Is there a middle ground between commercial respectability and political awareness? Working Week are working around to it, as Tony Reed discovers.

"Have Working Week sold out? Have they betrayed the New Jazz movement? Are they a Jazz band, or a Soul band? Are they trying to be fashionable?"

A familiar hack's litany. Strange then, that it issues from the smiling lips of Simon Booth, guitarist and one-third of the band in question. The remaining two thirds, saxophonist Larry Stabbins and vocalist Juliette Roberts, smile back across a refectory table in the kitchen area of London's Townhouse Studios, scene of the recording of the band's just-completed second album, Companeros. Smiles of recognition. Of agreement.

Simon is mimicking the reception he thinks the British music press will give to the release of the album. He's probably right.

Perhaps that explains the paranoia of the group's label, Virgin, who've been jealously guarding the pre-release rough mixes. But why the paranoia? Why the band's cheerful resignation? A bit of history seems in order...

Larry and Simon, who first played together in the short-lived band Weekend, formed Working Week early in 1984. Initially a floating ensemble of nine players (including such luminaries as trombonist Annie Whitehead, vocalist Julie Tippet, nee Driscoll, and pianist Keith Tippet), the band played around the then thriving Jazz-Dance scene, supporting the IDJ dancers, and appearing at gigs hosted by Jazz-Dance DJ Paul Murphy. A deal was signed for an eclectic first single, Venceremos, written by Simon and expressing solidarity with the Chilean people's resistance to dictatorship. Already, the band were refusing to make artificial distinctions between personal musical expression and political statement. Fortunately for their future, it was a good dance single too...

With less than 10 days to go before recording began on a debut album, Working Nights, Juliette Roberts (familiar to many these days in her role as co-presenter of Channel Four's Solid Soul show) was drafted in as permanent vocalist, and the rest, as they say, should have been history.

In fact the album, produced by Sade man Robin Millar, notched up a very respectable 150,000 UK and overseas sales. Already, though, the lazy minds of the music press were at work, pigeon holing the band along with Sade and Vic Godard as representatives of a largely spurious 'Jazz revival'. It was an approach which couldn't easily accommodate the mature diversity of styles reflected on the album, from the aching Soul of Sweet Nothings through the cool big-city Jazz of Autumn Boy, to the latin swing of Venceremos. It couldn't easily accomodate; but it would do.

It is an awareness of that mentality, something that Larry Stabbins calls 'a peculiarly British attitude' which is at the root of the band's concern. In the 18 months following the release of the first album, Working Week have toured a lot, mostly in Europe, written — as a three piece — and played a lot. The album born of that process is not the one the new-Jazz purists will have been anticipating.

"There is no hope for the dream of a pure music. This kind of spreading of music... is today's reality. To dream of a natural Africa here and a natural South America there is another kind of Colonialism." Gilberto Gil, Brazilian fusion musician.

"What does Companeros mean?" Simon Booth laughs. "I could go on for hours about that... It means friend — but more than that, friends in struggle, compadres... there's a song on the album called Don't You Touch My Friend, about racism, so we were going to call the album that, Friend. But we thought that sounded a bit wet..."

So is it a 'political' album?

"Everyone always asks us that — 'are you political?'... Let's put it this way — we are not a frivolous, disposable Pop group. But then, neither are we heavily political, in an obvious, sloganeering kind of way. Turning an issue into a slogan is the best way to trivialise it... In Latin America, there's a great tradition of revolutionary poets and musicians, who deal with political things in a very intimate, personal way... if anything, I think it's a failure of British culture, a kind of coldness that always wants to put these things in separate boxes. I'd prefer to say that we are heavily social — in what we say, and the way we work — the sincerity of the performance, and the collective struggle that gets it there. As an artist and a musician, I think you have to be aware of your environment — and your environment is global."

So why shouldn't the music be? Companeros, from the title down, reflects a broader cross-cultural commitment than the purists will easily sit still for. Brazilian influences are in there, of course, courtesy of long-time Working Week session percussionist Bosco D'Oliveira, but don't get the idea that cross-cultural means Third World chic — the first single off the album, Too Much Time, is a Funked-up, very American-Soul version of the old Captain Beefheart number. And its solid dance groove owes as much to the keyboard skills of a young Funk player, Ian Prince, as it does to Larry Stabbins' punchy horn arrangements. Yet it's not just the songs that have changed since Working Nights. The way they write them has too. Simon again:

"The first album was very traditional — Larry and I would take the melody lines and chord charts into a demo studio, and we'd rehearse it with the band. The thing about musicians though, is that they like to go in, play their bit, and go away again. It's terrible hanging around waiting for inspiration to strike. People go off, get depressed... it's hard work."

This time round, it was different. The writing of Too Much Time was typical of the approach throughout: "Larry actually picked the song," explains Simon, "although we initially had our doubts, since it's effectively only one chord! The one thing we didn't want to do, it being a cover, was to sound too much like the original, a straight R 'n' B song. So, like any cover, the first thing to do is to strip it down just to the melody line and the lyrics — and then stop listening to the original. We dumped a lot, even the two-bar guitar solo that was there originally. We both went away to work on it, and Larry started to write the middle horn section, with a kind of Blue Note Soul/Jimmy Griffin feel in mind. Then we sat down in Larry's living room, and treated it like it was a song of our own, building up chords on top of the basic structure, playing ideas on guitar and an old Casio that Larry's got, jotting them down on his portastudio. If we wanted to do any more complex arrangements, we'd use Larry's piano..."

