Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  ‘I suppose what one wound up with was jazz/rock. And for a while there was this sort of fusion of theatre and rock music with improvisation, and it was a very exciting time – we did the Earthrise tour. We did some very big gigs, but I don’t think any of us were serious about it – it was just a phase, for a while. Especially when we got a record contract – we didn’t want to be pop music, nobody on our side of the scene did, the whole thing was about freedom. So to cut a very long story short, all that burned itself out and came to an end in about 1972.’

  The continental scene was shifting too. First there was a political period as left-wing municipal authorities supported left-field arts:

  ‘There was this political phase in the mid-seventies, when we played abroad quite often and they were communist festivals, run by the communist city councils – Florence was a big one – that were free to the public as a sort of great Utopian vision of modern art and music. It didn’t really happen much over here, although the Communist Party did organise one or two events at the Roundhouse. We got on very well with the Henry Cow people and played gigs all over France and stuff. It didn’t last long, but there was this feeling of being involved with social change and political awareness.’

  Brotherhood Of Breath were part of that circuit, given added star status by their South-Africans-in-exile credentials, but they were never fully politically committed. Although their background was now coming through in the music, they demanded total artistic freedom, and weren’t going to compromise that to make any non-musical points. When the final sea-change came, it was that approach that finished them off. Mike explains:

  ‘During the jazz phase, particularly in France, there were loads of jazz festivals that European groups, people like us and the Brotherhood, were playing, and they were less American-dominated for quite a long period. European jazz was doing very well. Then it was very significant that the mood changed, and world music became the thing, and you could see the jazz side of these festivals shrinking then, and there were big concerts by African groups who were big stars by then, them and the Cubans. Brotherhood Of Breath overlapped with that because it had that sort of ethos – and you had the international success of Abdullah Ibrahim and Miriam Makeba, and other exiled South Africans, very much referring back to their native music.

  ‘That took over as world music, and the Brotherhood basically were too uncompromising to be proactive with it, as it tends to be not really improvised. It’s more folksy, really, you don’t have this wild Cecil-Taylor-style improvising going on, which is the thing people find difficult. So jazz again had sort of come up, and then retreated into the background.’

  Chris McGregor carried on with various incarnations of the Brotherhood, from his base in France, until the end of the 1980s. Good as they were, they never reached the improvisational heights of the original line-up, but they kept the big band’s flag flying practically up to his death in 1990.

  Today, Louis is the only surviving Blue Note. Improvised jazz does still exist in London – Louis still plays here on a regular basis, while Mike, among other projects, writes, arranges and plays in the Mike Westbrook Big Band, and Hazel’s Ogun Records flourishes. However, it’s nothing like the vibrant, adventurous scene it used to be, and that it gained the foothold it did is massively down to the five South Africans that made the city their home.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  West Africa in the West End

  Mods and Afro-rockers

  ‘WE WERE THE FIRST ALL-BLACK BAND to go on Top of the Pops, with “Music For A Gong Gong” in 1971, when our album Osibisa was at number seven in the charts.’

  Sitting in his comfortable Kingsbury front room, Teddy Osei, founder and leader of Osibisa, thinks back forty years to the impact that the legendary Afro-rock band had on British music:

  ‘That was really sensational, not only for us and also for Africans at that time, but for all blacks at that time in England. At that time, all the bands that got on the BBC were either all-white bands or black and white bands, but this was the first time an all-black band had come on. [That’s band as opposed to vocal group.] We did Old Grey Whistle Test as well, and were the first black band to have a whole show devoted to them.

  ‘One of our things was that, when we got onto Top of the Pops, we would be wearing African clothes. We always wore them to play our gigs – even the West Indians in the band – but on television it made such a difference. It let everybody see we were a proud band, proud of the music we played, and after that at our gigs, sure the Africans would turn up wearing African clothes, but among the white people all of those who had ever been to Africa would turn up at our gigs wearing something African. That was wonderful.’

  Something more than just a sartorial milestone was being passed. When three Ghanaians, one Nigerian, one Trinidadian, one Grenadian and an Antiguan came together as Osibisa, in a Finsbury Park rehearsal space in 1969, they became the first example of the genuine Londonising of an immigrant music. Here was a band aiming, right from the start, to create a sound that came from an African perspective, but was of London, rather than simply being in London.

  ‘The idea was to come out with a fusion of original African drums and Western instruments. Of African melodies, and also the jazz and rock and the Caribbean music and other Western music … If something like that was ever going to happen anywhere, it would be in this city, London, because everything it needed could be found here.’

  This was a major shift: a genuine local fusion, not merely a palatable version of something exotic. The African clothes serve as a deft illustration. Calypsonians – whether suited and booted, or kitted out in a clichéd Caribbean style – wanted to get to the mainstream. Osibisa, on the other hand, encouraged African dress among their audience – all their audience – and wanted the mainstream to come to them.

  Not that West African music was anything new in London. Osibisa were not the first African group to make an impact, or even the first band to mix Africans and Caribbeans. Parallel to the African involvement on the jazz scene, highlife had evolved into a healthy cottage industry. It’s just that the front door to this particular cottage wasn’t too easy to find.

