But the Kingston Sessions themselves were indubitably exciting, with Lee Perry, as I remember, occasionally contributing as an engineer, and session men Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare playing on many of the tracks we recorded. These were mainly wordless dub pieces composed by myself and the band in the studio, meant as no more than rehearsals and sketches for further development. I contributed organ, while we received help from a multitude of session guitarists. To this day, it is one of the few sessions I have played without the help of Tick Tock.

The cuts, which numbered around ten, were, though embryonic, very convincing and encouraging, helped mainly by the excellence of the band (Sly and Robbie together had recorded tens of thousands of tracks as session men even by then) and my simple knowledge of the Jamaican music form. In a time of arena rock, progressive rock and heavy metal, records imported into the USA, by artists from Fred Locks to The Abyssinians to Dillinger to The Congos, had sustained me through the vacuous parts of the musical Seventies. All the forms mentioned before seemed only to be tying up loose ends in music, with over-trained university kids making their unwanted, nightmarishly dull contributions to the Western musical landscape.

Juxtaposed with the Gothic soundscapes of Bach-inflected organ solos and concept albums about space travel, Jamaican music was everything that music was not: exciting, atmospheric and often moving. The chord changes and melodic movements were very simple upon further inspection; the sonic restrictions of the relatively inexpensive equipment used were always audible; the rhythms were repetitive and basic. But somehow, this form, more interesting than nearly everything else in the American mainstream, seemed to intrinsically work. Even before ambient music, the rustic dubs of King Tubby seemed to transport one to another level of consciousness, and the lyrics of political songs from authors from Max Romeo to Bunny Wailer to Burning Spear inflamed with more strength than anything seen in America since Dylan's golden years. The melodies were interchangeably (sometimes concurrently) ghostly, reassuring, frightening, spacious and uplifting. The form offered something almost entirely obscured in American music at the time: integrity and truth. And this was why Jamaican music attracted me so.

We recorded until interest in the project began to wane, and abandoned the master tapes in the studio, which would burn down a year later. The concept was soon forgotten and we all moved on. But to my knowledge, for years to come various tracks from the sessions would see release via bootlegs, from The Kingston Tapes of 1983 to BC Williamson In Jamaica, a popular title released a year later. Famously, one rare bootleg, which retrieved every cut recorded in those few weeks, was named Dub Will Tear Us Apart, in reference to a veiled Joy Division cover we had recorded one morning. These bootlegs all went out of print, and I had believed that the Jamaica tapes were finally gone, never to be witnessed once more.

And this was why I was so surprised this morning to find the original master tapes, undamaged by the fire of 1979, and in perfect quality. Listening back to them today, the recordings have many merits, and as curiosities they are invaluable. As such, I will use at least one of these tracks in the sequencing of the new album.

I will write soon, and in the interim why not follow me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/bcwilliamson) and encourage others to do so?

Thank you kindly,
B.C. Williamson

But Albert surprised me more greatly by asking me, as an ex-pastor, to give a speech at the church on Monday, as part of a new project he is heading, in which he desires to let the congregants hear both sides of the religion debate that he is so often asked about. He asked me specifically to speak for ten minutes or so, owing to my acceptance and rejection of the faith, saying that it would provide an erudite and well-reasoned argument to the church members, something needed greatly in a time of overzealous religion and poor tolerance. He stressed yesterday that I was not here to convince congregants to follow me on the path atheism, but rather that I was to pitch a separate case to them, in order to increase understanding. As Albert is a friend, I had no choice in good standing to refuse, and as such I gave the speech, hastily prepared on this computer during Sunday evening, to an audience of over five-hundred, many of them familiar to me from days gone by.

"I suppose it is upon Albert's kind, undeserved words that I must begin my speech today. I am humbled and privileged to be recalled here after many years of apostasy, and I thank you for your forgiveness and acceptance.

Today, in speaking on my thoughts regarding religion, I know not where exactly to start. I come to you here today as one thoroughly unconvinced by the cause of the religion, but this has not always been the case. Indeed, many will remember that I worked in these halls for around ten years from 1989 and onwards. I have experienced religion in full, and I made my choice to move elsewhere, so I hope my argument will be lent a slight conceit in this sense.

