An immediate success in almost every respect, the Centre seemed to treat music as a kind of anthropological ‘experience’, rather than a casual social occurrence. While it provided a suitably cerebral hangout, therefore, it neglected that other important aspect of student life: the Friday-night knees-up. Or at least it did, until Wala thought up the Limpopo Club:
‘The Africa Centre was unique. One of the first places that people from different African countries really used to mix, because for a lot of the African students it was like a home away from home. They could go to the bar or get some African food. For a social thing it didn’t matter what country was hosting or doing a show, where there was some kind of celebration everybody could join in, even if you weren’t from that country.
‘Because it was in the centre of London you’d not only get people from the universities, but people from the north, the south, the east and the west of the city – that helped to mix it. And being in the West End, there would always be other people who have wandered past the building just dropping by to see what’s going on, there would be quite a few English people in there too. But although it was mixed, it was still community based – a Ghanaian night or a Congolese night – so the band and the music tended to be from that country and only on certain nights. There was nothing on a consistent level that was open to everybody. This was the middle of the seventies, and we felt there wasn’t so much of an organised African music scene at the Africa Centre, or anywhere in London. We started the Limpopo Club to be able to put on all African music on a regular basis, for everybody.
‘We did it on every Friday night and at times on Saturday nights too. Occasionally, when we got a really big band on, we’d take Thursday as well. Although we didn’t formalise it as the Limpopo Club until 1983, we started the regular night in 1975.’
These club nights were an inspired move, establishing a pan-African vibe at the Centre thanks to the democratic turntable policy of Wala and his fellow deejays, Ugandans King Maslo and Bossa:
‘When we started we were sourcing records straight from Africa. African students would come in with their own records and say “This is the club record they are playing back home right now, would you play this for me?” And if the crowd enjoyed it we would also ask them to order copies for us from their country, and it didn’t matter which country that was. So it was very much people bringing the music to you, then you going back to Africa to source it out. Very informal.
‘Then I went out to make kind of bridges with the record companies in Africa, so I started getting new records, I was on their mailing lists. It meant we were always up to date with whatever sounds were being played in Africa, and I could ask for back covers and things like that.’
The Centre believed it was important to have a live band on each club night and Wala’s random approach to booking the groups further helped African musical solidarity. He supplemented acts that were based or had originated in the UK, like The Funkees, BLO or Assagai, with African bands visiting Britain to play the community dance circuit, cajoling them into doing a date as they arrived or left the country, and he’d also put together pick-up groups that knew how to keep the groove. All of which meant that the club’s only booking policy was that there was no booking policy.
In keeping with the welcoming atmosphere of the venue, the Limpopo looked beyond expat Africans, and aimed to enlighten a wider audience by offering workshops, seminars, classes and discussion groups on African music and dance. Debbie Golt, who now manages and promotes African acts, and deejays African music at club nights and on the radio, was among the English people who were made to feel welcome at the Centre:
‘When I came to back to London in the early eighties, from living in Manchester, for somebody who hadn’t lived here for a long time, the Africa Centre was a mecca to find music and to socialize. There was a mix of Africans from all over, and for the Friday nights [Limpopo] there were quite a few English people there. For me, this was strange, because in Manchester it wasn’t mixed at all – on the African scene there was hardly any English people, and the only way you’d get an introduction would be if you worked for Zimbabwe Solidarity or something like that. The Africa Centre was always much more relaxed.’
Limpopo became one of the hottest African clubs in Europe, as Wala achieved his goal of mixing up African styles with a spontaneity that would appeal to a broad crowd. A huge factor in this was that Limpopo was presented by an African, with a fundamental understanding of the music, the culture and how things knitted together. He was making his decisions based on a prospective audience of Africans, not as an outsider trying to second-guess what his peers might want for or from African music. That meant Limpopo was the real deal, and ensured that people of every stripe loved it.
It quickly became the most important venue for anglophone African acts, too, so Wala was no longer limited to capturing acts at one end of their tours. Indeed, any African artists with even half an eye on the world stage also had Limpopo in their sights. As a showcase, it was second to none: Baaba Maal, Kanda Bongo Man and Salif Keita played their first European shows at the Centre, while Angélique Kidjo and Thomas Mapfumo made their UK debuts there.
Naturally enough, a consistent diet of such exciting, glamorous African music, presented in an ideal setting, swiftly attracted the mainstream music business. In the wake of punk and Rock Against Racism, mainstream types were freshly aware of the commercial potential of ethnic music, and coming to terms with the idea that Bob Marley’s passing in 1981 might have put an end to their Jamaican adventure. The prospect of that new gateway to the world sparked an unprecedented explosion in African bands during the 1980s, particularly in Zimbabwe, Zaire and the Congo. Although only the likes of Kanda Bongo Man, the Four Brothers and the Bhundu Boys made much of a dent in London, literally hundreds of bands back home were trying their luck. The vibrancy of those Africa Centre gigs was a true reflection – albeit in microcosm – of what was happening in Africa.
