INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES
GQ APRIL 26, 2020 - by Chris Sullivan
HOW FELA KUTI CHANGED THE GAME WITH FELA FELA FELA
Fifty years since he released his stunning Afrobeat debut, Fela Fela Fela, Fela Kuti remains a cultural and political icon in his native Nigeria and around the world
Listening to Fela Fela Fela, it's hard to believe that it's been fifty years since Kuti made this remarkably contemporary debut album, fifty years since he named his formidable band, Africa 70, its progeny Afrobeat and fifty years since he embarked on his journey to become Fela, who, as Africa's biggest superstar, needed no surname.
He was born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti on October 15, 1938 in Abeokuta, Nigeria. His mother, Funmilayo, was a leading feminist campaigner; his father, reverend Israel, founded the Nigerian Union Of Teachers; his brothers, Olikoye and Beko, were doctors and human/medical rights campaigners, while his cousin Wole Soyinka was the first African Nobel Literature laureate.
Always destined for a life less ordinary, he - parcelled off to London in 1958, after sampling Soho jazz clubs - enrolled in the Trinity School Of Music, married Remilekun Taylor, had three children, Femi, Yeni and Sola, and played the London circuit with his band, Koola Lobitos. "Fela used to come down to the jazz all-nighters in The Flamingo," remembered Ginger Baker of supergroup Cream. "He was crazy! But a very likeable fella. He was a very good friend of mine."
In 1963, three years after Nigerian independence, he returned to Lagos and recruited a prodigious young drummer, Tony Allen, who became the de facto bandleader of Koola Lobitos. In 1969, they embarked on a ten-month tour of America, during which Fela met African-American civil rights activist Sandra Smith. Smith introduced Fela to the black power literature of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver and the funk of James Brown, Sly Stone and The Temptations. Accordingly, he found his calling and his voice and returned home with a mission in the spring of 1970.
Indeed, Kuti had enough to scream about.
Nigerian dictator Murtala Mohammed had waged the most heinous war on the new Republic Of Biafra, which resulted in the death of two million civilians from a famine deliberately created by Nigeria. On January 15, 1970, Biafran forces capitulated and were dragged into the implausibly corrupt Nigerian state.
"As Fela said, 'Music is the weapon of the future,'" explained Fela's former manager Rikki Stein while sitting in his London home. "He considered it his duty to make people aware of injustice."
In 1970 Kuti opened his own nightclub, the Afro-Spot in the Empire Hotel, named and then renamed his band Nigeria 70, then, realising he had bigger fish to fry, renamed them Africa 70 and started making big music and called it Afrobeat. Thoroughly overwhelming, it was a mesmerising hybrid of The JB's guitar funk, jazz and traditional African rhythms, a mighty horn section and powerhouse chants. On October 14, 1970, James Brown's backing band came to Afro-Spot. "They blew us - The JB's - away, so we told them that they were the funkiest cats we ever heard," informed bass player Bootsy Collins.
Fela Kuti's journey to greatness had begun.
"I remember the first time I listened in the early 1970s and how dazzled I was," recalled Brian Eno. "I told The Talking heads that this was the music of the future and it still is. This is what I'd have liked jazz to have become."
Undeniably, 1970 was a big year for Kuti. That summer he'd created his own hippy, weed-smoking (widely used but very illegal), free-loving commune, The Kalakuta ("Rascal") Republic in Lagos, replete with a free health clinic and recording studio and declared it an independent state.
Later that year Ginger Baker brought Kuti and Africa 70 to Abbey Road and together they recorded the Fela Kuti album, Live! (released August 1971) in front of a hundred and fifty guests.
In 1971 he relocated his club and called it The Shrine. Paul McCartney attended and said, "This is the best band I've ever seen live. I just couldn't stop weeping with joy." Fela, after hearing that the former Beatle had invited a few of his musicians to play with him, jumped on stage half naked and accused him of "stealing black man's music". "So I had to say, 'Do us a favour, Fela, we do OK,'" McCartney informed. "'We're all right as it is. We sell a couple of records here and there.'"
Meanwhile, Fela furiously released a slew of landmark long players: Shakara (1971), Roforofo Fight (1972), Expensive Shit (1975) and the hugely successful Sorrow Tears And Blood (1977), all of which derided the government, the army and the establishment.