I am here for no longer than ten minutes, so I would like to touch upon the moralities of religion and atheism, and to discuss whether in fact they conflict or overlap. It is, once again, a great honor to be invited here again, and I will always refer you to more informed, courageous works in the course of my speech; at the end of the day I am no philosopher, merely an artist trying to make his way in the modern world.

Morality is one of the recurring ontological debates of the religious experience, and it is the one that I have most often encountered, in discussions with myself and others. I suppose one could always question, where does morality emerge from? Some believe that religion is responsible for this, that we were a lost, aimless race of primates united and strengthened by a strict moral code. But others, myself included, believe that morality has developed over the many years of our collective existence. According to Dawkins, this may be as much as 250,000 years, and surely this is enough time, through natural selection and the concept of agonizing trial and error, to develop our own morality? Rabbi David Wolpe recently argued at a debate in America that we aren't necessarily born good at all, that it takes very strong mentoring to help us to work towards kindness, altruism, justice, and all of the other positive human traits. For me, this goes back to a rather vile religious idea I have always disliked; that we are created unwell and that through God we may heal ourselves. It is something common in all religions, from Christianity to Hinduism, and I see it as a somewhat patronizing conceit.  For tens upon tens of thousands of years we struggled through poverty, illiteracy, ignorance and agony, rarely living beyond twenty years of age, our infant mortality rates terrifyingly high, our lands ravaged by disease, plague and natural disasters we could not fathom. And this is not to speak of the pointless murder, racism, turf wars and slavery we suffered at our own neighbors' hands. Did morality not develop, bit by bit, over this time period? Or does it come from a higher source? I leave the question with you; I am not here today to make a specific argument.

But I continue nonetheless, and now I shall speak of morality in the main Abrahamic texts: from the Qur'an, itself a plagiarism of the Bible, lifted from the Hebrew Torah. Examine for a moment the Decalogue itself, and its talk of common moral law. Where are the commandments against genocide, against the maltreatment and coercion of children, against sexism, slavery and racism? The Ten Commandments itself is home to very few righteous laws, in reality, beyond the commandments not to murder, not to steal, not to lie, and to honor one's parents. For me, the matters of jealousy and adultery are intensely personal matters. No, the Biblical version of morality reminds me of the late 1940s, and how Stalin aimed, successfully, to remove the line on murdering citizens based on political ideology from the United Nations treaty regarding genocide, knowing only too well, that as a UN member, he would receive condemnation, perhaps even expulsion, at the revelation of his Gulags, and the horrific total murdered under his political regime. Religion has significant blood on its hands, and as such, it often neglects to mention certain injustices. Genocide isn't commanded against because it is a Biblical commonplace, from Noah's Flood to the murder of the Amalekites, the Geshurites, the Gezirites, the first-born of Egypt to the Midianites. The mistreatment of children too: from Abraham's attempt to gut his own child on Holy order, to the infanticide of the 42 children who "mocked" Elisha. The Bible and its accompanying religious texts seem to agree that certain petty laws, from fasting to sexual matters, to mindless, archaic propitiations and offerings, are far more important than the rights of women and children, the freedom of speech, judgment and thought, and the right to be protected from human injustice.

It was Jesus, after all, who once said "if anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned." Rather than a strict moral code these laws seem to be concessions made to certain leaders in their benefit. Believe in us and you shall have a friend to talk to, an answer to your prayers, and a type of morality not available to the rest of the human race. Don't believe in us? Into the fire you go.

I don't argue that evil is a religious trait, for that would be a highly inaccurate and foolish statement indeed. Evil, or the human need for war, seems to me to be a fundamental human mistake. The Greeks believed this too, and so do modern scientists, who see evil merely as an evolutionary flaw. Human injustice and hatred does not come from religion, just as human goodness does not come from atheism. And the time-old argument that I will not go into today, about the atheist leanings of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao, springs to mind. The malign spirit is older than religion, and it will last long after the fall of religion. But my point today is that when one believes that God is on his side (as Hitler, indeed, did), that evil is infinitely strengthened in a frightening way. Witness the commandments to murder non-believers present in the Qur'an, which exceed one-hundred and forty in total: "strike terror into God's enemies, and yours...slay the idolaters, wherever you find them...fight them, Allah will punish them by your hands...Allah loves those who fight in His way." Before Muhammad's death, he would command over sixty military campaigns in order to spread the Islamic faith. He would order the murder of his critics and detractors, and would support murder, rape and looting in battle. And this is "the religion of peace," as George W. Bush calls it?

