Kid Creole Searches for a Mass Audience

August Darnell can easily reel off the influences on Kid Creole--his dapper “alter ego” who leads the defiantly uncategorizable big band Kid Creole & the Coconuts.

There’s Cab Calloway, for the overall image. Frank Sinatra for vocal phrasing and romantic attitude. Elvis Presley for dance moves and hero worship. James Brown for live performance. Calypso singer the Mighty Sparrow for witty lyrics.

But, if things go as he hopes, Darnell will also owe a debt to a new benefactor: Prince, who wrote and arranged Kid Creole & the Coconuts’ just-released single “The Sex of It.” The debt won’t be aesthetic. This is a matter of pure survival.

The funk-flavored, up-tempo dance jam is a blatant pitch for the mass market by an act whose Latin-accented hybrid has always been marked by a sophisticated stance and an experimental slant. After 10 years of precarious existence as a cult act, Darnell is in a mood to compromise. If the Prince connection isn’t enough, he and the band even appear in the current lambada exploitation film “Forbidden Dance”--without qualms.

“I have no hesitance about associating myself with anything,” the glib bandleader said with a laugh at his manager’s Beverly Hills office. “At this stage of the game, breaking the American market has turned out to be more difficult than anyone anticipated.

“It’s been quality all the way from the beginning, and if that wasn’t enough, maybe it is time to link myself with the fast food chain. Whatever it takes to get into the American mainstream I’m gonna do, because I know that when I’m there, I will not have sold myself to the devil.

“The Prince song is a catapult, a battering ram to enter the consciousness of American (radio) programmers,” continued Darnell, 38, who brings Kid Creole & the Coconuts to the Palace for shows on Thursday and Friday.

“The danger is that you might win a public that expects you to do the same thing from that point on. That would be my demise, because that’s not what I’m about. What I want to use it for is to gather a public and then turn them on to what I am about.”

The oddest thing about the odd coupling is that Prince and Darnell have never met. The only time they’ve even been in the same room was a few years ago when Prince watched a Kid Creole show in France from the wings. But the two didn’t speak. “We were both on large ego trips,” said Darnell.

Then last year, a tape of “The Sex of It” showed up at Darnell’s office, complete with Prince’s guide vocal. Darnell had already finished the tracks for “Private Waters in the Great Divide,” his first album for Columbia Records (due for an April 10 release). But when the label brass “went over the moon” for the Prince cut, he found himself in a familiar situation.

“I didn’t want to add it to the album,” said Darnell, an old hand at butting heads with record executives. “I wanted to put the album to bed. So once again it was a question of me being my old stubborn self, which would have said, ‘Go away, the album’s done.’

“But I played along with them, so we did the recording. It was really 1990s techno-world. The guy sent the track to New York, I put my vocals on the track, I sent it back to his people and they mixed it. There’s no contact whatsoever. I actually grew to like the recording once I put the vocals on. I Creole-ized it as much as I could, but it still had the stamp of Prince on it.

“You know the expression ‘I did it my way’? This is doing it their way, and hopefully they know what they’re doing. You beat your head against the wall so much, and then you realize perhaps they do know the American market better than I do, perhaps it’s time to open up to some input.”

In a second adjustment of the album, Darnell was persuaded to replace an intriguing social-comment song called “Ode to a Coloured Man” with an English-language version of “The Lambada.” (It’s sung by Cory Daye, the vocalist from his earlier group, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah band, who’s now signed on with Kid Creole.)

Isn’t Darnell afraid that these compromises will cost him credibility with his serious fans?

“I think at this stage, after 10 years of tenure, it’s time to expect that your followers will know that for your longevity to be assured, they’d better understand what’s happening,” he said. “Because they’re not paying the bills. The cult following has been a loyal cult following, but it has not expanded. We can’t play the heartland, because that cult following does not go into the heartland.

“If it wasn’t for Europe, South America or the Orient, we’d be dead for sure. We’re talking about a massive entity here,” he said of the 14-piece band. “I sort of liken myself to the modern-day Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey. Those guys went through some changes too to keep their bands alive until the prehistoric beast had to die.”