  DURING THE FIRST TWO DECADES after the Second World War, by far the greater proportion of Africans who arrived in London were from Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Ghana. Like Teddy Osei, who came to study music and drama in 1961, on a scholarship from the Ghanaian government, they were here to attend university, with engineering, medicine and accountancy as the most popular subjects. That meant their time in the capital was far more insular than that of their West Indian counterparts. Most were middle- or upper-class, and didn’t need to work. They stayed in college halls of residence or student digs, so they had much less social interplay with Londoners or other black immigrants. University courses lasted for a fixed, relatively brief period, which further reduced any imperative to engage with London. The usual plan was to graduate and find a good job back home, preferably with a government, not to settle down in London. On top of that, students who failed their degrees were often not allowed to return home; the prospect of enduring another London winter served to keep the young men and women focussed on their studies.

  Osibisa show off their interesting-looking instrument. Left to right: Mac Tontoh, Dikoto Mandengue, Sol Amarfio, Kofi Ayivor, Teddy Osei.

  The wave of independences in anglophone West Africa during that time – Ghana 1957; Nigeria 1960; Sierra Leone 1961 – ensured that nationalistic spirit was running high among young people. Their new self-governed homelands represented every opportunity, African opportunity, and made the desire to go back as graduates, and contribute to the building of the nation, paramount. This point was much truer among West Africans than West Indians in London; while the same pride existed among the Caribbean diaspora, many were well aware that independence had only been granted because there was precious little of anything left on their islands, least of all opportunity.

  Independence also played a huge part in the musica
l development of each country, encouraging, as with ska in Jamaica, obviously African expression. Thus highlife, which originated in Ghana at the start of the twentieth century but had been all but ignored by the establishment, came to the fore when musicians began to turn away from western music, and it took hold across Nigeria and Sierra Leone as well.

  The social lives of African students in London tended to revolve around what was going on in their universities. Most London colleges had groups like the Ghanaian Student Union or the Nigerian Society, usually backed by the relevant High Commission, to deal with welfare issues, maintain contact with home and organise get-togethers. Social events were strictly African in style, recreating as much back-home atmosphere as possible. As music took on a central role in the psyche of each newly independent nation, it became a major part of African life in London. A coterie of musicians who could play highlife – mixed in with a bit of palm wine or juju, depending on whichever union booked them – came together to service this lucrative circuit. There was a certain irony here, because as the musicians established themselves in London, their music evolved in subtle ways. As a result, what audiences celebrated as the genuine article was not really so, but they took to it keenly anyway, because, perhaps subconsciously, it better reflected their new-found sophistication as part of their essential African-ness.

  Teddy’s first band, Cat’s Paw, formed part of this reassuringly familiar entertainment:

  ‘By the early 1960s, there was enough going on around the universities to mean there was a big highlife scene in London. In the summertime it would move to the town halls – St Pancras Town Hall, Seymour Hall, Porchester Hall, Battersea Town Hall – because many students would stay in on London during the break. African students from other parts of the country would come to London for the summer vacation, too, so it would really build up. Every Saturday, there would be a Ghanaian community dance or Nigerian or Sierra Leone … it was a big scene. And it was all highlife, because all of West Africa was highlife – the only part that wasn’t playing highlife was the francophone areas, they were playing a type of music with the cha cha cha. All the English-speaking regions were playing highlife, the only difference was the dialect of the lyrics, which is their own. Nigerians have juju music as well, like Sierra Leone has maringa or palm wine, but they are all very close to highlife, and Ghanaian highlife was the most popular across the whole region.

  ‘It was all live bands on that scene, playing versions of the hits from back home. There were a lot of Nigerian bands, Fela was living and playing music in London at the time, I can’t remember most of the groups’ names because many of them didn’t have names! They weren’t professionals, but they would get themselves together for the highlife gigs in the summertime – there was a very good band called Black Star, from Ghana, who were big, they were amateur. There were more professional bands as time went on, because musicians were realising they could make a living from this and the recording scene that started up. I had jobs in hotels, cleaning or washing dishes, or in the Post Office, during the breaks, but I went to the Ghanaian embassy here and talked to them, and they supplied some equipment for us to entertain students. So, come the summertime, we all get something to do and everybody is very happy.

  Nigerian Ambrose Campbell, a mainstay of Soho’s 1950s jazz community, was among the first to mix African and Caribbean players and styles.

  ‘Because the dances were organised by different unions, there would be more Ghanaians at a Ghanaian Union dance and more Nigerians at a Nigerian Union dance, but enough people go to each other’s dances to make it a joyous muddle!’

  One interesting consequence of this collegiate mash-up was that because stylistic adjustments were aimed at other Africans rather than a potential wider audience, they could develop instinctively without being subject to the whims of the mainstream. The scene was big enough to support a large and perpetually shifting number of musicians, so there was considerable creative growth in London. But it was pretty much an exclusively live phenomenon, and in order to achieve longevity it needed someone to get it down on wax. Not surprisingly, that someone was Emil Shallit.