The Catholic Church, for years, has mocked the very concept of morality, choosing to condemn Galileo but tNazi Germany, supporting the rights of the clergy over those of the abused youth, failing to stop the spread of destructive sexually transmitted infections due to the idea of the Bible's moral code. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams recently suggested the introduction of Sharia law in the United Kingdom only for Muslims, in the name of tolerance and ecumenism. In the Mormon religion, the very sect that believes that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri, and that God lives on a star, black skin is a curse, and indeed the church was a racist organization until 1979, when it decided that men like myself could finally join. These are all alternate 'moralities' in the religious sense. So my argument, in closing, is that religion's own version of morality is a skewed and dangerous one indeed, selective and incomplete to its own fault. As well as encouraging positive behavior (which it does, partially), it also encourages the abdication of responsibility, the fear of one you love, and the idea of absolving one's sins through another's suffering. This cannot be good for the future of a benevolent world. I believe that in relying on our own ingrained human morality, we can be far more righteous in day-to-day life than ever before.

I finish on one issue and one issue only. I am not here today to discuss science, or a universal, factual tautology regarding God's existence, for I have not the time. But I am here to find fault in religion's own morality, and its questionable view that righteousness would not exist without its existence in the modern world. Do we not come equipped with our own universal goodness, provided by thousands of years of culture, philosophy and science? Are we not fundamentally benevolent in spirit? I leave it with you, in addition to a statement of Mr. Thomas Jefferson that reads as follows: "God is a being of terrific character: cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust."

Let us be very careful when we state that morality comes only from religion, my friends."

We will speak soon, I hope.

Regards,
B.C. Williamson

Tomorrow, less enticingly, I am booked for a day-long conference downtown, in which I will speak to the recording industry diaspora of the local area. I hate writing speeches of any kind, but especially for an audience this dull. Well, it's never an easy job, and I must continue. This afternoon I may stay indoors, though it would be a shame to do so, the weather seems to make London seem predictable by comparison. I bought a new camera at the airport, which is only the second digital camera I have owned. I don't like using the things, but for increased portability and ease of use, this one should do me fine. I took a fair few photographs today, and while it isn't celluloid, the lighting (owing to past rain and a generous amount of clouds) makes things look good in any case. Hopefully I should be able to show you a couple of pictures next time, but this aged laptop has no earthly way to connect to any modern appliance, as it seems.

Well, these are my movements so far. I leave you with no ruminations on the past and future of art, or political commentary on the world in motion we see today. But I hope you are all doing well, and I eagerly await when I can write to you again. This afternoon I am being taken to dinner with the head of one of the big three record companies; his secretary tells me this place has the best food in North America. I cannot complain too greatly.

Regards,
B.C. Williamson

For me, religion had been a constant search for self-justification, a quick fix to finding the divine that had not entered my life for many bitter years. This was the late Eighties, a time where, unlike now, I was confused by modern technology and philosophy, longing for a return to the distant past of my youth. Even the endless touring and stress was attractive to me once again, living alone in a large country house in Tennessee, not having touched a guitar or keyboard for years. Religion, in my desperation, seemed like a solution to this lack of divinity in my life. But, in answer to the question I posed about art, I suppose I stopped looking a long time ago for divinity; if one seeks the truly divine, the transcendent, here it remains for all to see.

I would later realize, only in extended age, that art, or beauty, natural like the human face or man-made, like a painting or a piece of music, was the only thing that was other-worldly in this life. And the only frustration remained was the bitterness of realizing just how much time I had wasted in the church, searching for that which I already knew well. I preached for years about the beauty of the scriptures, guilty of the utmost self-deception, for what beauty is there in the Bible? A burning bush, a dead man walking, a Virgin birth. To quote Peter Cook, "it's not enough to keep the mind alive, is it?" No, I've read War and Peace, seen A Space Odyssey, heard Kind Of Blue. The search for the godly, if one wants to use such a confused adjective, is a simple one indeed, if one can rid themselves of the sentimental values of religion. And as such, art was always a natural choice, even before I brought myself to understanding that complicated issue.

