Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  Traditionalists complained that the music was being de-Africanised by the incorporation of precisely the modern instruments they’d been working to get rid of, and that the distinct regional styles were being mongrelised. Mostly, though, the London sounds were welcomed, on the grounds that the new music was making colonial (western) instruments sound African, and thus claiming them for Africans.

  That London played such a crucial role in the development of the music was thanks largely to the sheer diversity of its black musicians. Proficient in Latin, jazz and calypso, they made it possible for different styles and approaches to rub against each other in a way that could not have happened anywhere else. African bands flocked to London studios to take advantage of Caribbean session players, arrangers and producers, or just to learn new licks. Thus Ghanaian highlife superstar ET Mensah spent three months in London by himself, in 1955, just soaking up what was going on. His band back home, the Tempos, were huge with their danceable swing-influenced highlife, and he came over to study the arrangements of Edmundo Ros and Lord Kitchener. He was so impressed by the Paramount Ballroom that on his return to Accra he renamed his own nightclub the Paramount. Similarly, drummer and percussionist Kofi Ghanaba, then known as Guy Warren, moved to London early in the 1950s, where he presented jazz, African music and calypso on the BBC. After he took home Latin/Caribbean percussion instruments – maracas, claves, congas, guiro – as gifts for other musicians in Ghana, they became almost regulation in highlife rhythm sections throughout West Africa.

  For the plethora of West Indian-owned/oriented independent record labels that sprang up in Melodisc’s slipstream during the 1960s, there was cash to be made from recording highlife. Planetone in Kilburn – probably London’s first black-owned record label – Carnival, Giant Records, Masquerade, Pama and Stamford Hill’s R&B Records were all putting out African sides. This made good sense, as they were already plugged into the small-shop circuit, and there was considerable crossover in black clubs. London highlife bands drew sizeable crowds in West Indian-owned venues like Count Suckle’s Q Club in Paddington, the Four Aces in Dalston, and the Apollo Club in Willesden.

  However, all that served to keep the scene insular, whereas Teddy’s longstanding dream was for the music to sound African but still reach the mainstream. By the end of the 1960s, when he was looking for record industry support, the company best placed to help, Melodisc, was running its operation down, and Shallit himself spending more and more of his time in France. As late as 1969, Ambrose Campbell cut a reggae-ish cover of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”, but after that there wasn’t a great deal of anything, let alone highlife, on the label.

  On the other hand, though, a new kind of commerce-meets-counter-culture spirit within the music business, first apparent during the 1960s – and also visible in the links between modern jazz and prog rock described in the previous chapter – was becoming increasingly influential in life in general. The post-hippie determination to be open-minded allowed Teddy and his peers to write a vital chapter in the organic evolution of London’s black music, which was probably as much social as it was musical.

  This important aspect had been developing alongside the lower-profile highlife scene for about ten years before Osibisa ever set foot in a studio, and came out of the same Soho clubs that used to put on jazz. To come to grips with it, it’s necessary to go back to before that group even came to London.

  Ska legend Prince Buster playing Ambrose Campbell’s drums – the two musicians were good friends and frequent collaborators on Melodisc/Blue Beat sessions.

  THE START OF THE 1960s saw a sizeable cultural shift in the UK. The post-war generation was looking for its own way of doing things, and as mod emerged out of beatnik, young English men and women found a different soundtrack in the largely Jamaican-controlled black scene that was moving into the West End clubs. With jazz giving up ground, West Indians, American servicemen and some, if not all that many, Africans were grooving to the far more mainstream-friendly American R&B and the emerging Jamaican ska. Accessible via imported records and newly formed groups, the scene quickly attracted a white following in clubs like Le Discotheque, the Flamingo, Sylibles, the Bag O’ Nails, Le Duce, Whisky-A-Go-Go, the Scene and the Marquee.

  This was a lively, dance-oriented crowd, stylistically on the cutting edge and eager to shake off the spectre of their parents’ wartime austerity – and just as keen not to go home until the sun came up. Most London mods prided themselves on their racial acceptance, which was another way to distance themselves from their often bigoted parents. Seeking out West Indian clubs for music and dancing, they created the first widespread movement to engage with immigrants on a straightforward level. For ska to share the turntables with R&B was an entirely natural state of affairs – the two styles are first cousins – and many clubs were run by Jamaicans who had operated sound systems in 1950s’ Kingston, where the genres happily coexisted.

