Everybody

Album: Dance, No-One's Watching (2024)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Everybody," the final track on Ezra Collective's third album, Dance, No-One's Watching, is an instrumental jazz number that reflects the band's journey. They set out to capture the spirit of the diverse dance floors they encountered during their 2023 world tour, a tour that followed their triumphant Mercury Prize win.
  • Ezra Collective took inspiration for Dance, No One's Watching from their friend Steve McQueen's BBC drama Lovers Rock, part of his 2020 Small Axe series. The album unfolds like a perfectly choreographed Saturday night: the anticipation, the crescendo of revelry, and the quiet epiphany of the morning after.

    "Everybody" delivers the Sunday morning homecoming with an epiphanic vision of Heaven based on a Nigerian Baptist church song. "A night out can be exemplary of life," drummer and bandleader Femi Koleso told Mojo magazine. "It has a birth, a middle, and end."
  • Ezra Collective recorded Dance, No-One's Watching in just three days at Abbey Road Studios just after the Notting Hill Carnival. They spent the first day nursing post-Carnival hangovers and setting up the gear. The intention was pure and simple: capture the unfiltered magic of their live shows, complete with an audience of family and friends to stave off overthinking.

    "What you're hearing is very, very real," Koleoso told the BBC. "We just played it, listened back, and said, 'Yeah, put it on vinyl.'"
  • Dance, No-One's Watching danced its way to #7 on the UK Albums Chart, marking Ezra Collective's first-ever Top 10 record. The group enjoyed Top 40 success in 2022 with their Mercury Prize-winning second album, Where I'm Meant To Be.

    The previous jazz album to hit the UK Top 10 was Here's to Christmas, a big-band effort by former footballer and pundit Chris Kamara, which reached #8 in 2019.

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