I believed in it, art, more than anything else in the universe, and as a result, it would reflect in the way in which I treated the creation of music throughout my career, for good, and equally often for bad, if we are to recall my work of the late Seventies. As a critic, I can never bring myself to settle for less than good, and that is why I became so out of step with the blues movement I would reject, from the late Sixties onwards. I hated the plastic blues of the British revival, the quiet, virtuosic boredom of Eric Clapton, and the way in which an expressive, powerful form, the making of centuries of black oppression in America, became a light, acceptable form for unadventurous listeners. I respect all of these people greatly as talented musicians, and have worked with Mr. Clapton on one occasion in his capacity as a competent session player, but besides his work with Duane Allman in 1970, I found his music devoid of any kind of soul or understanding, no more than a carbon copy of his influences, studied and perfected, but not altered. Stevie Ray Vaughan was a similarly brilliant musician, but his music, as recorded, was flat, shallow, and sounded much like the backing tracks one receives with a guitarist's magazine.

For this I would always dislike artists who took a form and did nothing with it, ignoring the hard work of previous generations. The Rolling Stones, before 1973, I respected, for they took American roots music (blues, country, folk) and began to twist that in their own image, in a way that worked for me. People who want to regress in search of past styles confuse me; it's what John Lydon called "escapism" a while ago. And indeed, what is the point of a rockabilly revival? Or for that matter a blues revival? I have my own axe to grind, in truth. It was this reassessment of values that preempted my decline in popularity by the time the Sixties were coming to a halt, and I never stopped resenting those who seemed to purloin a form that had been dear to me. Of course I am overly disparaging in this case, but for me art is something of high standards. And if they are not met, I can only react with profound despair.

I don't enjoy things that are n0rmal or drastic at all; I see good art as something that is otherworldly, but familiar all the same, and if something is overly mundane, or for that matter, overly detached from where I am, it simply doesn't work for me. For that reason I always preferred the poetic, rhythmic brilliance of Sly Stone's music to the pretentious post-psychedelic ramblings of George Clinton's Funkadelic. It's more familiar, while still inhabiting the distant aura of illusion that the music depicts. In music, I'm looking for a lot of things, a balance between chaos, order, intelligence and indifference, humor and tragedy, realism and escape. And on top of all that must be a sense of dedication; even if the music isn't serious, the person creating it must be, and there's nothing more offensive than observing a facetious artist who doesn't properly respect his or her audience.

My criticism has always been tough for other artists and my own work. Method is a strange creature in itself, one that I will never understand. I remember discussing the way in which an artist works with Salvador Dali many years ago in the Sixties, during a brief meeting we once had during a European tour, a picture of which I have placed below this paragraph. We talked about self-criticism for a brief time, and though I would have liked to have taken the matter further with the man, I was not so lucky. But self-criticism, in the artist's case, is bizarre indeed, and it often does not work. I have always believed that art relies on years of work, failings, and experiments, and the quick, momentary flashes of inspiration that result. And in this vein, I think that the creation of an album should really only take a month or so, that one should write a song within one sitting, that every idea (and meta-idea) should be followed to its natural conclusion.

Otherwise, one is lost in the strange world that results when you return to a piece of work a day, or a week, or a year later. One is stuck having to retroactively criticize and construct, no longer the creator, but not yet a spectator. You end up having to ask yourself, what inspired me to do this? Where did this come from? Construction doesn't work because the narrative thread started by the initial idea has been lost. And criticism becomes impossible because you're still emotionally attached to the idea. I believe in working through things thoroughly; sometimes ideas work, sometimes they don't, but one has to hang on to the end of each one. Inspiration is often like walking through one of those man-made forest plantations. Everything appears as a great sprawl of disordered trees until you reach the correct point, where you realize that every tree is actually perfectly lined up in grid formation, and you can see in every direction until the vanishing point. Ninety percent of the time, matters are too confusing and formidable to understand. But sometimes, and only rarely, do we properly and truly see in every direction, things finally seeming so simple and linear. If I get a few of these moments in a week, I'm lucky already.

