11. Fela Kuti
Andrew Blick introduced me to the work of Fela Kuti and I quickly became obsessed. Afrobeat rhythms are amazing, and when you have these pieces that last 15 or 20 minutes you can become totally entranced and immersed in it. Stornoway, where I now live, could really do with an Afrobeat club. Good on him for not chopping these pieces down into radio-friendly segments. To do so would be to completely miss the point. You need to spend an evening with Fela’s music, not just three and a half minutes.
One of the big problems with there being little money in the music industry now is that you can’t afford to have a group of 40 musicians and singers, performing every night at a place called the Shrine year after year, meshing together so incredibly like on this album and all the others from the entire 1970s. These sophisticated ensembles are out of reach of the vast majority of modern budgets. No wonder the quality of music is in decline. What sort of work do people expect if they balk at even paying 50p?
