Producer Tony Visconti, of Badfinger, David Bowie and T-Rex fame, was so taken with the group after seeing a Ronnie Scott’s show that he agreed to produce their first album. He took them into the studio, where they played their set live, and he caught it in one take. Teddy maintains:
‘We knew what we were doing. We had developed that sound for nearly a year, we were already playing the set we were going to record … you know, “Ikobea”, “The Dawn”, “Music For Gong Gong” and all that. We wanted the same excitement of the live show on the record, and Tony Visconti understood. Also, because we were well known in the clubs and the colleges, when the album came out people already knew the songs. That’s why it was a big hit.’
Because MCA marketed the band as they would any rock act – in the colleges – Osibisa reintroduced themselves to their original audience, African students, albeit this time via the mainstream entertainments rather than particular societies. That helped them to build on their London club following, which, as Teddy tells, was almost exclusively English:
‘As Osibisa, we didn’t start with a black following at all. We, as musicians, had all played the town halls and African student dances, but because of where Osibisa were playing, the West End clubs at the end of the sixties, it was mainly all-white audiences. You’d only get one or two black people … Americans. Remember, at that time it was very difficult to go out in the night in central London, especially for Africans. They didn’t have the money for those clubs, and the vibes weren’t right. Many didn’t feel it was welcoming for them.
‘Once our management started to get us colleges and universities, we reconnected with our African audience. At first our own people knew there was an African-oriented band playing that circuit, but they didn’t come out right away because we weren’t playing what they considered to be a typical African sound. Our following among them wasn’t there until they saw us on Top of the Pops wearing our African clothes, and heard that what we were playing was African, but could fit into this country. That’s when we started to get Africans in the audience at the universities, they plugged into it, as they’d come to a show and say ‘Oh yes, we’ve got our own music now.’
‘Everybody was proud, not only Africans but West Indians as well. At that time the West Indians and the Africans weren’t together, they didn’t get along. There was so much differences, so much … It wasn’t like ten or twenty years before, it seemed we were no longer black people together. Our message was there were no differences, especially in an environment like London. We really hammered it home that we were all one people.’
This last point is important. Teddy is addressing the often-confusing process of racial integration that was going on in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A great deal had changed within Britain’s immigrant communities during the twenty or so years since the Windrush, to produce a frustrating period of transition between the first and second generations. The arrivals of the 1940s and 1950s had accepted they weren’t going home, but, for the most part, continued to feel like immigrants, and behaved as such, socialising among themselves with minimum engagement with Londoners at large. That said, they were also very aware of who they were, and how much they had in common with other black arrivals. Their children, on the other hand, were far more integrated, yet in searching for their identity they often identified with lands that many of them had never seen, in much more vociferous ways than their parents.
Hostility wasn’t simply contrived between young West Indians and Africans. In much the same way, children of Jamaicans would be scathing about the ‘small islander’ children of Barbadians or Kittitians, or a guy with Trinidadian parents might sneer at a second-generation St Lucian as a ‘chicken waver’. Osibisa the album, though, went a fair way towards papering over cracks. It was so proudly black it was difficult for anybody to find fault; it was funky enough to sit alongside Kool & The Gang or the J.B.’s; and the group mixed Africans and West Indians, one of whom had dreadlocks. What wasn’t to like? Also, most importantly, it was a cultural expression created in the UK, for the UK, which made it into the mainstream.
At this point, with the exception of Eddy Grant’s Kentish Town soul band the Equals, the only black music that was having any impact on the pop mainstream came from Motown, Memphis or Kingston, Jamaica. (London funksters the Foundations’ hits sounded so Motown-y they might as well have been from over there.) By the time Osibisa formed, the mainstream British entertainment industry had taken several steps backwards from the 1950s in its approach to race relations. The group’s first album was released into a cultural environment best described as institutionally hostile. With the exception of Kenny Lynch, Charlie Williams, Derek Griffiths and Spring – played by a teenage Brinsley Forde, five years before Aswad, on kids’ drama Here Come The Double Deckers – the number of non-Caucasian British faces on television, other than TOTP, was somewhere south of negligible. Trevor McDonald and Lenny Henry didn’t hit the screens until the mid-seventies.
Far worse, though, was the casual, often quite vicious racism permeating TV comedy, where ‘darkie’, ‘paki’ and ‘paddy’ jokes were thrown around with abandon. In 1969, the same time as Osibisa were coming together, ITV was airing a sitcom called Curry And Chips, written by Johnny Speight, which made the trademark racial abuse of his ‘Till Death Us Do Part seem like Noel Coward. The lead character, known as Paki Paddy, was mixed-race Irish and Pakistani, and played by blacked-up white English comedian Spike Milligan sporting a ludicrous Indian accent. Kenny Lynch was a regular cast member. Even if, as always, justifications were issued as to why such a clearly odious state of affairs was being promoted, that was the tip of a light entertainment iceberg that gave the country at large the licence to a) assume that people who didn’t look like them must be foreign; b) that they had little value beyond being laughed at; and c) that it was funny to be rude about them.
