The celebrated musician on his epic career of hit singles and travelling the world
BY BEN WEST
“I’ve worked with some of the greats in the industry. I’ve worked with Nile Rogers, I’ve also worked with Barry Manilow. People are shocked when they hear that.”
August Darnell, aka Kid Creole of Kid Creole and the Coconuts, is reminiscing about some of the people he has been most proud of or enjoyed working with in his career.
“Working with Barry Manilow was a great experience, because not only did we do the song together, we did a TV special together. And it was nice to see that completely different genres Barry Manilow and Kid Creole doing something together is just proof of how the genres can blend.
“There have been so many it’s been great working with. I had the opportunity to work with Cab Callaway, who was my idol, with his zoot suits and that whole look we adopted. That whole genre was something I loved from when I was a youngster.”
Born Thomas Browder in 1950, August Darnell became a household name as Kid Creole in 1982 with the hit singles I’m an Wonderful Thing, Baby, Stool Pigeon, Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy, and Dear Addy. However, the band had a UK top 40 hit two years before, Me No Pop I, and three members of the original band lineup had previously had a number one dance hit in America in 1976, Cherchez La Femme/C’est si bon.
The latter was with Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, which Darnell had formed with his brother Stony in the Bronx, where he grew up. By his own admission, he made and spent a lot of money during those times, while pumping out hits blending calypso, reggae, funk, pop, Latin American, Caribbean, jazz and a whole lot more.
The father of nine children, he lives in both Sweden and Hawaii with his wife and manager Eva Tudor-Jones and is currently on a world tour. He says it is his last tour – although he’s said that before. With all the touring he does, I ask him whether he feels grounded or is he more like a nomad?
“The rate of touring now is nowhere near where it used to be in my prime, where it was occupying I would say nine months of the year in the golden Creole days. I would feel that every time I’m on a tour is the thing that I’m concentrating on. So it’s definitely a feeling of being grounded. It’s not feeling like a nomad anymore. The nomad feeling was in the past.”
Has he been back to the Bronx?
“There’s nothing that would bring me back there now because my parents aren’t there and I have no relatives that are there. And the last time I went there was enough. It was about 20 years ago. I said, ‘Let me go back and see what the Bronx is like.’ And after I saw it, I said, ‘Damn, I don’t have to go back here anymore.’ But the Bronx has changed and all neighbourhoods have changed, obviously, from when I was a child. But the Bronx has changed for the better, I would say.”
Is it in a way that you want to preserve memories of your childhood but instead you see all this change?
“No, I’m not that sentimental about it because I think that the Bronx served its purpose for me. I’ve been in so many places in my life that each one became my home. And that’s why I like to say that I’m a citizen of the world. I’ve lived in many, many different places, many different cities, many different countries. And most of my time is no longer in New York. Most of my time now is spent in Hawaii, in Sweden, in Denmark, in London, in Vienna, in Switzerland. My ex-wife was from Switzerland. And so I was blessed to have seen the world. And my ex-ex-ex-wife was Haitian. And so she exposed me to Haiti and the Caribbean culture. So it’s been a great journey.
“The fact that I’m still doing all this in 2025 is astonishing, even to me. That we’re still talking about tour dates and organising the next single and promoting it and all of that. I’m surprised at myself that I still have the wherewithal to deal with all of it. I still love performing, I still love recording in the studio, I still love all those aspects of it. I do not like, as much as I used to, the travelling, going from hotel to hotel and all of that nonsense at airports these days, which is very miserable, but I still enjoy the performance.”
He believes the secret to his longevity and success has been because he has always stayed true to what he thought would be an eclectic blend of music.
“Growing up in the Bronx I was very fortunate to have my dad and mom who were into all kinds of music. They were into jazz, they were into rock and roll. They were into rhythm and blues, they were into country and western. They were into all genres. And they declared that not one genre was better than another. Learning that at an early age was a fantastic thing, because you never frowned upon punk music when it came out. You never frowned upon hard rock, or you never frowned upon any genre that was different than what you proposed was the great genre.”
His career has also included working with renowned artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, on a film, Downtown 81.
“He was an interesting guy. In those days everybody was doing a project, and you didn’t know who was gonna be famous and who wasn’t going to make the grade. But he was a very talented guy and everyone looked at him as a guy who was going to make his mark.
“When we did that movie together it was just fun. You never knew whether it was gonna be finished or not, whether it was going to be sponsored, if it was going to get investors. And when it did finally come out, we said, wow, yeah, this is good. It was a historic clip of what the 80s were like in New York City.”
Where does he like touring best, around the world?
“I don’t have any favourite places, to be quite honest, because each one comes with a special kind of audience. The Italians are amazing in terms of their respect for the music, even when they don’t understand the lyrics. And even in the Orient, when we play Tokyo, it’s amazing. They don’t know the lyrics, but they just love the music, and they’re a very reserved audience. But they still dance, and they get along and they get the groove, they understand the groove.
“And the UK audiences, I do not find them reserved at all. We would invite loads of audience members onto the stage while we performed, and they would jump on stage and start dancing with us and acting crazy.
“Anyone who comes to a Kid Creole show realises they’re coming to have a good time, even though some of the lyrics are political, and some of the songs have some dark ideas. But the basic premise is, have a good time. Let your hair down and dance. And I think that any country we play in, that’s been what has happened. So you ask me what are favourite places? I can’t say there’s been a favourite place. They’ve all been really, really respectful of the groove.”
Those songs that are political or have dark ideas – could you give examples?
“I hate to give an example because then people go thinking that I’m a troublemaker. But I wrote a song called Animal Cop about police brutality. And I got a lot of feedback from that because people were saying, ‘oh, you can’t label all the police by the actions of some bad ones’. And I said I wasn’t obviously talking about all of them, I’m talking about the bad ones. That’s one example of how people can misinterpret your songs.
“There’s another one called There But For The Grace Of God Go I. And in that song I had a line, ‘no blacks, no Jews, no gays’. And every person who heard it thought I was being racist but what the story was was about a boy and a girl who grew up in a neighbourhood where he was told at an early age that he wanted to live in a place with no blacks no jews no gays and then the chorus goes ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. But they didn’t hear that. All they heard was ‘no blacks, no Jews, no gays’. And so I got a lot of mail in those days saying, ‘What? You don’t like blacks and you don’t like Jews and you don’t like gays?’ And I said, why don’t you just be intelligent and listen to the rest of the lyric? So, yes, I have been political and sometimes to my detriment.”
Although, aged 74, Darnell says he’s now ready to give up the touring I’m not convinced this is the last we’ll see of him. Indeed, he’s currently in discussions about bring a stage musical, Cherchez La Femme, to the London stage. It had a successful run in New York off Broadway ten years ago.
Watch this space…
Further information: kidcreoleandthecoconuts.com
