Guys and Dolls: Mayaula Mayoni - Ko Tika Te (22 May 1993)

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If there’s a heatwave in the UK, you can usually depend on this blog to provide a soukous track from a John Peel playlist for you to dance along with.

This one had a question mark against it, because it’s a bit of a slow starter, and its opening minutes are dominated by the synthesisers which Peel so loathed hearing on African music. But once Mayaula Mayoni and friends have spent the opening two and a quarter minutes imploring his loved one, Do not leave or Don’t Give Up - both of which are potential translations of Ko Tika Te - the guitars kick in and the dancing can start. My wife heard and liked this, last night, so that confirms its place on the metaphorical mixtape.

Language issues mean that I’m not sure why Mayoni’s lover wanted to leave him, but it could be because Ko Tika Te is taken from an album call L’Amour au Kilo - or Love By the Kilo - which strikes me as an album title that even Barry White’s management team may have considered a little too on the nose, though I love the fact that on the album cover, the title is broken up by a little drawing of a market scale for measuring fruit and vegetables - lest we get too offended by the title’s connotations.

Mayoni turned to music after quitting professional football in the Congo at a relatively young age. His nearest UK equivalent is Gareth Ainsworth, who has combined a lengthy career in football playing and management with a music career fronting several different bands. His current band, The Cold Blooded Hearts, released their debut album in 2023. Mercifully, Ainsworth and friends refrained from offering us Love By the Kilo, plumping instead for the niftier title of The Cold Light of Day. 

As things currently stand, we’re more likely to get a Gareth Ainsworth soukous album than we are a Mayaula Mayoni rock album. Not least because the latter died in 2010, six years after suffering a stroke.

Tell Me! - The closest thing that The Cold Blooded Hearts have to an out-and-out floor filler.