James Taylor sits nursing a lime and soda as we dissect his unconventional
double life. He and his quartet have just released a new album of funked-up
Motown classics, but our talk isn’t of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder or the
Supremes – it’s Jung, deep trauma and a newly emerging therapy called EMDR
(eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing). The keyboard king of acid
jazz has a new role, as a psychotherapist treating some of society’s most
damaged people.
The two worlds might seem at odds, but they aren’t so far removed, he says:
“Music and therapy sit side by side quite nicely. They’re both about
connection.” It’s the sort of comment that, taken in isolation, may sound
perilously like pop psychology, but Taylor talks of psychotherapy, Heidegger
and Freud with the learned reverence of a true convert. And he is convinced
that the practice saved his life.
One day every week, Taylor, whose jazz funk band has been renowned for its
live gigs since the mid1980s, provides free therapy to homeless alcoholic
people at a 1960s council block in the shadow of Belmarsh prison. Down
there, in grimmest Southeast London, his patients are unaware of his status
as the man who revived the Starsky and Hutch theme and turned it
into a booty-shaking fave. But that’s not surprising. He’s a tough one to
spot, even in an uncrowded bar. There’s no hint of ego, feyness or vanity,
just a gently blokeish solidity, the rooted aura of a guy who still lives,
with his wife and daughter, in the Medway town where he grew up. That
robustness, though, is misleading.
He is teetotal nowadays. But Taylor was smashed and desperate when he first
put himself into therapy. “I fell apart ten years ago. You could call it a
breakdown,” he says. “I could no longer find meaning in anything. There was
persistent depression. I was doing so much alcohol and drugs the whole time,
to the point where I was... well, mad; unable to live a normal life.”
Thus in many ways his story reflects the standard script for a rocker’s
downfall: “I had got involved in music, had some success and enjoyed it, but
I reached the point where it became meaningless,” he recalls. “I had
attained all that I wanted to attain: the albums, the success, the tours.
And,” he laughs, “I still felt like sh**.”
“I did mum therapy, now I’m doing dad”
His own attempts to beat alcoholism serially failed. “I would stop for three
weeks and then mess up very badly,” he says. Then a fellow local musician,
Billy Childish, suggested that he follow him into therapy. “He was a father
figure in Rochester for a lot of musicians. As soon as I asked for help, I
was really doing it.
“My first psychotherapist was an elderly lady who was able to tolerate me as I
was back then. It went on for six years. For the first two years, it was
crisis management. I was sober, but all over the place. At one point I
rather put her on a pedestal. She had these panels of stained glass in her
windows and I became obsessed with stained glass. I built a greenhouse out
of it. But at some point during psychotherapy, the relationship changed. She
slipped off her pedestal. The relationship became adult to adult, rather
than child to adult. I am sober now, and in therapy with a male. It’s much
more challenging. It’s like I’ve done the mum therapist, now I’m doing the
dad.”
Taylor is convinced that for him the central tenet of psychotherapy rings
true; his problems originate in his relationship with his mother and father.
“It’s your parents, the original pain; that they can never live up to
everything for you, or give you all that you want,” he says. “That’s the
mourning that never ends.” But here, Taylor departs from the standard rocker
script; rather than returning to work as a damaged musician with a sideline
in discussing Freud, he immersed himself in this world by training as a
therapist. The fascination had long been there, he feels. “I’d read Jung’s
autobiography before I went into therapy. I felt such a resonance with his
way of seeing the world.” Taylor is still training, but is sufficiently
qualified to practise.
First he volunteered at Equinox, which supports people fighting alcoholism.
And for the past eight months he has done voluntary work for Emmaus, a
charity founded in France just after the Second World War to help homeless
people by giving them work refurbishing, recycling and reselling donated
goods.
“It’s a 1960s low-rise block in Plumstead. It’s not the nicest of buildings
and it’s not the nicest of areas,” he says. “But there’s a real sense of
pulling together.” Emmaus calls its residents “companions”. They’re each
given a small wage, a place to live and three meals a day. They fix TVs and
furniture, there’s a gym and a computer room.
“Most of the companions have been living on the streets. Belmarsh prison is
just over the road, so some come straight from there. Some have been lawyers
or professors. They have had huge traumas in their lives, awful things. You
don’t know how they survived,” he says. “They don’t know my background; the
therapist is by and large anonymous.
“Alcohol is their main problem. It pertains to the mother, to the breast.
Often it’s a double trauma that caused the drinking. They had a childhood
trauma, such as sexual abuse, then in adulthood something else awful
happened that triggered their fallout from society.”
His practice has revived his love of music
Taylor has been using the comparatively novel technique of EMDR, which uses
the simple practice of getting patients to look left and right as they talk
through their traumas. The physical action seems to enable the brain to
reprocess “stuck” memories. Taylor explains: “Emotional trauma is like a
knot in the brain. EMDR forces the trauma to link with associated neural
pathways, so it becomes part of normal memory where it can change and fade.
I’ll get the client to talk about their trauma and it’s so vivid that they
can remember everything, the exact smells, the sights. But all the time I’ll
be asking them to follow my hand with their eyes, left, right, left, right,
for three minutes. Then I’ll ask them to tell the story again. After a
while, the details start to change and fade.”
Is it a cure? Taylor smiles. “There are no answers, but we can move towards
wholeness.” Meanwhile, his practice has helped to revive his love of
performing music. “Connections at the therapeutic level remind me of the
connections you build when you’re playing music live. A good band responds
to the audience. I do the same with my clients.
“During my breakdown, I kept asking myself, ‘What do I do that has any
substance?’ Therapy helped me to realise the point of playing music,
especially improvising live. It’s a dialogue with the audience, coming
together in a shared human experience. Music connects with a very deep part
of your psyche. You come out of it changed in some way.
“My original woundings were addressed by music. I can take my despair to a
place of joy. It’s a great defence against sadness. Creativity is a form of
reparation. Art is born out of an attempt to repair. I’m not going to wake
up one morning and think, ‘I’m mended’. It would probably ruin me as a
musician anyway.”
Don’t mess with Mr T: James Taylor Quartet Plays Motown is now on
release by Dome Records; domerecords.co.uk