Under such circumstances, wanting to sound and look African yet still take that music out of its own environment was a big deal. Osibisa was a massive worldwide hit, yet relevant enough to its environment for tracks to find their way into practically every aspect of young black London’s clubs and dances. It also opened a few ears, and records like Fela’s London Scene and Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa were better received because of it. Then, almost as quickly as they had seemed to appear, Osibisa all but vanished, leaving London’s African music to take another couple of turns.
‘OSIBISA WERE QUITE OUTSTANDING as a band, and they had that edge of rock about them with the guitars – they were like Afro-rock instead of Afro-funk. The executives of the London record companies were more familiar with rock, so there was something they loved about that sound.’
Wala Danga is explaining what put Osibisa ahead of the pack when it came to getting major label recognition. As they were signed by MCA International rather than the company’s UK arm, the album was marketed all over the world to great effect. It was the first African hit in the US mainstream; they gained strong followings in continental Europe, Australia and Japan; and in West Africa they became superstars, even megastars in Teddy’s native Ghana. To consolidate the global success of Osibisa and their swift follow-up album Woyaya, however, the group pretty much abandoned Britain for a couple of years. Surprisingly, no other African groups were thrust into that gap, as would have been normal record-industry behaviour. Wala has an idea why that never happened:
‘Because this thing was so unlike what the record companies had been developing or looking for, it took a while for them to get on board and to realise the potential of it. Then by the time they did, they couldn’t find the sort of groups they were looking for. There were a lot of bands in London playing Afro-funk, but they didn’t want funk – they used to say if they wanted funk they would ‘find the real people to play funk’ and all they could think about was James Brown, not these guys making music in London clubs.
‘Really, Osibisa were unique. Although a lot of bands used to talk about trying to do Afro-rock, only Assagai came
close to it. Them and a London Nigerian group called Ojah which was led by a guy called, I think, Ian St Louis.’
To this day, Assagai remain the best known of the bands that followed in Osibisa’s slipstream. It’s not hard to see why. As the group was a side project of three members of the Blue Notes/Brotherhood Of Breath axis – Dudu Pukwana, Louis Moholo-Moholo and Mongezi Feza, supplemented by London Nigerians Fred Coker and Bizo Muggikana – they had strong prog-rock connections. They were signed to Vertigo Records, Philips’s left-field rock subsidiary and home to Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, Gentle Giant and Jade Warrior. The latter group almost adopted the Africans, writing songs for them and guesting on their two albums Assagai and Zimbabwe. Kwela-ish Afro-jazz and soul, with a healthy dose of prog-rock twiddling, both sets did very well, and the Osibisa-style Roger Dean sleeve art did Zimbabwe no harm at all in its chosen market. The London African musicians who joined Assagai on the first album included Terri Quaye, the (much) older half-sister of electronic reggae star Finley Quaye, who has also worked with Osibisa in his time.
Another reason why Osibisa’s absence left such a vacuum was that the scene was so informal. Musicians approached live work much like sessioneering; key players would organise bands on behalf of club owners or promoters on an ad hoc basis. As in the jazz days, if you went to the same circuit of clubs at all frequently, you’d see the same players in all manner of permutations. While this provided reasonable job opportunities, Wala believes it held things back. No matter how good these amalgamations might be, there was nothing for audiences or record companies to latch on to:
‘These guys were the best bands under those circumstances, because they knew how to get people dancing, but most of the time nobody knew their names. So many of these musicians were concentrating on just playing music, the image thing was coming second. They just didn’t bother with “What shall we call ourselves?” and “Why should we call ourselves that?” And these were big bands on that circuit, who have been playing together for ages. I remember asking a band I had booked “What is your name?” They said “Oh, we never thought about that. What shall we call ourselves?”, and I think they gave themselves a name just for that night.
‘That was very much the London scene, so much that even now it’s not changed much. It was not good for development, because it was the ones that worked as groups – proper, regular groups – that by and large would be the most successful, because it meant that the sounds never changed that much. True, if you keep putting different guys together they will bring different things and experiment more, but it has to be able to settle. If there was a unit and the people were working together to change the sounds, there would have been more progress. Also, if they stayed together for a bit longer as a group, the professionalism would even get higher – in terms of timekeeping and all of that …
‘It meant they could build up a following too, and promoters could advertise a particular group. That’s what would get record companies interested, the record companies weren’t going to try and track down musicians and then put them together and wait for them to call themselves something. Osibisa already had all of that. They even had their songs, and they made it very easy for the record company.’
Roger Dean created Osibisa’s iconic flying elephant before he did any graphics for Yes.
Such bands largely followed the Osibisa model by mixing London Africans with London West Indians. That the Africans were usually in the majority had a lot to with the centrality of sound systems to Jamaican/Caribbean London culture, as opposed to the much stronger live-music tradition among Africans. Pretty much everything else was changing, though. As the 1970s got underway, clubs were evolving away from the rock/R&B crowd into strictly soul, pushing bands away from African-isms laced with rock-isms, and towards more straightforward funk. In the same way, as described in the next chapter, a soul scene was blowing up quite spectacularly in West Africa, and that in turn hastened the decline of the university high-life dances as hip young students wanted to give up the funk. The more traditional music had evolved into a looser circuit of club nights and one-off dances at places like Billy’s in Meard Street, the Country Club in Belsize Park, and the Winchester Road Community Centre in Swiss Cottage.
