Kid Creole and The Coconuts - Career

Career

Thomas August Darnell Browder was born in The Bronx, New York City, USA on August 12, 1950, his mother was from South Carolina and his father from Savannah, Georgia. As an adult, Thom Browder began going by his two middle names as August Darnell.

Growing up in the melting pot of the Bronx, Darnell was exposed early on to all kinds of music". Darnell began his musical career in a band named The In-Laws with his brother, Stony Browder Jr, in 1965, which disbanded so Darnell could pursue a career as an English teacher. Darnell obtained a masters degree in English, but in 1974 again formed a band with his brother Stony Browder Jr under the name Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band. Their self-titled debut release was a Top 40-charting album which was certified gold and was nominated for a Grammy.

Together, the Browder boys defied convention to invent a new breed of music. Of convoluted and deliberately obfuscated racial heritage, the brothers decided to promote their pan-genetic Creole Creed: a better, brighter reality that ignores gender and colour restrictions.

Darnell began producing for other artists, such as Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band and Gichy Dan’s Beachwood No.9, before adopting the name Kid Creole (adapted from the Elvis Presley film King Creole) in 1980. The persona of Kid Creole is described as:

Kid Creole was to be "the larger-than-life central figure in a multi-racial, multi-cultural musical carnival." The co-founders of the band were, August and his Savannah Band associate vibraphone player Andy Hernandez, also known as his "trusty sidekick" Coati Mundi, who serves as his on-stage comic foil, as well as his musical director and arranger and Darnell's former wife Adriana "Addy" Kaegi who was the leader, choreographer and costume designer of the Coconuts, co-writer Peter Shott on Piano who co-wrote their first hit "I'm a Wonderful Thing Baby", drummer and band member David Span, bass player Carol Colman and legendary Jamaican drummer Winston Grennan The original Coconuts- backing vocalist/dancers Adriana Kaegi, Cheryl Poirier, Taryn Haegy (who was replaced by Janique Svedberg). This line-up remained in place throughout the band's heyday.

Their debut album Off the Coast of Me was critically well-received but not successful commercially. The second release Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places was a concept album matched with a New York Public Theatre stage production; it received rave reviews, and Darnell was recognized as a clever lyricist and astute composer, arranger and producer. By the second album they were accompanied by the Pond life horn section Charlie Lagond, Ken Fradley and Lee Robertson as well as lead Guitarist Mark Mazur. They performed "Mister Softee" on Saturday Night Live during their promotional tour for the album. The album charted briefly, and subsequently Coati Mundi's early Latin RAP "Me No Pop I", though not originally on the album, became a Top 40 UK hit single. Their breakthrough came with 1982's Tropical Gangsters, which hit #3 in the UK and spun off three Top 10 hits with "Stool Pigeon", "Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy" and "I'm a Wonderful Thing, Baby", written by musical director Peter Schott. "Dear Addy" also made the Top 40. In the US the album was retitled Wise Guy and reached #145, and "I'm a Wonderful Thing, Baby" flirted with the R&B charts.

Darnell subsequently produced spin-off albums for the Coconuts. Coati Mundi also released his solo L P before the fourth Kid Creole and the Coconut's album in 1983; Doppelganger was a relative commercial disappointment, despite the single "There's Something Wrong in Paradise" reaching the Top 40 written by guitarist Mark Mazur.

Darnell and Kaegi divorced in 1985, though she remained with the band. She and Cheryl Poirier also formed their own group, Boomerang, with Perri Lister, which released an album on the Atlantic label in 1986. Darnell continued Kid Creole and the Coconuts and in the mid to late 1980s contributed to various film soundtracks and other such projects. He appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1986 and in this period released the albums In Praise of Older Women and Other Crimes and I, Too, Have Seen the Woods, neither of which charted despite the hit "Endicott". 1990s Private Waters in the Great Divide, described by the NME as "a return to form with inspired lyrics and buckets of the type of sexual innuendo that Creole has made his own", had a hit with the single "The Sex of It", a song written by Prince and recorded at Paisley Park Studios with Sheila E. It reached Top 40 in the US and UK and is to date one of his best-known songs.

Kid Creole and The Coconuts have appeared in a number of films, such as Against All Odds (1984) and the Lambada themed The Forbidden Dance (1990); They also starred in a TV movie, "There's Something Wrong in Paradise" in 1984, based around their songs and produced for Granada Television in the UK. Andy Hernandez has also made appearances in a number of films separately, and Adriana Kaegi produced and directed a documentary film about the band called Kid Creole and my Coconuts.