  FROM THE EARLY 1950s ONWARDS, a large number of African musicians were operating in London. Unlike their West Indian counterparts, they tended to stay for relatively short periods, and to travel to and from their home countries far more frequently. They played on jazz, calypso and big-band sessions, indulging in all sorts of cultural intercourse as well as coming together as solely African bands to service the university dances and national association functions, where they made the most money. They started recording in their own right during the 1950s, when Emil Shallit – already introduced in chapter one of this book, as the King of Calypso – shifted his focus to transform Melodisc into the hub around which London’s African recording industry revolved.

  As Melodisc had already shipped a great deal of London-recorded calypso to West Africa, Shallit knew how the region’s wholesale and retail business worked. Similarly, in London, he knew how to sell records through an off-grid network of black-owned shops and small businesses, and was aware that the capital’s immigrant market contained many different demands. He had also seen tastes in anglophone West Africa shift away from European music as it geared up for independence, and figured that new music would be in demand. Above all, he had witnessed the modern, more pannational kind of African music bubbling up in London, and noticed that people seemed to love it.

  Although EMI and Decca dabbled in African music, it was recorded in Africa, primarily for African consumption. The small proportion that received a UK release didn’t accurately reflect the scene that was establishing itself in London. Shallit, however, with his keen sense of what was happening around him, was willing to commit to the brand of highlife being played in London. Through his dealings in calypso and jazz, he had the hook-ups to recruit the right players, and the experience to get the best out of them in the studio. For a while, too, he had the field to himself.

  Ambrose Campbell and the West African Rhythm Brothers, the core of the Melodisc catalogue, cut the largest number of singles and at least one album, going from the ten-inch 78-rpm era of the early 1950s until late in the next decade. Most of Campbell’s tunes were easy-going highlife, given Melodisc’s trademark jazz swing with piano, clarinet and brass. As when the company started out with calypso, Denis Preston was involved, and events in the studio reflected was going on live. Highlife, juju, palm wine, merengue, calypso and jazz all got mixed together, and so too did the personnel. Trinidadians Rupert Nurse and Russ Henderson often sat in on African sessions. Sierra Leonean Bliff Radie Byne recorded for the label backed by Ivan Chin & His Rhythm Sextet, a Jamaican mento group who appeared in the Melodisc catalogue in their own right as the Ivan Chin Calypso Sextet (calypso being much more saleable than mento). Byne’s fellow-countryman Ali Ganda cut highlife for the label, but mixed so much Trinidadian style into it that he became a bona fide calypsonian. Calling himself Lord Ganda, he cut a series of righteously multi-national highlife/calypso mash-ups, including “Freedom”, “Freedom Sierra Leone”, “Ghana Forward Forever” and “The Queen Visits Nigeria”.

  The Melodisc roster also included London-based acts like Nigerian Union Rhythm Group, fronted by Brewster Hughes; Lonely Lamptey & the People’s Highlife Band, who played highlife with a big-band swing; and Ebo Taylor’s Black Star Highlife Band, who were sponsored by the Ghana High Commission. Ginger Johnson & His Afro Band, the predecessors of the African Messengers, gave “Won’t You Cha Cha?” a highlife feel for the label, and the master drummer went on to record three albums of jazz-ified highlife for Shallit.

  Later, Melodisc hoovered up practically every African act in London, as well as a few that were put together specifically for the session: Billy Sholanke; Tunji Sowandei; Victor Coker & His All Stars; Yesu Fu Adeyeno & His Group; King Jimmy; Enoch & Christy Mensah; Banna Kanukeh; Ad Kinle’s Highlife Beats; Suberu Oni; and the marvellously named Adam’s African Skyrockets. The mid-1960s
electric guitar’n’brass-powered outfit Flash Domincii & The Supersonics was especially interesting – not only did they cut a set of festive songs under the title Christmas Highlife Music, but their numbers included both Teddy Osei and future Assagai member Fred Coker.

  Arguably even more significant was Melodisc catalogue number 1532, a 1959 single entitled “Agigana”. The clue lies in the B-side, “Fela’s Special”; these were the first recordings by the man then known as Fela Ransome Kuti. Resident in London between 1958 and 1963, after his family sent him over to go to medical school – his two brothers are doctors – Fela switched to Trinity College of Music in Greenwich, and played a mix of highlife and jazz in the capital’s clubs at night. The nucleus of the band that became Africa ‘70 came together in London at this time, under the name Koola Lobitos.

  To promote the music in Africa, Shallit compiled two sampler albums, somewhat audaciously titled Authentic African Highlife Music Volumes 1 & 2. Shallit was spot-on as regards the appeal of London highlife in Africa, where the music rode in on the back of his calypso, setting itself up as ‘the most modern African music’ – precisely the right soundtrack for the most modern Africans. As the reputation of the label grew, some of the biggest names in highlife and juju, including Tunde Western Nightingale, Ayinde Bakare & His Meranda Orchestra and the Rans Boi Ghana Highlife Band (who also worked as the Rans Boi African Highlife Band), either came to London specifically to record, or would incorporate studio dates for Melodisc into European tours. Shallit also pushed the records hard in continental Europe, where Melodisc became the first company to sell African music.