Oliver!: Esperant - Eloucha (15 March 1992)

Looking back through lists of tracks written down months ago, it can be a dreadful feeling when you see a track title and realise that you remember nothing of it.  This is particularly true of foreign language tracks and on the page, Eloucha brought back no recollection at all.  There was no distilled joy as in the mid-section of La Joie de Vivre, no plangent ringing riffs from Leonore or even the wonderful coda to Ngonda from the same 15/3/92 show wending through my unconscious.  The lack of those instant associations made me wonder whether this would see the track fall from favour, but it romped it straight from the very start with an explosion of floor-filling joy like a Fanta bottle that's been shook up for an hour.  It's a fun track, swapping virtuosity for a kind of French-African soul music, complete with xylophone and comedy Italian phrases (though not in a Joe Dolce sense).  Even the synthesiser, always an obstacle to Peel's enjoyment of a soukous track feels right before the guitars come in to take us home.

Video courtesy of mrbobodigital.