Working as a band was therefore always more interesting. In an ensemble environment, no single man is the creator of anything. Working alone, as I often do, is manageable, and often the best idea, but you have only one set of ideas to work upon, and nothing to work up against. Working as a solo artist is much like playing tennis alone in an endless desert, and one can get lost. In a band, one has to cope with a room full of different kinds of inspiration and intention, and multiple ideas join together to create a fuller picture, even when one is playing with payed session musicians. Most of the time, I don't like working with people who agree with me, who have the same ideas and inspirations as me. Music isn't about perfectly ordered ideas running alongside each other. I like chaos, the idea of different rhythms running into one another; African music is the same. When one becomes too precise and governing over the content of music, each bar sounds the same as the other, until perhaps a part is added or subtracted, until a pre-determined section change is made. This is minimalism, dance music, Kraftwerk, and that's all fine, but not where I'm coming from.

And so we reach a close. I have not yet taken a word count of this blog entry, but I am afraid that I have probably failed Tick Tock's requests. I will try next time to do my best. As Thomas Paine said "when the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted." And I will write no more, before my audience becomes so. Thank you very much for reading, and I hope to speak to you again next week.

Thank you,
B.C. Williamson

Most stimulating is the wealth of demo versions that we uncovered in our searches. What many of my fans do not know is that from the early Sixties onwards I owned an old mixer, a reel-to-reel, and a small four-track studio machine in my apartment in Memphis, which was then moved to my house outside the city. Before this I owned an expensive Phillips tape recorder, and for nearly every song we ever recorded (or discarded) in the area from then on, I would record demos on the reel-to-reel, either playing all the parts myself or rehearsing with the band in the early hours of the day. Results would be brought into the studio, giving us rough sketches to work from. There are hundreds of forgotten demos out there, so I hope to incorporate as many as possible into the new album.

Apologies for the lack of social comment in this article; with all the planning involved in the last week I have little time for creative thinking, and as a result I have been unable to think of a matter enthralling enough for my audience. Please spare me concessions this one time; I hope that next week I will be able to write more. In the interim, please send the website an email here (b.c.williamson@hotmail.com) if you have a topic idea, or use the ‘contact me’ form, somewhere here on the website, which, I am told, has recently been renovated by the boys back in America. Follow me on Twitter if you have the time (www.twitter.com/bcwilliamson), I await your call regardless.

Thank you,
B.C. Williamson

I started properly using Twitter this week; ever the skeptic, I had my doubts, but I'm beginning to realise what a powerful, insightful tool it is. Only 4 people are 'following' me so far, but I'm following a whole lot of people, from the Prime Minister of Australia to Roger Ebert to the notorious politician George Galloway, and it truly is a fascinating way to see the modern world of communication. We're living in a frighteningly complex world now, bound together by a multi-faceted web of communication that would floor the most developed of minds with its grandeur. I could write a book or two just on the insignificant intellectual contributions I have to make regarding this matter, but to summarize I'm both bewildered and enlivened by the new age we all inhabit. On one hand, the flow of information afforded of the new digital, metropolitan generation - culture itself, if you indeed believe in culture as a unifying system for humans to process and communicate information and art, as I do - is a new democratization of the free world, a formidable and expanding system of human design and intellect free of tariffs and barriers. Just look at the mission statement of an organization such as Wikipedia: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."

It makes you think, doesn't it? In my time, you had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to experienced and knowledgeable producers to create a record, and it still never sounded great. Today, one can create an entire album of studio-quality music for no more than the price of a good computer; the album that I'm working on now has no acoustically created sounds within it, relying only on computer samplers, sequencers, software synthesizers, and sound effects picked up off various online radio stations. The fact that I could make an entire album of music within an entirely digital space would have shocked me just twenty years ago, and now I'm making my own (if unfocused and idiosyncratic) contribution to the growing genre of computer-designed music.

