Dee C Lee: 'I can’t believe the amount of love I’ve received since making this album'

“I really just wanted to make some music and I can’t believe the amount of love I’ve received since making this album; it’s fabulous.”

After the Japan-only release of her 1998 solo album Smiles, Lee admits that she had fallen out of love with the music industry and wanted to spend more time with her then-young children Nathaniel and Leah. (She was divorced from their father, Paul Weller, the same year.) “I had a young family and it was not something I really knew how to do, so I found it quite overwhelming being a young parent in those days,” she says.

“I’d spent most of my time making music and performing, so it was lovely to be in love and have a family, but there did come a time where everything got on top and I kind of lost myself a little bit. I wasn’t really sure: am I a mum, am I performer, what the hell do I do? And at one point I felt like I was doing all of them really badly, so I did take a proper chill, so to speak, and I hid behind my grown-up kids a little bit, just interfering in their lives, so they’re really happy that I’ve gone back to making music.”

Lee, now 63, describes the new album Just Something as “everything that I’ve ever wanted to do” musically. The songs For Once In My Life and Trojan Horse had existed in demo form for years “just waiting for an opportunity to be aired”. Lee also returned to co-writing with Mike McEvoy and Ernie McKone with whom she’s previously worked in the 1980s. “They’re two very prolific songwriters and musicians in their own right but they’re my go-to guys whenever I want to start something,” she says.

Covers of two rare groove tracks from the 1970s, Renee Geyer’s Be There In The Morning and the Don Blackman song I Love You, were suggested by Piller, while the single Walk Away was co-penned with keyboard player Mick Talbot, her long-time friend from their days in The Style Council. “I said to Mick I’ve got this album, have you got any tunes? He brought me a couple, but Walk Away was the one that stuck,” she says. “Obviously there’s that flavour of The Style Council but in our minds we’re hitting a little Motown there – you can see our influences.”

Everyday Summer, meanwhile, was written by Lee’s daughter, Leah Weller, while she was working on her own solo album, which came out last year. “She was at my house at the piano working on it and it sounded beautiful,” Lee recalls. “I said, what are you going to do with that? She said, ‘I just don’t know where to take it’. I really felt it and I was thinking to myself if I get the opportunity and she hasn’t used it or sold it I’ve got mummy dibs on that track, I was straight in there. It was pretty cool, I love the track.”

Lee sees the record as tying together multiple strands from her career, which began at the turn of the 1980s as a session singer with the funk-soul group Central Line and continued as backing vocalist with Wham! on their hits Wham Rap, Young Guns and Bad Boys.

She says she “really got the vibe” for singing after seeing Earth Wind and Fire onstage. “Most sensible musicians learn to play something, I was far too lazy,” she says, laughing. “I got bored very quickly. Had had guitar, piano and violin lessons and I can’t believe how I wasted those opportunities, but I did find what I could do...I just started singing and I found that I could mimic most sounds with my voice, so I want down that route and it was a lot easier for me. When I’m performing I don’t have to carry a bunch of heavy instruments – another win! But I just discovered that my input to music would be vocals and writing.

“All the people I’ve worked with have had an influence of me, but I’m quite lucky that I’ve had a high calibre of people that I’ve worked with, so it’s not a bad thing to have hanging around your aura.”

The album features members of the James Taylor Quartet and the Brand New Heavies. Lee says: “One of the perks of being on Acid Jazz is it’s a whole family of musicians and writers and producers, so it’s very easy for someone like me to come into contact with that high calibre of musicianship and I was very lucky that they were all there and helped me out with the album.”

Back in 1981 Lee had met members of Central Line in London clubs. “You used to go there and meet musicians and like-minded people who wanted to make similiar music,” she remembers. “Central Line gave me my first break. I was basically pestering them and hanging around the studio in case they needed a vocalist, and eventually they did.”

From that, she went on to work for publishing companies “doing vocals for songwriters who don’t sing”, through which she met the future managers of “two young guys who wanted to put a band together, they were going to call themselves Wham! and said, would you like to come and meet them?”

Lee says she “couldn’t believe” the rapid success that George Michael and Andrew Ridgley enjoyed, but following Michael’s death in 2016, she also sees it as a cautionary tale. “It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen…it was a different level of everything, totally mind-blowing, and I was very happy that I had the opportunity to be with those guys because they were the equivalent of be careful what you wish for. They got so famous and the rest is really not how it should’ve been. That amount of fame can always lead to quite a lot of heartache, it seems, but that’s another story.”

