WITh Frankie Vaughan for a father, and Amy Winehouse his cousin, music was always going to be big in David Sye’s life.
However, trouble-torn parts of the world, both home and overseas, were also fated to be uppermost in his thoughts, as he explains his exotic background.
David has a very unusual single out, 27, about the early death of Amy and the many other music giants who died at that age, and as he reveals, his famous dad would have loved it.
“My father’s sister Carol married Neville Winehouse, so Amy was a cousin, and I offered to help her with the therapy I do, but the next thing I heard was she’d died,” says David.
“Amy used to hang out near to Inverness Street, where I lived in Camden. I would pass her a few times, but I never went over to say: ‘Hi! D’you know who I am?’ I hate that kind of thing!
“So maybe I wish I’d talked to her, but it is what it is. It is frustrating that I never got the chance to help her, but I felt this song should be a celebration of her life.”
With traditional Kazakhstan music, the single is a wonderful mixture of pop, rock and ethnic, and David is a great singer, like his father.
But why Kazakhstan?
“Aidos Sagat, who has composed the music, is a big star in Kazakhstan,” David explains, “and he’s mixed traditional Kazak instruments with modern music.
“It has that wildness that speaks to my roots, which are Ukrainian.
“That’s where Dad’s side of the family was from.
“They came over after being horsebreeders there for 500 years, having come up from India. All the women had been raped by the Mongols in the 12th century.
“This is why a lot of my family look kind of Chinese, and some like my dad look really dark!
“It is an amazing meeting of the Oriental and the Occidental, which is why I love this kind of music.”
Bohemian Rhapsody is widely acknowledged as the greatest single made in recent decades, so it was a thrill for David and his band, No Mad Karma, to record 27 in the same studio, Rockfield in Wales.
“It’s auspicious, that’s for sure!” he laughs.
“Rockfield is an amazing place, and you definitely walk in there and feel that history and the influence of what was done there.
“And, of course, you thought of a genius like the late Freddie Mercury. Like Amy Winehouse, these people come along only once in a generation.”
Sounds a bit like Frankie Vaughan, of course.
“I loved going up to Easterhouse in Glasgow with Dad,” David admits, “when he brought the knife gangs together and finally got both sides to get on with each other. That was an incredible thing to do.
“Later, I went to Palestine, and I have also worked in other trouble spots.
“When you go and see how hard life is, you can’t do anything but stay and try to help.”
His father would be proud, indeed and his cousin would be thrilled.
The single, 27, by No Mad Karma, is out now.
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