It's an experiment; I haven't condemned traditional methods to history; indeed the old world order of microphones, mixers and reel-to-reels is still my method of preference. I have three properties (one in Memphis, one just outside New York, and one in London), and all of them have identical small recording studios I designed; nothing fancy, just a good old Neve mixer, an Akai reel-to-reel, a good collection of vintage microphones, compressors and guitars, an upright piano, and a Gretsch drum kit. There's nothing like the old-fashioned process of making music for me, and I could never give it up. And in 1953, when I first started, who could have predicted that home studios would be so easy to set up? It cost the record company $30,000 to produce the first album, and three years ago I assembled my humble Soho recording studio for under $10,000. Now I don't have to pay engineers, and I can freely record whenever I feel like doing so.

The world is now becoming self-sufficient, and I suppose the only danger in the modern information world is just how easy it is to become engulfed in the wealth of solutions out there for artists and consumers alike. I have a collection of "plug-ins" on my computer capable of making my track sound like a 1970s Jamaican record, or my guitar sound like it's being played through a modified 1971 Vox AC30 amplifier. One can either become dazed, or worse lazy, in the face of these new ways. It means that, today, given the right amount of smartness, anyone in the world could make a good record or film, and that's both a good and bad thing. Knowledge, it seems, as a shared human experience, is growing faster than the oil spill in Louisiana. (For an idea of scale, I find this website very enlightening.)

I guess that the creative focus point has subtly shifted over the past century. Until only recently, one had to attend a conservatoire to learn how to compose music in a style, to be proficient on at least two instruments and to have a working knowledge of classical form. Artists often had to study fine art for years to be acknowledged in their respective fields, learning the style of former masters in specific schools of art. We now live in a world where craft and art are two very separate ideas, where technical virtuosity and skill has lost much of its significance. Artists from John Lennon to Brian Eno to Lou Reed have shown that personal charisma and the strength of ideas far outweigh the importance of classical training. From The Kingsmen to Pop Art to the age of punk, the layers of elitism surrounding traditional art have been stripped down, never to be restored. We move slowly towards elevating importance of the individual in the creation of art over the concept of trends or movements. Modern art, I suppose, given the bizarre plurality of our age, cannot be categorized, and in this vein, the unfocused sprawl of expressions made across our planet, stored on discs, hard drives, photographs, canvases and reels of film, will act as some kind of a picture of our mystified culture for confused generations to come.

Make of my ramblings what you will - I have so much to write on this subject, but my mind is sketchy, and I have little patience left on this uncharacteristically hot English summer day. I would just like to note my distress at the current state revolving around the scandal involving the Israeli government and the aid workers in Gaza. What a terrifying matter it is to behold; when will the Israeli government learn that these actions are not to be tolerated by the global community? Much has been made of this by sources both left and right, and while the whole picture has not yet been shown, many questions remain. What "peacefully minded" government authorizes armed soldiers boarding a ship in international waters without an agenda? Journalists taking pictures were shot at, despite surrendering, a 19 year-old American boy was shot in the head 4 times; are these the actions of a friendly force asking the ship to dock for  government searches? And the right wing press continually highlights the issue of Israel attempting to prevent weapons from entering Gaza. Were any found on board, besides a few small knives and iron rods? The collection of cooking knives in my small London kitchen is more threatening, and this was a boat after all.

I am ashamed of the way in which the Western world has supported and ignored these violations of human rights for decades. It is sad situation indubitably; as much as I denounce the nationalistic cause of Zionism, and the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, one can not forget the negative actions of both sides in this conflict, and both factions' refusals to make compromises. One can only look in fear to what lies ahead; peace surely does not await, and more blood will be shed on both sides.

And so I leave you here. I hope you enjoyed reading the blog - please, if you are interested in me writing more often, or want me to cover a specific point in a future blog, email us here or use the 'contact me' form on the website; I would genuinely like to hear more from my friends and supporters, for I do so only rarely, and I don't want to write too often if it isn't being read. Follow me on Twitter, email me, listen on last.fm, and stay tuned for the upcoming album, which should be finished with in the next few months. And if you enjoyed reading this, please share with a friend or colleague; in the age of free information it makes sense to redistribute without restriction.