Being more about the desire of promoters to attract the largest regular clientele than about particular national organisations hiring venues, this scene resulted in a greater blending and cross-fertilisation of music from all over West Africa and from London. What’s more, the fact that events would mix live bands with records, or even be deejay-only, made it much easier to mix the music up; deejays would, within the context, play whatever would move the crowd. By this time, there was an audience for this very modern presentation of traditional music, as a generation of young Africans was growing up in London who presented themselves to the outside world as African rather than of a particular nation.
AWAY FROM THE CLUBS, an ad hoc network of African music outlets, whose approach to stock control veered between quirky and downright anarchic, was fuelling this scene. This had its roots in Emil Shallit’s distribution channels, which serviced as many black-owned hairdressers, grocers and cafes with calypso, ska and highlife as they did actual record shops; Shallit had quite rightly realised that black people across the board tended to patronise the same establishments. By now, though, records were being made in West Africa and brought into London, along with foodstuffs, cosmetics and bolts of Kente cloth, by the more aware African importers.
The prime movers in this area were the Oti brothers, based in their large supermarket in Balham, who would import food from all over West Africa for wholesale to shops across London, and simply added records to the operation. According to Wala, who bought his first-ever Fela record there, Oti’s was for a while the only place to find a good selection of African music. It became something of a Saturday pilgrimage for Africans from all over London, who came down to sort through crates of records stacked next to boxes of yams. Spotting the opportunity for some vertical expansion, the brothers set up a licensing operation and, briefly, a record label.
At much the same time, another general-goods emporium, Stern’s Electrical Supplies on Tottenham Court Road, established a reputation in this market. Being close to several universities, it did very good business among African students who needed things fixed and bought valves, electrical parts, small appliances and other household items. Staff would often accept records brought from home instead of cash for repair work. The resultant boxes of random singles became so popular with browsing students that the shop introduced a dedicated record counter at the back, and began to order in from the Oti brothers. In similarly opportunistic fashion, it also stocked a sizeable selection of gaudy but inexpensive lingerie, which often caused casual customers to raise an eyebrow, but was simply a response to demand from the thriving red-light district in Fitzrovia to the west.
In its new incarnation, Stern’s came to play a crucial role in London’s African music scene. Music sales – African music sales – had become the largest part of the business, and when old Mr Stern sold up at the end of the 1970s, the new owners concentrated on that side of things and kept the name. During the next twenty years, Stern’s became Europe’s largest distributor of African records, with a truly massive mail-order department, and even had its own label. The retail operation remained the key, however, especially after they expanded into bigger, dedicated record-shop premises in nearby Whitfield Street.
Stern’s was as much a social club as a shop. Every Friday, African music aficionados of every stripe – musicians, writers, journalists, deejays, punters and the merely curious – would gather to swap information about clubs, sessions, tunes or just life in general. With so little media space given over to African music, this was where you had to go to find out about the scene, which while simmering nicely was doing so entirely under the radar. All manner of different demographics would happily rub shoulders. The new improved Stern’s still bought records over the counter, so a student might s
tagger in with a huge suitcase of records he’d lugged over from Nigeria, in the hope of making a few quid. Or an ambassadorial limo might pull up, and its occupant step out to buy some sounds and stay on to enjoy the banter. Or a deejay might be twitchily waiting for a box of brand-new tunes to arrive. Or a doctor might just pop in to buy an album as a birthday present for his dad.
Then there was downstairs at Stern’s. If the street level was the club, the basement was the VIP Room. Technically a stock room/office space, it held a sound system, television and sofas, and was usually occupied by musicians, both resident and visiting and their entourages – not that you’d necessarily be able to recognize them through the smoke. The local off licences and pubs always did very well out of Stern’s Music on a Friday afternoon.
Although the scene seemed healthy throughout the 1980s, it was losing focus. Changing dancefloor tastes in London were pushing the music to incorporate more soul and funk, and it might well have evolved itself out of existence. Wala, though, had an idea of dazzling simplicity: run an African music night at the Africa Centre. ‘It was something we felt needed to be done’, he chuckles.
THE AFRICA CENTRE FIRST OPENED in 1964, at 38 King Street, Covent Garden, WC2 – the same location where it remains today. What’s now Covent Garden Piazza was then London’s main fruit and vegetable wholesale market, and the Centre took over a tomato warehouse that, somewhat ironically, had once housed auction rooms specialising in Benin bronzes. The idea behind the Africa Centre, as conceived by English Africa enthusiast Margaret Feeny in 1961, was to foster non-governmental relations between newly independent African nations by bringing people together on neutral, apolitical ground. It would also maintain informal cultural links between Britain and her former colonies, while offering a friendly meeting place for Africans living in London. Student-oriented, it held a lecture theatre, a library and a conference room as well as a bar and a restaurant, plus an art gallery and a performance space to showcase the emerging nations’ culture.
Sounds Like London Page 14