  Once again, Emil Shallit was at the hub of ska in London, among the first to anticipate the potential impact of this new Jamaican music. In 1960, he launched the Melodisc subsidiary label Blue Beat, dedicated to the music and aimed specifically at the young white R&B crowd. He made regular trips to Jamaica to do licensing deals with producers, and with records by the likes of Prince Buster, Derrick Morgan and Laurel Aitken, he cornered yet another market. When Shallit began recording ska in London, he recruited many of the same West Indian and African players that he’d used for calypso and highlife, complemented with local R&B musicians. Prince Buster, for instance, who recorded regularly for Blue Beat in London, taught his good friend Georgie Fame the rudiments of ska. Often alongside Blue Flames’ saxophonist Mick Eve, the organist can be heard on many of the label’s tracks. Buster, whose original name is Cecil Campbell, got to know his Nigerian namesake Ambrose Campbell in those same studios. Ambrose sat in on a few of his sessions, and taught the Prince to play the African talking drum – the conga drums the lamé-jacketed Buster is playing in that famous photograph (on p.141) were borrowed from Ambrose Campbell.

  Although ska had a dedicated following that extended beyond the Caribbean community, the big record companies got behind R&B instead, and by the middle of the decade it had prevailed. As mod died out, to be replaced by all things flowery, homegrown blues started to take over London’s music scene, and in doing so introduced Africans as Africans to the mainstream. In 1964, the Fourth National Jazz and Blues Festival, held over three days in Richmond, provided a vivid early illustration. Not only did blues supplant jazz in the prestigious evening slots, but these were British blues and R&B acts. In front of a crowd of around 30,000, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds – at that point, Eric Clapton was in the group, and Jimmy Page was still in the audience – Long John Baldry and Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames had equal billing to Acker Bilk, Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes. Of as much significance in our story, Ghanaian drummer and percussionist Nii Moi ‘Speedy’ Acquaye was also taking part, as a key member of the Blue Flames.

  Speedy Acquaye (centre) with Georgie Fame (left) & the Blue Flames. Any apparent sartorial discord went down very well with the band’s mod audience.

  The single most vital connection between London highlife and jazz on the one hand, and the rock world that gave Osibisa their platform on the other, Speedy first arrived in London in the mid-1940s. After initially performing as a fire-eater, a dancer and in panto, he decided to specialise in music during the 1950s. Joining the jazz and dance band scene, he played percussion with the likes of Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott and Kenny Graham, and was a featured drummer in Melodisc’s highlife recording posse. A familiar, usually smiling face in the black clubs of Soho, he ran into Lancashire-born R&B singer and pianist Georgie Fame in the early 1960s, in the Roaring Twenties in Carnaby Street. The two became instant friends. Fame, forever fascinated by different musical styles, had just bought a Hammond organ after hearing Booker T.’s “Green Onions”. He brought Speedy’s Ghanaian drumming and percussion into his band a couple of months later.<
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  This was a bold move, as the Blue Flames, who at various points included guitarist John McLaughlin and drummer Phil Seaman, had already developed a trademark sound as one of England’s finest R&B outfits. Then there were the sartorial considerations. Mods took clothes very seriously, and expected their bands to dress the part; while the Blue Flames obliged with stylish matching suits or cardigans, Speedy would take to the stage in traditional Ghanaian dress. In the event, the audience lived up to their open-minded reputation, embracing the new rhythms along with Speedy’s energetic, often unpredictable performance style. His drumming remained integral to the Blue Flames for almost five years, during which time Speedy was responsible for introducing Georgie Fame to the Melodisc operation.