For about twenty minutes in the early 1980s, the mainstream recording industry went Africa-crazy.
While it might be a bit ambitious to credit the Africa Centre with responsibility for the world music boom of the 1980s, for anyone exposed to an evening at Limpopo, it was hardly going to take a series of marketing meetings to work out that African could be ‘the new black’. So to speak.
ISLAND RECORDS, BOB MARLEY’S LABEL and previously the UK’s biggest investor in reggae, got in first, signing Nigerian juju sensation and Africa Centre regular King Sunny Adé to a long-term deal. The 1981 release of his first Island album, the totally infectious Juju Music, was accompanied by a hefty dose of Marley-type marketing – treat it like a rock album, and push it squarely at the mainstream. The press duly lauded the LP, and several scribes, with a staggering lack of self-awareness, dubbed this charismatic Nigerian ‘the new Bob Marley’. Suddenly big record companies were in a sub-Saharan scramble, signing up acts like Salif Keita, Chief Ebenezer Obey, Gasper Lawal, Angélique Kidjo, Youssou N’Dour, Ali Farka Touré, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Bhundu Boys. That in turn opened the door for specialist independent labels like Stern’s, Earthworks and World Circuit. Radio deejays Charlie Gillett, John Peel, Andy Kershaw, and Gilles Peterson took African music to the airwaves, and the mainstream press featured the records and artists alongside their regular rock coverage. Then a new generation of rock stars started showing an interest in all things African: Brian Eno, Malcolm McLaren, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel …
Jumbo Van Reenen, a perpetually genial South African and lover of music from all over that continent, who arrived in London at the start of the 1980s, founded the Earthworks label in 1983. He remembers those growth years:
‘We started when Stern’s was still just a shop, and the African wave was starting to break into the mainstream. As well as the rock acts playing around with African sounds, hip-hop acts and post-punk groups like Rip, Rig + Panic were listening to all sorts of stuff, and going on their own excursions with African
experiments. Earthworks had the intention of doing wholly African things, which was never easy in England but at least back then you felt you had a chance. There was some interest from magazines like the NME and Sounds, they all started to write a little bit about it – if you gave them something to write about.
‘Also at that time there was a healthy thing revolving around the festivals and African bands crossing over to the rock side for those events. And there was the GLC [the left-wing Greater London Council, later abolished by Mrs Thatcher] who, through subsidies, would enable promoters and all sorts of people to bring all sorts of bands over from Africa to play gigs in London. We could bring bands in, and people used to wander down to the South Bank, or wherever, and see a band, then tell their friends and maybe want to buy an album. In the beginning we used to get a lot of West Indians at these things, because we’d advertise them in Black Echoes, but then we started to attract more and more of an English audience.’
While it seemed that African music couldn’t be any stronger, the problem was that to reach the mainstream audience it had to be part of the mainstream business. That upset the delicate balance maintained at clubs like the Limpopo, where guys like Wala Danga were losing control as a new highprofile scene was tailored for wider tastes.
King Sunny Adé’s tenure at Island was a vivid example of that sort of cultural engineering. A huge star in Africa, and a supremely gifted performer, he took great exception to the expectation that he would Europeanise his style. Understandably so: he’s not merely the King of Juju, but an actual king as well, and parted company with the label because of their demands. Wala remembers acts he had brought to major labels, whom he was then asked to produce:
‘They’d say “Why don’t you put the guitar solo in there?”, not even thinking about whether we had one planned for anywhere in the song! Because that was the way they heard the music in their heads, regardless of how it sounded.’
Jumbo describes how an ultimately self-defeating bigcompany mentality took over:
‘Once the major labels got involved, they were always looking for that quick pop-star business, because that’s really all the people working there understand. And it didn’t always work for something like this – I could sell more records out of the back of my car, very often, than they did at Island, dealing with the sales force who are just looking at it from a pop point of view. You know, “Is there a sales point?” “Is there a video?” and so on.
‘Then with all these things factored in, you have to play that game to make it work; if you don’t, or it doesn’t work, you’re gone. Even if it does work, it didn’t guarantee you anything, because then the next thing comes along and everything becomes geared up to that. It wasn’t like these artists were used to doing these things, they were used to building up a following and then working to keep it by developing and moving forward.’
The term ‘world music’ came into play around this time. No one who was involved in African music, then or now, has anything particularly good to say about it. Debbie explains how it worked, or rather how it didn’t work:
‘I have mixed feelings about the whole world music thing, Once the term established itself, retailers racked African music alongside Latin, Turkish, Bulgarian and so on, reducing its presence. You had music from everywhere totally diluting it and losing any direction for it … you won’t get a band like Taxi Pata Pata racked under their own name, they’ll just be ‘Congolese’ or ‘soukous’ within the World section, so they won’t easily be found.’
