Fela Kuti, Revolutionary Dream.

In 1971 I was sixteen, turning seventeen in October. It was the age when music was becoming my life’s blood and starting to influence how I saw the world and related to it. My friend Mark and I would float around Camberley town centre, from coffee bar to record store talking about the value of this band and that band; we’d also crowd into the listening booths and beg the older bloke (at least twenty two) to let us hear whole sides of albums. It was Mark who dragged me into the booth and said “You gotta hear this!” and played me Heroin by the Velvet Underground; I dragged him in to hear Dirt by The Stooges. Record shop guy sort of tolerated us and then one day said “You two need to hear this”. It was Why Black Man Dey Suffer by Fela Kuti.

I never really listened to music the same again.

Over the years this early openness to what was out there musically has brought so much joy to my life. Disco, reggae, soul; the list is endless. For ages I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness, or at least a member of a small gang who used strange words like Fela, Franco, Sunny Ade or Joujouka. It didn’t make me a purist, it just made me open. Then it got called World Music and somehow in two simple words this magical music was put into a box marked “Liberal Middle Class Muesli Eaters”.

For me Fela is revolutionary music, by a man who walked the walk, talked the talk and took all the beatings handed out to him by an oppressive state. A man who articulated the problems that Africa faced from rapacious multi-nationals and corrupt governments many years before NGOs and pressure groups caught up with him was a giant. He was educated, sophisticated and informed; he chose to sing in pidgin English because it was a language that was pan-African, it enabled his message to travel beyond the borders of Nigeria and brought the issues he sang about, and highlighted, into the consciousness of the wider populations. He was a lot more scary than The Clash.

Now Knitting Factory Records are re-releasing several of Fela’s most important albums and they’ve led off with a pretty good compilation. Actually it’s a fucking great compilation but if you’re a Fela fan you’re always going to gripe that this song should be there, and that song, oh, yeah, and that one. I guess one of the problems is that so many of his songs clock in a big time so in an effort to introduce as many songs as possible you either edit or find the shorter ones.

That said this compilation has such towering greats as Everything Scatter and Expensive Shit, the breathtaking Sorrow Tears and Blood and the angry, and politically exact, Colonial Mentality.

For a true illustration of the power of music you cannot do better than anything by Fela. Right now we are living in difficult times, we have a government pressing down on the poorest in society, we have a middle class with a shrinking share of the national wealth and we have the youth of our country being priced out of education and work. Now, more than any other time, we need artists to step up to the plate and make common cause. I appreciate that pop music never changes much, but it changes the general environment, the water we swim in. When we are fed a diet of One Direction and Emelie Sande, when even the “challenging” bands are wary of speaking out about politics then we must delve into Fela Kuti. We must throw ourselves into his music like fishes desperate to breathe.


Everything Scatter

Many foreign companies dey Africa carry all our money go
Many foreign companies dey Africa carry all our money go
Them go write big English for newspaper, dabaru we Africans
Them go write big English for newspaper, dabaru we Africans (I.T.T.)

The son also rises.

I can still remember the moment when I first heard Seun Kuti's father, Fela Kuti, for the first time. The track was I.T.T. on the Black President album. It was something of an epiphany comparable with hearing the Velvets, Big Youth or The Ramones for the first time. The very soul of the music exuded protest and anger, before Africa became the cause du jour it woke so many of us to the realities of modern Africa; not the poverty but the corruption, the terror and the nepotism the pervaded so much of African society, and still does.

Ironically, at the time, I.T.T. was the original bastard multi-national, they even won compensation for damage done to their factories in Germany that were bombed by the allies because they were building Focke-Wulf planes for Hitler. They are American. When Fela was recording I.T.T. the company was co-opting African leaders through bribery and corruption, leading the charge of the modern day economic colonialists. Times have not changed though Africa rises and now Seun steps into his father's shoes.

From Africa With Fury: Rise sees Seun Kuti linking up with his father's smooth-cool outfit Egypt 80 and the result is so refreshing that it makes most music around us seem monochrome and flat. Moving at a speedier rate than his old man did, with his laid back Afrobeat horn grooving machine laying down the law, Seun kicks off the dust from the shoes he's stepped into and heads off into our brains at a modern speed. Egypt 80 lock in behind him, horn arrangements flowing and Seun spitting the political lyrics, decrying the filth that crawls over his country, from the generals to the Western businessmen, from the oil companies poisoning their land to the local politicians who let them.


Tracks like African Soldier and Mr Big Thief gives us the setting for this new anger, Slave Masters and Rise speak of the new economic exploitation that exists in the Third World today. As Kuti says: "Nobody wants to stand up for anything, everybody wants to toe the line."

Produced by Eno and John Reynolds (who has worked with Sinéad O'Connor and Natacha Atlas) the album sounds great. Punchy and fine.

Go out and buy it OK.