  Later still, Speedy gigged regularly with, among others, Alexis Korner, Graham Bond and Cyril Davies. This may not have done a great deal to develop African music in a uniquely London way, but it brought him to the attention of younger English R&B musicians like Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Mick Jagger, Denny Laine, Eric Burdon, Peter Green … mostly former mods, all Soho club regulars. The evolution of their music from blues to rock coincided with a hippie-friendly urge to explore the music of other cultures as a way to enhance their own musical ideas. The studiously musical rock and folk bands used alternative rhythmic structures and intricate patterns to open up new tonal and tempo possibilities, and add an extra dimension to their compositions. The Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin all flirted with Indian classical music – which had the bonus of built-in spirituality – while African rhythms proved popular in the London environment. Speedy became something of a ‘go-to guy’, working with Rod Stewart, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Winwood, John Martyn, the Faces, the Animals and the Small Faces. He became a key member of Ginger Baker’s Air Force, and in 1979 was in Paul McCartney’s Rockestra, as featured on Wings’ Back To The Egg.

  Speedy was not the only African musician to join the new rock party. Pyrotechnic Ghanaian keyboard maestro Kiki Gyan, who came to London in 1972 to join Osibisa, became a Traffic regular. Nigerian drummer Remi Kabaka played with Jim Capaldi, Paul McCartney, John Martyn, Ginger Baker, Paul Simon and Steve Winwood – these days his son, also called Remi, provides the voice for the Gorillaz drummer Russel Hobbs. Fellow Nigerian Rebop Kwaku Baah gigged with Eric Clapton and became the longest-standing non-founding member of Traffic, before getting in on the beginnings of Krautrock, working with Can from 1977 to 1979. Before returning to Nigeria to form his own groups, Gasper Lawal was resident in London where he featured with the Rolling Stones, Ginger Baker’s Air Force, Viv Stanshall, and Stevie Winwood, as well as Clancy, one of London’s original 1970s’ ‘pub rock’ bands.

  A couple of members of London’s rock aristocracy were so taken with West African sounds that they formed groups around them. In 1972, former Small Face Ronnie Lane produced the eponymous album by Akido, a multi-national Afro-funk outfit of which Speedy Acquaye was the rhythmic force, while a year later Steve Winwood formed the Third World, a trio of himself, Remi Kabaka and Ghanaian Abdul Lasisi Amao. They made one album, Aiye-Keta, of intricate Kabaka-written, Winwood-produced Afro-rock. Kabaka and Amao had first met in Ginger Baker’s Air Force, and both went on to play in Osibisa.

  One high-profile link between Africa and the new rock gods dated back to the Soho jazz world, in the shape of Nigerian drummer Ginger Johnson, who came to London in the 1950s. A regular Edmundo Ros and Harry Parry sideman, he later formed his own Afro/Cuban jazz group, the African Messengers, who recorded extensively for Melodisc, and were on the bill for that 1964 Richmond festival. By the mid-1960s, he was rated London’s foremost Afro/Latin percussionist, and his flexible-membership troupe, Ginger Johnson’s African Drummers, was in huge demand from rock acts. He’d frequently pop up on stage at underground clubs like UFO on Tottenham Court Road, Middle Earth in Covent Garden, or Chalk Farm’s Roundhouse, bringing up to two dozen drummers along to augment whatever happening was already, er, happening. Johnson’s group was chosen, apparently by Mick Jagger himself, to be part of the Stones’ massive free concert in Hyde Park in 1969, where their contribution to “Sympathy For The Devil” took the tune into a new dimension. Among Johnson’s troupe that day was another Nigerian drummer, Jimmy Scott-Emuakpor. He had been on the Soho jazz and R&B scenes ever since the 1950s, usually in full African dress or with a leopardskin thrown casually over western clothes, topped by ever-present, very dark glasses. Jimmy became good friends with Paul McCartney; his constantly used catchphrase ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ (‘such is life’ or ‘life goes on’ in Yoruba) formed the basis for the Beatles song of the same name.

  Jimmy Scott-Emuakpor’s favourite expression was ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, life goes on’, and he used to hang out with Paul McCartney in the Soho clubs. Do the maths.

  Even if all this activity seemed more like a fad than anything likely to develop African music in the capital, it introduced African sounds and costumes to the rock world, and thus paved the way for Osibisa.