On February 18, 1977, even though Fela was Africa's biggest selling recording artist, the regime sent a thousand troops into Fela's commune, who set fire to the compound, destroyed his recordings, burned the cars, looted, bludgeoned the men with rifle butts and raped the women. As a result, fifty-five people were hospitalised. They then dragged Fela by his genitals into the courtyard and battered him to a bloody pulp. Only the intervention of an officer saved his life.
"I couldn't understand why my father - a loving, funny, generous warm-hearted man - was beaten and attacked so often," expounds Femi Kuti, who, watching from the sidelines, was fourteen at the time.
During the attack the militia threw Kuti's seventy-eight-year-old mother out of a second-floor window; she died eight weeks later. Fela's answer to this was to drop his mother's coffin at the door of military head of state general Olusegun Obasanjo.
"The only thing that kept him alive was the unconditional love that the African general public had for him," clarifies Stein. "Had they killed him there would have been massive riots."
Fela moved into The Crossroads Hotel in 1978, where to protest against the Westernisation of African culture he married twenty-seven women in one ceremony (he later restricted himself to a mere twelve consorts and employed a timetable that he pinned outside his bedroom so his wives would know whose turn it was), formed his very own political party, Movement Of The People, and stood for president in Nigeria's first elections on August 11, 1979.
Consequently, while touring Europe, his band, who he hadn't paid, deserted him after they accused him of funding his political ambitions with their wages. The following year Fela formed new band Egypt 80, release a slew of astonishing albums including Black President and Unknown Soldier and toured the world with an entourage of seventy men and women.
"They were wild," chuckles Stein. "We [Fela and band] were banned from most five-star hotels in the world, not because they were wicked, but we would forget to turn the bath tap off and flood the hotel. They also all smoked weed all the time; there'd be the girls running through the corridors naked. Fela would show up in the lobby wearing nothing but his customary Speedos. But we never missed a plane.
"Fela did miss one plane, though. He didn't carry money and, if he did, it was down his balls as he never carried a wallet or had pockets in his pants. So Fela filled in all the forms at customs going out but didn't have that 'little something' the official asked for, so the form was 'lost'. Fela was arrested and detained while the band left on the plane."
In 1984 a judge sentenced Fela to five years in prison for alleged currency violations. He served twenty months in Kirikiri, Nigeria's toughest prison. The judge was later discharged after he admitted that the military had forced his hand.
"Even after his releases, they continued to arrest him and tried to charge him with murder, armed robbery, all kinds of shit," rebukes Stein, who now looks after Kuti's estate." They arrested him some two hundred times and beat him bad, real bad, but couldn't nail him because he was innocent."
Fela continued to release albums and tour (with his own personal witch doctor), preaching the merits of polygamy, sex and marijuana while attacking the Nigerian establishment, but the sentence and regular beatings were making life difficult.
"He was in real pain," reflects Stein. "By the late 1980s, all the beatings and broken bones started to take their toll, so that he couldn't pick his saxophone up." Indeed, rumours spread that Kuti was suffering from an unknown illness.
On August 2, 1997 Fela died at the age of fifty-eight. The cause of death was AIDS.
"It seemed like Fela was immortal, but AIDS killed him," reveals Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, who directed the 2016 documentary Finding Fela. "It was like his lesson to the whole of Africa that said, 'If AIDS can kill me, it can kill you.'"
An estimated one million attended Fela's funeral.
"Everywhere was full of people," reminisces Stein. "In trees, in windows, on top of cars... Our journey that normally would have taken twenty minutes took eight hours. It was incredible."
"What Fela did was register in people's consciousness the importance of resistance and made them aware", stresses Gibney. "He was globally significant."
"Today, too many artists think the highlight of their musical career is to win X Factor and consider music purely as a means to make money and achieve fame rather than a means to affect thought or social change," chides Stein. "Fela was the exact opposite."
After the release of Finding Fela, a surge of interest followed. Knitting Factory records released Kuti's complete catalogue. DJs such as Lauren Laverne, Cerys Matthews and DJ Edu have dug deep into the incendiary Nigerian's archive, while both Brian Eno and Erykah Badu have compiled classic Kuti LP box sets.
"Fela Kuti was a big someone," concludes Rikki Stein. "He was the bravest, most principled, most amazing, funniest man you could ever meet. But even more simply, he was a man who loved to make music, laugh, fuck and eat."
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