After debuting with The Style Council on the 1983 single Money Go Round, she joined the band for their album Cafe Bleu while simultaneously launching a solo career. Although the ballad See The Day reached number two in the charts in 1985, Lee found herself uncomfortable with the pop direction that her label CBS wanted her to pursue.

“It was actually also my fault,” she says. “I got that deal off the back of Wham! and to be honest, I was so excited. When Wham! were coming to a different conclusion anybody surrounding them weren’t doing much, but (CBS) said ‘we still like your voice’ so I said let’s do something.

“Me being the smart-a*** that I am, I gave them four songs to give them an idea of my writing abilities and the sort of genres that I could cover. I gave them Selina Wow Wow, which was pop, and I gave them See The Day, which was a ballad, and I gave them two other songs which I still can’t remember.

“Of course they jumped on Selina Wow Wow and I was very honoured. I thought if it worked out then they would see another side to me with See The Day, but oh no, they weren’t interested at all, didn’t think much of it, so I ended up getting trapped a little bit and I know the dollar signs in their eyes were saying ‘the black Bananarama – yay, that’s what we’ve got here!’ and I walked straight into that one.”

She adds: “By the way, I love Bananarama, they’re good friends of mine.”

Lee credits her former husband Paul Weller and his father, John, for ensuring that See The Day was released. “They even paid for the recording of it,” she says. “(CBS’s) principle was ‘we don’t want this song, forget about it’. I played it to John and Paul Weller and they loved it so much that we started performing it as part of The Style Council set at that time, and I was getting such a great reaction, so then John and Paul we like, ‘let’s just put it out ourselves’ and I couldn’t believe it. But it was really self-fulfilling for me that something that I believed in all that time and was being turned away by people that apparently know what they’re talking about, to do it ourselves and have it do well was a real present to me, that was fabulous.”

She says she was “absolutely flattered” that Girls Aloud covered the song 20 years later. “I loved their little version, it was amazing to hear somebody else sing my song,” she says. “They did well with it and I was very happy and honoured that they did.”

Lee looks back favourably on her years with The Style Council. “I say it to Steve White (the band’s drummer) all the time, I say it to Mick (Talbot), I’ve even said it to Paul (Weller), it just seems like the other day,” she says. “We all do agree, where did it go? But the good thing is I’m really grateful to be one of those people that can say I don’t have any regrets in my life, and I’ve lived quite a full life and I’m going to continue to do so as much as possible, but at my pace and at a level that makes me happy.

“If you knew that such good times were going to go so quickly, I think you’d savour them more, but it was a fantastic time. I don’t think ever worked with any other band where you’re working, getting paid and it was nothing but a laugh and a really good time and really good music. I’ve got a lot to thank them for because I really grew from that as a solo artist.

“I’m also lucky enough to still have Steve White with me, he’s MD-ing my band, so I’ve still got some of the brothers with me. I’ve got a lot of back-up, so it’s all good.”

She also remains friends with Robert Howard, with whom she formed the short-lived house project Slam Slam. “He’s a sweetheart, he’s such a good man,” she says.

Of the band itself, she recalls: “It was the music of the time, and to be honest, it was the freshest new music to my mind that I’d heard in a long time. I was a young mum at the time and I was very insecure as to whether or not I could perform any more. I lost a lot of confidence – I think it’s quite common for mums to go through that, so I was hiding behind the Slam Slam persona. It was make music, perform, but the emphasis wasn’t all on me, it was on a name, Slam Slam could be whoever it was. That was a fun time, I needed to do it.”

Later in the 90s, Lee worked with Guru’s Jazzmatazz collective and made the single New Reality Vibe for James Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax. “New Reality Vibe, that was me being really self-indulgent surrounded by fabulous musicians in the recording studio,” she says. “That was basically me just tripping, but it was fun to make and I still love listening to it because from my point of view to be involved in something so musical considering that I don’t play anything, I’m very proud of that.”

Just Something is out now. Dee C Lee plays at The Old Woollen, Farsley, Leeds on Tuesday October 1. https://www.deeclee.com/