  BY THE TIME THE STONES played Hyde Park, the 1960s were pretty much over culturally as well as chronologically. A new generation of blue-eyed soul fans had emerged from the post-mod R&B fans and the upmarket hippies. The influential West End clubs were the Speakeasy in Margaret Street, just north of Oxford Circus; the Bag O’ Nails in Kingly Street; Scotch of St James in Mason’s Yard just below Piccadilly; and the upstairs room at Ronnie Scott’s. The soundtrack was American soul on the cusp of funk, and the crowds were musicians, English scenesters and black Americans from the suburban air force bases. A live band would still be part of the night’s entertainment, and because they were soul clubs that would mean a black band. Ghanaian Wala Danga, future founder of the legendary Limpopo Club, was then a promoter, producer, manager and sound engineer. He laughs heartily as he remembers those days:

  ‘Black musicians in London had to learn many styles, because with promoters and club owners back then there was this thing about colour: it didn’t matter where you were from, all they saw was you were black, therefore you must be authentic. They didn’t really care about authentic what! Usually they wanted to make out they had an American soul band on, so a group of musicians who could be from different African countries and the West Indies would play soul. Or they’d want a band from Ghana so the same musicians would be that. Once, I remember, when a group turned up with a couple of white session musicians the promoter, who was white, was not happy. He was like, “I don’t care who you bring, whether they are American or African or West Indian, as long as they are black! Then I’m happy, but don’t bring me these guys, ‘cos then my audience don’t think it’s authentic!” He was right, too, because as a promoter one time I was fielding a band that had genuinely come from Senegal, and they had a white guy playing guitar. The audience – the majority of which were white – were complaining! They were shouting “What’s he doing here? We came to see a black band!” Actually I don’t think this has changed much today.

  ‘The good thing about it was, it threw different musicians of different styles together. After all, if you’ve got a gig, you’ve got a gig … you can always pick up the new style. You needed somebody else for a gig, so you ask around, “Who’s good at playing highlife?” OK, this guy is. Whether he was African or not, it don’t matter, that he was good was the only thing that counts. And because people pooled in that way in a small scene like London, they are going to bring different things to the band and influence it. If you have a guy who is an expert in something else, but he’s playing highlife he might say “OK, what if I do a bit of bass and slam it a bit like this?” and the others would go “Yeah, yeah, that sound good, OK, let’s do it.” So the music was starting to change to suit the styles that were going into it at the time, and often the audiences like that.’

  Little had changed from Russ Henderson’s days twenty years previously, and this serves as an accurate description of Osibisa’s evolution, as Teddy explains:

  ‘Before Osibisa, when I had the
band Cat’s Paw, we played in clubs like the Q Club and the Speakeasy, we had to play soul. This was before reggae came in big, because after that if they came to book Osibisa they’d think we were a reggae band because we were black! But back then, like many other soul bands, we’d play James Brown, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, all cover versions, but we’d put in bits of our own highlife, to make us stand out from the other bands. When we play it the people love it, not because they knew anything about what it was, just because they thought “At last, here was a different black band.” As we got into it, we’d play a few of the covers that people knew, but we’d put a different rhythm behind it, make it sound highlife.

  Ginger Johnson – fourth from left with drum and stick – and his African Drummers, including Jimmy Scott-Emuakpor, backed the Stones at their 1969 Hyde Park gig.

  ‘When we became Osibisa [1969] we started rehearsing in this basement in Finsbury Park, and that’s when the Caribbean musicians came to check us out. Wendell Richardson, guitar, Spartacus on bass and Robert Bailey on keyboards; one after the other, they all got interested. We did a single called “Black Ant”, which we took to the record companies, but although there had been so many African musicians with the rock groups, nobody was ready for an African band. So we carried on in the clubs where we built up a cult following because we were different – we even looked different, with African clothes and Spartacus, I think, was the first person with braided hair [dreadlocks]. Anywhere we could play it was all full up.

  ‘It’s through that we got a management from Bronze [Manfred Mann, Colosseum, Marianne Faithfull, Uriah Heep, Bonzo Dog Band], after Gerry and Lillian Bron saw us play in a club in north London. We picked up a good rapport with the press – Richard Williams of Melody Maker was very keen – and although we had tried the London record companies, our management invited Mike Maitland, the boss of MCA America to come and see us play at the London School of Economics. He came in there, the whole place was jamming, you know, the students jumping up. We didn’t even know he was there, then after the show he came to the dressing room and the first thing he said to us was “I will sign you up, worldwide”. That’s when all our efforts became fruitful.’