Music

Many people who know Cymande, the genre-bending British band from the early ’70s, have their own Cymande origin story. For the director Tim MacKenzie-Smith, “it was a mixtape that was passed to me at college, and it had no tracklist. It had 90 minutes of brilliant old American funk on it. Rare groove stuff, soul.”

MacKenzie-Smith recognized most of the songs – but not all of them. As a Shazam-less college student in the mid-’90s, he spent the next several years wondering who, exactly, had recorded two tracks that he “absolutely adored.” Eventually, a record-collecting friend threw on Cymande in MacKenzie-Smith’s presence and the director had an epiphany: “Oh my god, that’s those tunes that I’ve been loving for the last five years!”

“Why does no one know about this music?” MacKenzie-Smith remembers asking himself. “That started me off on a journey of discovery that carried on for many years, shouting from the rooftops, telling people all about them.”

Now, MacKenzie-Smith has moved from the proverbial rooftops to the silver screen. After premiering at South By Southwest in 2023 and hitting theaters in the British Isles earlier this year, his documentary, Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande, is opening in the U.S. on July 26. With the help of a diverse roster of talking heads – from the producer Mark Ronson (Amy Winehouse) to the members of psych-funk trio Khruangbin to De La Soul’s DJ Maseo and Prince Paul – the film tells the story of an innovative funk band ahead of its time, derailed initially by an unreceptive music industry but ultimately embraced by the founders of hip-hop, house and disco music and the generations since.

In the early ’70s, several young men in London’s Afro-Caribbean diaspora community, including bassist Steve Scipio and guitarist Patrick Patterson, formed Cymande. The band drew on its varied influences – not just the sounds of their Caribbean countries of origin, but the contemporary R&B of Otis Redding and Solomon Burke and the forward-thinking jazz of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck – to create music that, while inviting, defied easy categorization. That proved an obstacle as Cymande tried to grow its profile.

“The industry at the time tended to pigeonhole black musicians in the U.K.,” Scipio, 74, tells Billboard from his Anguilla home over Zoom, recalling the straightforward “reggae stuff” that labels often requested when Cymande was shopping its demos. “We deliberately made a choice not to go down that route.”

Scipio and Patterson, also 74 and chiming in on the Zoom from London, argue that the British music business treated Black and white musicians differently when it came to creativity. “Young white musicians at the time who were experimenting with all kinds of different things, [the British music business] was accommodating for them,” Scipio explains. “As Black musicians, we were never given that kind of opportunity.”

Cymande eventually landed a deal with Janus Records, and released an album a year from 1972 to 1974. They even earned fans stateside opening for legends including Al Green, Jerry Butler, Patti LaBelle and Ramsey Lewis. But stymied by the industry in the U.K., the band took a break – Scipio and Patterson are adamant today that Cymande never broke up – that ended up lasting 40 years.

However, while Cymande was sidelined, its music took on a life of its own. As Getting It Back recounts, when DJ Jazzy Jay and other early hip-hop artists in The Bronx began experimenting with using double turntable setups and duplicate copies of records to mix and extend tracks, “Bra,” a standout from Cymande’s self-titled debut, was one of the most common songs they threw on the decks. By the ’80s, legends like The Sugarhill Gang and Gang Starr were sampling “Bra.” With its infectious, easily isolated groove, the song also percolated to disco clubs and became a frequent pick for DJs at the dawn of house music. (Paradise Garage visionary Larry Levan was a fan.) Filmmaker Spike Lee also championed the band, using “Bra” in 1994’s Crooklyn and 2002’s 25th Hour.

“The sampling of Cymande’s material started quite early,” says Patterson, though he explains that, “in the early days of sampling, it was difficult to know who was doing what because it was a hidden culture.”

But after De La Soul released its seminal 1989 album 3 Feet High and Rising, which includes the “Bra”-sampling “Change In Speak,” Scipio’s kids turned him onto it – and by extension, the fact that Cymande’s music had become a touchstone for the artists who followed them. “Something was going on with our music because they were hearing snippets of it in the music that they were listening to,” he says.

Cymande’s publisher, Sony Music Publishing, has helped the band to identify usages of its music and “to ensure that we are properly recompensed,” Patterson says, with Scipio adding that all sampling matters have been resolved amicably. The sampling was a financial boon (like many Cymande songs, Patterson and Scipio are the two credited writers for “Bra”). And both heartily endorse sampling generally: “I’ve always supported it,” Patterson says. “Steve and I regularly say it’s a good thing, using creativity to make new things.”

In 2014, motivated in part by the decades-long groundswell of support for their music, Cymande returned to the stage in London. MacKenzie-Smith and eventual Getting It Back producer/editor Matt Wyllie were at the gig as the fans. Then, MacKenzine-Smith, who prior to Getting It Back had primarily made sports films, used Cymande’s song “Dove” to open his 2017 documentary about the British boxer Anthony Joshua – and a representative for the band got in touch to let him know they’d heard the synch. “We’d always said, ‘Man, whatever happened to Cymande?’” the director says of his conversations over the years with Wyllie. With contact established with Cymande’s camp, he shot his shot and inquired about doing a documentary about the band: “The only way we were going to find out was to go and make a film about them.”

The film became a labor of love for MacKenzie-Smith, and he embraced “a process of ridiculous research and just obsession, really” as he began searching for musicians who Cymande had influenced. And when the pandemic hit during production, the project’s logistics became even more daunting. “We always had in mind the story of the band itself,” MacKenzie-Smith said. “When there were those days where you thought, ‘We’re never gonna get this finished. Is this [film] ever going to see the light of day?’, then we always remembered that, ‘Hold on a minute – this is a band that took 40 years off and came back and found themselves to have a brand new audience of kids who found them on YouTube. It might take a while, but you get there in the end.’”

MacKenzie-Smith expects Cymande’s story of resiliency to resonate similarly with modern audiences. And he also thinks it encapsulates a fascinating aspect of consumption in the digital age.

“Everything’s a double-edged sword, because for artists to make real money from their art is so difficult these days – they get such small amounts of money from streaming, and everything’s available for free on YouTube,” he says. “But, ultimately, with this particular story, it’s actually showing the good in all that. Everyone will quite rightly discuss the bad and what needs to change. But the good in all of that is that a band who thought their time was done have found out that it’s not. And kids who are in their teens or their early twenties, who might be fans of Khruangbin or whoever, are finding this band.”

For their part, Patterson and Scipio still marvel at the continued influence of Cymande’s music. “We are really appreciative of their love for the music,” Patterson says of the musicians who appear in the film, and Scipio calls the process “enlightening … I wasn’t aware the extent to which the music was appreciated out there.”

Since reuniting a decade ago, Cymande has released an album (2015’s A Simple Act of Faith) and has toured periodically. And with Getting It Back propelling them – plus new music in the works and touring on tap for 2025 – Patterson and Scipio envision a new, fruitful era for Cymande.

“Our target now is to make sure that everything is rolling to break out in 2025,” says Patterson. With a laugh, he adds, “We hope to satisfy our fans and the listening audiences that we haven’t been wasting our time.”