"Like any cover the first thing to do is to strip it down just to the melody line and the lyrics — and then stop listening to the original"

In contrast to the writing of the previous album, both Juliette and producer Ben Rogan (who knew the band from his time engineering Working Nights) were involved from this early stage. The most radical innovation in Working Week's working method, though, was the early involvement of programmer Tom Morley, who began his career as the original Scritti Politti drummer. He takes up the story:

"I'd got involved to do some fills for the track they had on Absolute Beginners. (Rodriguez Bay, described by Juliette as 'buried up to its neck' in the background of the film's coffee-shop scene). They'd already had some programming done by another guy, but he was a Rock drummer and the feel was all wrong. So I came in with my Linn 2/Umi 2B/DX7 sequencing set-up, and put down some fills for that. I got on with Ben, so I ended up putting down some basic rhythms for the other songs too, keeping it simple because I knew that Preston Hayman was going to be playing 'live' drums over the top of them. As Ben said, the machine was there for the groove, and Preston for the feel. As the songs progressed, we moved up to a 16-track demo studio with the rest of the band, and I started using whatever keyboards were around, particularly a Mirage sampler. The band had trouble finding a bass player at first, so I programmed a lot of that. I know the Linn 2 really well, so on some of the songs I was able to more or less 'jam' with Preston and the rest of the band. It's an on-going session really — on some songs, I've done very little, on others I'm going back now, at the remix stage, to sort stuff out. I think the one thing my involvement has done, is to resolve a lot of arguments. Using the UMI and the Linn, I'm very used to writing songs down as charts, which makes it easy for people to refer to, to change arrangements — 'Oh, let's double up the middle eight' — and to resolve arguments — 'I thought I came in at bar 44'. All they have to do now is refer to my charts".

Using Tom's technology (which so impressed chief arranger Larry that he wants to buy a similar set-up) the band were able to get virtually all the arrangement ideas, keyboard parts and drum patterns sorted out with producer Ben Rogan before they even stepped into the Townhouse. Once there, a large part of his task was to get the right sounds, as he explains:

"We spent a lot of time MIDI'ing things up — I think at the last count there were two DXs, an Emulator, a Mirage, and a Juno on the album, most of which belonged to Ian, the keyboard guy. We knew what feel we wanted from his sounds, and we relied on him to get them — that's the advantage of working with really good players. There was also some Piano from Keith Tippet, Percussion from Bosco D'Oliveira, the horn section, Tom's guitars — he used a new Fender Strat with EMGs DI'ed into the desk, an old Gretsch Semi through a Mesa Boogie, and a couple of acoustics; Julie and the backing singers, a real string section. It was a very varied album to record. Some songs, like Walking A Tightrope, went down 80 percent live. Others, like Too Much Time, we built up a track at a time — it all depended on the song. For the dance numbers, you want a real solid foundation, for the Jazzier ones, a raw, real-band feel.

"It's pretty obvious where you have to go sound-wise really. On the numbers with acoustic guitar, for example, we wanted a clean, large sound — to get the feel of the thing, we just close-miked the soundhole, very straightforward. I like to use a combination of close rooms with long plates, so you get both intimacy and a sense of space, so we went through quite a few reverbs — the usual Lexicon, AMS, REV7 and 1, and a thing called a Foil Plate reverb, which was quite horrible really, but it was there so we used it anyway. There was a little bit of sampling too, most of it the standard replacing drum sounds stuff, sampling as a tool if you like. We did use it 'instrumentally' for one thing; sampled a cowbell and actually played it off a keyboard. There's a fire extinguisher sound in there somewhere too... We did a couple of things over at Good Earth, simply because it's got such a good live room, and nothing beats real 'live' acoustics."

Working Week's philosophy of 'collective struggle' meant that all the many session players on the album — Bosco, Ian Prince, Preston Hayman, the backing singers, the brass section and Tom Morley — had a very real influence on the development of particular songs, leaving Ben with the problem of lending the album cohesion without blanding it out. How did he manage it?

"Well, there are some clever cross fades on the album, but the most important thing is eq — with so many different instruments and textures, you can, by concentrating on certain frequency bands within their ranges, by paying attention to their relative balance in the mix, bring them together, across tracks, in ways which aren't too obvious. I think you'll just have to wait and see..."

The evidence of the album is with us now — but how about catching Working Week working? Larry Stabbins:

"We'll be touring from October through to February, wherever record sales seem to dictate a need. Which means we'll probably play about a week in Britain..."

He smiles ruefully.

The band's uniquely passionate belief in the collective experience of music, of its pan-nationalism, and its commitment, as expressed in both the writing and recording of their latest album may not win them many new friends — but we can hope that the strength of their songs may swell the ranks of their Companeros.

Simon Booth: "Music should communicate on three levels — body, soul, and intellect."

Amen.