God bless you all,
B.C. Williamson

In recent news, B.C. Williamson's new iTunes release, "Sounds From A Dark Room," was postponed by two months for reasons undisclosed by both iTunes and B.C.'s record company, Rackermann Records. Williamson released this statement today from his home in Memphis, Tennessee:

My dear friends,
I write to apologise for a delay in the online release of my reissued "Sounds From A Dark Room" album. I was told by associates only last week that further foundations had to be put in place before the album can be released: analog to digital conversion, copyrights, and so on. Don't worry, we will all be able to hear the album online within the next few months. Until then, I would like to give you an exclusive track - I have been working on it for the last few months in the home studio - as a token of my gratitude of your kind support. It is a 30 minute long ambient piece, though far detached from the abrasive noise of the "Sounds From A Dark Room" period. It was performed on an ARP 2600 synthesizer (I owned one of the very first ones made), and edited on a simple sequencer, with layers of different tracks mixed together to create (I hope) a richly textured piece of gently evolving music applicable for many different environments. A factory was only my suggestion; you are welcome to play the track in any building of your choice. I created the artwork (click here for a better quality version) on Adobe Photoshop. Thank you for your continued support; this track only represents a small section of my deep gratitude.
Regards, B.C. Williamson

Download the track here (MP3 format, 33MB)
Listen to it on last.fm (high quality streaming or download)

Today B.C. Williamson returned to his birthplace of his ancestors, Ibadan, Nigeria, in order to receive an honorary master's degree at the prestigious University of Ibadan, in recognition of his lasting contribution to Western music culture, and his noted philanthropy towards the region that his great grandfather, Yoruba Chief Kwabena Babatunde, came from, prior to his deportation to Mississippi during the Second Middle Passage, according to slavetraders' documents unearthed almost fifty years ago during B.C.'s notorious and well-documented Pan-African Tour of 1965.

Williamson, amid the controversies that shaped that very tour, donated the proceeds of his African concerts towards a new academy in the centre of Lagos, the Williamson Academy For Performing Arts. The centre experienced many great successes during its first year, graduating over 3000 students. It was sadly destroyed only a year later by rebel activity during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967.

B.C. would visit the region once more in 2009 for his revelatory project Back To Africa, a fusion of blues, soul, African vocal music, highlife, and dance. He recorded the album on a TEAC 8-Track tape machine in a small village just east of the Benin border with an assortment of local musicians. Recording sessions were halted prematurely due to violence; Williamson was advised to leave the country despite his wishes to stay and set up another foundation for the arts; production (including overdubs) would be completed in America. It was on that trip that Williams0n would meet for the first time his estranged son, Prince, the product of a brief relationship started during the 1965 tour. Prince, in his late forties, who received his education at Ibadan University, is now a journalist writing sports articles for The Nigerian Compass, a notable newspaper. He also plays occasional guitar in a Western-influenced jazz group in his home town, Ogbomoso. Their meeting was one of great happiness, and Prince would later that year be warmly received in B.C.'s spacious Tennessee mansion.

A delighted Williamson returned today for a heart-warming celebration of art and music, in the city centre of Ibadan. A great kilometre-long parade welcomed the blues singer, even waiting for two hours as Williamson struggled to find a reliable taxi service from the airport. He was welcomed into the university foyer by Vice-President Olatunji Kenechukwu, where, during the brief ceremony, he was made an Honorary Graduate of the University to frenzied applause from the strong crowd. Williamson, now a Member of the Order of the Nigeria Justice of Peace, made a short speech and was later seen to be having lunch in a local diner with the Vice-President himself, before setting off in a chartered jet for the State House in Abuja, where he is to meet leaders of the nation.

"Mr. Williamson - music superstar and living legend - is a man of abundant creative energy and  multifarious talents. It is a great honor to welcome his return to our country. This represents a day of importance for remembering all that is good in art and culture." - Excerpts from Vice President Kenechukwu's speech to the people of Ibadan

Rumours abound as to what Williamson's next actions will entail - there are hints of the possibility of a new Williamson Academy for the Arts in Nigeria, even of a great concert hall built in his name - until then, stay tuned for more news.

SOURCES: Abeo Olayinka, B.C.'s official Nigerian translator