Graeme Ewens, who co-owns RetroAfric Records – kind of African rare groove specialists – still splutters at the introduction of the world music category:
‘I believe it was the worst possible umbrella for African music at that time. African and Latin music were building solid and separate fanbases, and had established a touring circuit of small venues in London and around the UK. Then world music gatecrashed that party.
‘It may have brought a short-term increase in exposure in high-street record stores, but African culture was diminished by being lumped in with Mongolian throat singing and Bolivian nose flutes. Even using the name Africa itself was too general. There was already a wide variety of African genres. The big-selling music from Nigeria, Congo/Zaire and Cameroon was urban dance music, not the plinky-plunky stuff that now proliferates. That is “folk” as far as I am concerned, and it is still being traded on its exoticism. Now we have “urban” to cover all black music but are there no cities in Africa? Cameroon, for one, is a whole culture/country that has been erased from the musical map. I still find that whole scene patronising to the point of racist.’
African music in London, whether local or imported, appeared to have hit a wall.
IN PRACTICALLY ALL RESPECTS, the Afro-rock of Osibisa and Assagai was the pioneering London black music style. Rather than simply limit its evolution to its own internal ideas, it was always making moves to consider its new musical and social surroundings. It hadn’t simply adapted itself to suit an existing London audience, it had deliberately set out to represent the changing face of the city and make a point that went beyond performance. Yet it was unable to maintain any thrust, and nothing had followed up on it during the intervening couple of decades.
The biggest barrier was that there was no London African-controlled scene to incubate such a style, or what there was wasn’t big enough, exclusive enough or young enough to properly get it going – unlike, say, lovers’ rock reggae. That scene, as we’ll see in chapter six, was totally exclusive, deeply underground and with a teenage demographic desperate for a music that represented both their ethnicity and their British-ness. Under these conditions, players and producers could generate enough finance to evolve imported reggae into what a new audience expected, away from outside pressures.
There was no equivalent process with African music, despite the fact that a sizeable second generation of children of West African immigrants were now building their lives in London, thanks both to economic migration and civil wars back home. Instead, the capital’s young black population was growing ever more Jamaicanised, as, pre hip hop, Jamaican identity became the cornerstone upon which any identifiable black London character was being built. In the interests of fitting in, most kids were not overly inclined to pursue their African-ness beyond their own front doors – it was actually possible to know kids for years and not realise they were African until you met their parents. Also, the fact that black youth culture already existed in London – in the shape of the soul and reggae scenes – greatly reduced the need for anyone to start a scene of their own.
By the 1990s, even though African-owned clubs had for years been crucial to the establishment of self-regulated black music in London, it would have been virtually impossible for even the relatively high-profile African-owned/run venues to nurture a London sound and still stay in business. As Wala explains, it was all to do with ‘authenticity’, and the situation was hardly unique to African music:
‘I, and others here, were working to try to create stages for African musicians in London, so at least they can come and showcase and be heard and develop a unique sound – something African and London, but contemporary. But the record companies and the media were looking to get groups in from Africa, and would look on anything being done in London as not being authentic, and there is something they feel is inferior about using guys who are local. Which is quite interesting because a lot of these guys who were making the London music had been playing with those groups in Africa that the industry was going wild over! Many of them had come here on tour and decided to stay over. So it is really the same musicians [he chuckles richly] but because they now live in London, people just look over them. It was quite ironic, because we could mix up different African styles and countries, as long as it was African. But it made it very difficult for us promoters to attract the crowds we needed by putting on local bands.
‘It was the same thing with reggae. That’s why the first record that Matumbi did, they put a white label
on and pretended it was a Jamaican record – that’s how they broke into the charts. Then they told people “No, actually we’re from London!” and the reviewers had to admit “Ha! You’re good then”. But they had to force their way like that, and deliberately put nothing on the label and said this is a new band and the copies have been smuggled out of Jamaica. It worked.’
Subterfuge like that could only work because there was a huge underground reggae business. The London African bands had little choice other than to go to the mainstream record companies. Where there was little joy to be found, even if many such groups epitomised world music, incorporating influences from three continents and players from all sorts of countries, and having developed in response to the shifting population of the city. Behind the ‘authenticity’ aspect lay a fiscal consideration. Signing acts from abroad is a much lower investment, as it’s usually a matter of licensing in finished product rather than paying for a young local band to develop a career. In this case the practice was to scoop up a few more or less finished African albums on an A&R safari, throw some marketing at them, and see if anything stuck. As Jumbo implied earlier, the inevitable hit-and-miss results did little to convince the industry that the genre had a commercial future.
The demise of the GLC was the final nail, as the loss of subsidised venues and sponsored festivals meant that groups who might have had a bright future at the start of the 1980s were struggling. Debbie tells how the options were closed off:
Sounds Like London Page 15