unicorn – those kinds of voices just don’t exist any more. He’d been moving away from R&B, singing songs from Camelot and the Great American Songbook … But it was 2020, Black Lives Matter was happening. I told Billy he should sing the Great Black American Songbook.”
Thiele Jr assembled an inspired group of musicians – session bassist extraordinaire Pino Palladino, Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker – and selected a song list including classics from Flying Dutchman’s past (Leon Thomas’s The Creator Has a Master Plan, Gil Scott-Heron’s Home Is Where the Hatred Is), and songs such as Curtis Mayfield’s We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue and Stevie Wonder’s You Haven’t Done Nothing.
Valentine felt the weight of this political moment as he recorded the album. It was “cathartic”, he says, “but also gut-wrenching, singing these sad songs at this sad time. But Bob was never gonna let me stay in my comfort zone. In the isolation of lockdown, I inhabited those songs every day – I got into their headspace, like an actor gets into their role.” The resulting album doesn’t just serve as a fine showcase for Valentine’s masterly croon, but also as a paean to African American music’s rich tradition of protest and activism, its timeless songs speaking acutely to this tumultuous era.
“I just want to make a difference,” Valentine adds. “I had to get this stuff out of my gut, and say what needs to be said in a way that could change someone’s mind, someone’s attitude, or just make them stop and think.” Having rediscovered his voice singing the protests of others, he’s begun working on songs of his own once again tapping into the protest song tradition that made his name four decades ago. Billy Valentine’s time, it seems, has come again. “My work’s not done,” he nods. “I still have more songs I want to sing, social commentary things, if it’s meant to be. I’m a vocalist, and just like a runner has to run, a singer has to sing.”
• Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth is out now via Acid Jazz
