Galliano and the spoken-word roots of acid jazz

Galliano’s story starts with a reworked Curtis Mayfield song. Their first single, in June 1988, was “Frederick Lies Still”, a reworking of Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead”, and it was the first release ever on the Acid Jazz label. The group was then the first signing to Gilles Peterson’s newly formed Talkin’ Loud label. The London band was originally active from 1988 to 1997.

At the start it was Robert Gallagher, credited as Roberto Galliano, joined by Constantine Weir and Crispin Robinson, performing spoken-word pieces influenced by the Last Poets. They became a band to tour their first album, In Pursuit of the 13th Note, in 1991, produced by Chris Bangs, who had also used the alias the Quiet Boys. It featured Roy Ayers and won an Edison writing award in 1992. After an early tour of Japan a core band formed around Valerie Etienne, with Mick Talbot on keyboards, and a dancer known as Uncle Big Man.

The second album, A Joyful Noise Unto the Creator, came in 1992, and the peak arrived in 1994 with The Plot Thickens, which reached number eight in the UK Albums Chart. It spawned two UK top-40 singles: a cover of David Crosby’s “Long Time Gone” and “Twyford Down”, a comment on the road-building protests of the time, and protesters joined them on stage. The band played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury in 1994, returned to the NME Stage in 1995 and then made the fourth album, :4, in 1996.

They split in November 1997 after a farewell show at Camden’s Dingwalls. Gallagher and Etienne formed Two Banks of Four, and Gallagher also performs under other names. In 2023 the band announced a return with a new album and a few gigs, including two at Peterson’s We Out Here festival, and in May 2024 released “Circles Going Round the Sun”, their first single in 28 years. A UK tour ended with a sell-out at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in November 2024.