Equus: Soukous Stars - I Yelele (10 January 1993)

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When she used to work with Peel on the BBC's coverage of the Glastonbury Festival, Jo Whiley would  tell stories about how she would ask Peel whether he wanted to join her in watching a big name act on the Main Stage, only for him to decline because it clashed with Kanda Bongo Man playing somewhere else on the site. A choice between watching John Squire or Diblo Dibala was no choice at all as far as he was concerned. But curiously, although the effortless beauty of African guitar music could move him to tears of joy while watching or listening to it, the one thing it seemingly couldn't do was make him dance. Listeners to this edition of John Peel's Music were given an inventory of John Peel's Previous Attempts to Dance Since Reaching Adulthood and they were described as:

1) In Moscow with his wife, Very romantic. I won’t describe it in detail because you’ll start crying.

2) At a local dinner dance in Suffolk when Pearl, landlady of the village pub, and who is physically stronger than me, dragged me on (to the dancefloor).

3) The night before this show was transmitted, he had found himself dancing to a Whitney Houston song caught up in drink and the emotion of the moment.

The reasons behind his reluctance to dance can be traced back to childhood,  As he told his audience on this show: I used to go to dancing classes when I was a kid. My mother used to take me to the village hall in Neston and push me and my brother, Francis through the front door. And the first 3 or 4 times we went, we just walked through the hall in a confident manner and went straight out of the back door and hid in the outside toilets until it was all over. But somebody cottoned onto this and we were compelled to stay there and dance. And because we were very shy, country kids, we were always the last people to choose partners when it came down to it....And I always used to end up dancing with this girl who was about 3 or 4 times my size, and the back of her legs were always covered in mud. I never understood that at all. And Francis used to dance with this girl who was a good head taller than him who he once rendered unconscious during one of the more complex figures of something like a military twostep ‘cause he nutted her under the chin. And down she went, it was quite exciting, about the best thing that ever happened in fact.

To say he only danced three times in his adult life was a typical piece of self-exaggeration by Peel.  He danced plenty of times, he just wasn’t very demonstrative about it. When writing about the excitement caused by the eruption of punk rock bands, during a review of the music scene at the end of 1977, Peel noted that his dancing technique was little more than a barely perceptible shuffle of the knees, but I have done more of this in 1977 than in any other year (The Olivetti Chronicles, p.185, 2008, Bantam Press) In his autobiography, Margrave of the Marshes, the shuffle was given a name, The Westbourne Grove Walk and was described as a kind of energetic, springy, shuffling walk on the spot.  (Margrave of the Marshes, p.273, 2005, Corgi).  If the subjects of Sniffin’ Glue* could move Peel to dance than surely the stars of soukous (or even the Soukous Stars) would similarly get Peel to bust out the Westbourne Grove Walk.

Peel admitted that in retrospect he would have preferred to swap Whitney Houston for the Paris based supergroup, Soukous Stars as his dance record of choice.  Usually the word, supergroup, means an intermittent side-project or a short-lived collective of talents that struggle to subsume themselves into a ongoing entity.  But from their formation in 1988, Soukous Stars albums were released at a dizzying rate (4 were put out in 1991 alone) while egos were kept in check by crediting each of their first 7 albums to a different band member and Soukous Stars.  Indeed, Gozando, the album for which I Yelele was recorded, was the first of their albums not to include a band member’s name as part of the LP title.                              

Built around a delightfully sweet guitar riff and catchy chorus phrase, I Yelele gives a chance for everyone to shine, including rhythm guitarist and songwriter Lokassa Ya Mbongo and lead guitarist Dally Kimoko.  Even the brass section get a short solo slot and chance to impress Paul Simon by providing what can only be described as a textbook example of the standard soukous brass riff throughout the track.  I’m always slightly protective of brass sections on soukous records after what happened to the one used on Bayaya by Wawali Bonane.

*Danny Baker, who wrote for Sniffin’ Glue before finding wider media exposure was another man who moved in a world surrounded by music, but wouldn’t dance to it.  Indeed, in an episode of TV Heroes dedicated to the audiences on Top of the Pops, he claimed and showed that the only time in his adult life he danced was when he attended a recording of the show in 1979.  I know it looked like I was trying to stamp out a small fire but I assure you, it was a dance.

Video courtesy of Syllart Records