ROCKWiRED iNTERViEWS LiViNG COLOUR

JANUARY 12, 2010
COLOUR BLiND
COREY GLOVER OF LiViNG COLOUR
TALKS TO ROCKWiRED
ABOUT THEiR LATEST CD THE CHAiR iN THE DOORWAY
BLENDiNG VARiOUS SOUNDS TOGETHER
AND BEiNG MORE THAN A BLACK ROCK BAND

It wasn’t all that long ago when the idea of black guys picking up guitars and letting ‘em rip was a questionable one. Sure, you had HENDRIX, but that was it and he was dead. In 1988, LIVING COLOUR stormed the airwaves and MTV with their breakout hit ‘CULT OF PERSONALITY’ from their debut album ‘VIVID’. The potent mix of VERNON REID’s dexterity on the guitar, MARTY SKILLING’s slapping bass lines, WILL CALHOUN’s thunderous percussion and COREY GLOVER’s big, gospel-honed vocal prowess challenged the widely accepted notion that rock was a white man’s game. Either wittingly or unwittingly, LIVING COLOUR broke rock’s color barrier in a way that other black rock stalwarts such as ARTHUR LEE and NONA HENDRYX could’ve only imagined. These days, the proverbial door is wide open with artists such as ?UESTLOVE, SEVENDUST, LENNY KRAVITZ, and SKUNK ANANSIE and the fellas from LIVING COLOUR deserve most of the credit for kicking it wide open. While such notice is fine and well-deserved, being labeled a black rock band is something that lead singer COREY GLOVER finds limiting. “We infused elements of everything in our music.” says GLOVER “We realized early on that you could take the elements of everything and make it into whatever it wants to be. For me that was the essence of what rock n roll was. That was what my opinion of it was. People took all of this stuff form tropical music to the blues and country music and they turned it into something else. We took the spirit of that and really tried make something out of it. The formula is not difficult. The formula is to throw everything you know into the pot and see what comes out.”

Now the band is back with a bold new album ‘THE CHAIR IN THE DOORWAY’(MEGAFORCE RECORDS) and a need to prove to the world that they are still a band equally as willing to rock out as they are to play around with different sound textures. “We started writing these songs and the songs started to form themselves.” says GLOVER “The themes of the songs started to speak to the internal struggles within one’s self and the need to move forward. The songs just came out. We wrote a bunch of songs for this record and a lot of them didn’t work because they didn’t work with the theme. These songs did. I like the fact that the songs are short. No song is more than four minutes on this album. The songs are to the point. They say what they have to say and they get out of there. I love that about this record.” (READ MORE)