Fela Kuti: A Beginner's Guide (by Femi Kuti)

Femi Kuti sits in his dressing room at KOKO in Camden Town. He’s discussing what it’s like to be the son of a legendary musician and what it’s been like trying to forge a career of his own when his dad was Fela Kuti. It clearly hasn’t been easy.

Fela, after all, was the man who invented Afrobeat, that glorious fusion of African styles, funk and jazz. For Fela, Afrobeat was a political weapon to attack corruption in Nigeria, an attack for which he paid a tough price when the Nigerian authorities took their revenge.

Femi says that the style resulted from all the different music his father had listened to. “He loved jazz – Miles Davis, especially. And he liked highlife from Ghana – but he didn’t want to play highlife. His mother was the first person to tell him that if he wanted to be successful, he had to create his own kind of music. It was very catchy, very unique. It became very popular and very political”.

The rebellions and politics also came from Fela’s mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, who Femi describes as “a fighter for women’s rights who used to take Fela to her meetings.” Femi continues: “When he was in America, a girlfriend asked him what he was singing about, and told him to read Malcolm X and introduced him to the Black Panthers. But it was right under his nose.”

Back in Nigeria, Fela’s musical attacks led to constant fights with the authorities, beatings and arrests. “He was very courageous and brave”, says Femi. “It was a very high price to pay, but a lot of young people are aware and respect what he did – putting their minds to the state of corruption. His music is a historical encyclopaedia – you can listen to his music and know what was going on in Nigeria and Africa at the time. Fela is referred to as a prophet, but he was singing about the immediate reality”.

Fela also became known for his wild lifestyle – especially when he declared that the compound around his house was the Kalakuta Republic, an ‘independent state’. No surprise, then, that Femi – Fela’s eldest son, born in June 1962 – had an unconventional childhood. “Kalakuta was like a big party, and growing up, as children, it was just fun, fun, fun. If you don’t want to go to school, don’t go to school. My mother said ‘you must go to school’; Fela said ‘you don’t have to’. I kept failing my exams, and he didn’t care about that.”

Femi was even allowed to drive while still a child. “He had Volvos and Range Rovers, and I was driving them to school when I was 12. All the school would come out to watch. I remember he had a custom-made horn, and I was always pressing it”. Femi begins laughing and imitating horn noises. So, would he ever allow his own children to do anything like that? “I told my son, ‘You are not driving until you are 21.’ None of my children had that kind of freedom. No way! It was so dangerous… absolutely irresponsible!”

He now realises that Fela was surrounded by many of the wrong people and that “everyone was just grab, grab, grab. The people he trusted… 90% of them betrayed him. He was too kind to everybody.” At Kalakuta, “anyone could just walk in and say, ‘Fela, I don’t have anywhere to stay, can I stay here?’ ‘Oh, find a place’. So, he let in anyone, and that could be dangerous.” Because they could have been government spies? “They could have been anything! I remember before the burning of the house, an American told Fela he had heard that the government was planning to kill him. And [Fela] just said ‘aah!’ and took it like a pinch of salt.”

The brutal government attack on Kalakuta came on February 18, 1977, when the ‘independent republic’ was burned to the ground in an assault by a thousand armed soldiers. Fela and others were severely beaten, and his mother was thrown from a window, causing injuries that led to her death. Femi, then 15 years old, remembers he was “just coming home from school and saw the soldiers walking to Kalakuta. One of them recognised me and tried to chase me. If I had arrived 15 minutes earlier, I would have been in serious trouble.”

After the attack, Femi left school and told his father he wanted to play music. Fela agreed, but his mother insisted he should have music lessons first, asking Fela, “What are you doing? Your father sent [you] to the best school in England – why don’t you do the same for your son? They had a big fight!” Femi says he had two weeks of lessons from Baba Ani, Fela’s band leader, but that was it. “So I taught myself – I had a book, How to Play the Sax!”.

He first played with his father’s band in 1979 at the age of 17. “It was very scary. I was shaking like a leaf and was high; I had smoked so much.” He says that a telling-off from his mother, while he was staying with her, helped improve his playing. “She said you are the lousiest musician I have ever heard – you have been here two weeks and not picked up your horn once! I was so ashamed, and that’s what helped me. I went back to my jazz records, listening to Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, blues and even classical albums – any music that was helpful.”

He certainly improved, for in 1984, at the age of 21, he was leading his dad’s band at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles while Fela was in jail in Nigeria. “And that was scary. I was standing where Michael Jackson had been. My life was a roller coaster.”

But he was, he says, “desperately unhappy” and needed to establish his own identity, away from Fela. “I felt insignificant,” he says. “I was dressing like him, had the same shoes – so, where was Femi in this?” He quit to go solo, “but nobody came to my concerts because everybody was so against me – my life was so miserable.” When his first solo album, No Cause For Alarm?, was released in 1989, Fela publicly criticised him “and said this is a terrible album, it’s nonsense.”

“It was tough”, says Femi “but I was determined”. He broke into the European market after being invited to play in France, and when his second album, M.Y.O.B., was released in 1991, Fela had changed his mind. “He said, ‘You wrote this music? Unbelievable! I’m so proud of you’, and when the press came, he said, ‘he did it himself, he taught himself, I didn’t help him’.” Even so, when Femi had his first hit with ‘Wonder, Wonder’ in 1985 “everybody was like ‘Fela wrote it for you’.”

Only after Fela’s death in 1997 did Femi finally become recognised as an artist in his own right. His much-praised 1998 album Shoki Shoki included a batch of great songs, including ‘Beng Beng Beng’ and ‘Truth Don Die’, “and they couldn’t give Fela the credit for that”.

Since then, he has just kept going, and at 66 is releasing a new album, Journey Through Life, demonstrating his individual take on Afrobeat. Unlike Fela’s epic works, his songs are the length of conventional pop songs, and though he echoes Fela in his angry attacks on political corruption (“because corruption is now worse”), there are also highly personal compositions like the title track. “It’s a reflection of my inner being”, he says. “Trying to talk about things people don’t know about me”.

An hour later, he’s on stage, playing keyboards, alto and soprano sax as he leads his band through a powerful set that ends with new track, ‘Politics Don Expose Them’, and a classic Afrobeat finale from the repertoire of his brilliant, difficult father. It includes ‘Beast Of No Nation’ and a glorious treatment of one of his favourite songs by his father, ‘Water No Get Enemy’.