Titus writes:
I’d like to thank fans of lex – WTF is this for their positive feedback to the two blogs I have written so far. I thought last Friday’s show (1 Dec) was excellent and I was pleased that my choice of a Paris Angels’ track went down well.
This week I’m moving onto another love of mine – music from the African Continent. Now, I know that this genre is not really anything new, so I have concentrated on the involvement & sheer joy I experienced by this music, since I discovered it in the mid eighties. As most of you know, I was a John Peel Show fanatic, and John, plus his then Radio One colleague Andy Kershaw championed people and bands from Africa that I’d never heard of. Please also bear in mind, that as the sixties drew to a close, despite the appeal of African music, it was difficult to project, compared with say Anglo-American music.
Rightly or wrongly, it became grouped under the title of World Music – this incorporated Asian influenced artists such as Quintessence, The Incredible String Band and The Third Ear Band, plus the likes of e.g. established musicians like Ravi Shankar and Imrat Khan.
Punk (which I loved) and its localism arguably helped close the hippy trail, and this was seemingly not helped by the Iran revolution, the war in Afghanistan, and the ongoing occupation of Tibet by China. World Music became rare, even on the John Peel Show.
A new breed of World Music underwent a resurgence, IRONICALLY on the Peel Show in the 1980’s, and I am using the term again making no apologies for such...... IRONICALLY, on the African continent,many people had formed a love of newer music very similar in broad terms to the way many British, Americans and Europeans had embraced punk. Peel & Kershaw played an abundance of post-independence Zimbabwean music, featuring bands like the Bhundu Boys, John Chibadura & the Tembo Brothers, and The Four Brothers, who famously played a live set on Peel’s lawn in 1989. His wife Sheila (“The Pig”) had secretly arranged this as part of the great man’s 50th birthday celebrations that year. Indeed the Four Brothers did 4 Peel sessions. Andy Kershaw described the moment when Peel and him first heard the Bhundu Boys, by referring to it as “a dazzling quality of the music, the harmonies, and the sparkling guitar playing”
The emergence of the Soukous genre of World Music seemed to be a tonic to the ears of many music lovers, Worldwide. This was actually dance music, with searing guitars, and apparently originated form Zaire, (since re-named The Democratic Republic of Congo). In my opinion, the greatest and most exciting soukous guitarist was a Congolese guy by the name of Diblo Dibala, who was known as The Machine Gun because of his amazing speed and skill while playing his guitar.
Like myself, he’s not young, and was born in 1954 in Kisangani, moving to Kinshasa in his childhood. In 1979 he decided to join the European scene moving to Brussels, and two years later joined Kanda Bongo Man in Paris, gaining instant success. He was regularly sought after as a session musician, and worked with the excellent Pepe Kalle. By the mid eighties, Diblo had formed his own soukous band Loketo, with two superb singers Aurlus Mabele and Mav Cacharel. In 1990, he started a new soukous band called Matchatcha, and as far as I am aware, even at the grand old age of 69, (Yes, I know the Rolling Stones and others are older!) he’s still a part of them.
When in N.Y.C.in 2004, I managed to buy 2 Kanda Bongo Man cds from a specialist Record Shop in Greenwich Village which (at the time) I could not get in the U.K. and I still play them nowadays, mainly in my car. When I am stationary at traffic lights, this invokes mega “car seat dancing” from yours truly! I hope you like my choice of Diblo track Laissez Passer I could think of dozens more, but maybe another time. If you want to find more out about Diblo, there’s loads online and some of his music is on You Tube.