Zimbabwean group first flew into Britain 20 years ago, and became stars overnight, world music pioneers who supported Madonna. But their fall was equally dizzying - as tragedy wiped out the band. Founder and survivor Rise Kagonga tells a story of optimism and despair to Graeme Thomson.
Rise Kagona is sitting in an Edinburgh cafe. It's a warm August afternoon but he is dressed for winter, swaddled in a bomber jacket and a thick woollen shirt, the ever-present baseball hat glued to his head as he sips his tea and wonders. A quiet, thoughtful man, he wonders about a lot of things: the way humans impose boundaries on a world belonging solely to the Creator; how the value of life back home in Zimbabwe continues to deteriorate; above all, he wonders what on earth happened to the Bhundu Boys.
It was, the band's guitarist, singer and founder member recalls with surprise, 20 years ago.
In May 1986, Kagona and his young compatriots - singer and guitarist Biggie Tembo, bass player David Mankaba, drummer Kenny Chitsvatsva and keyboard player Shakespeare Kangwena - landed at Gatwick and stepped into the unknown. For a short spell they were welcomed with open arms, the infectious, virile joy of their music seducing all-comers and earning them a support slot for Madonna at Wembley and a record deal with Warner Brothers.
The Bhundu Boys were by no means the first stars of what we now understand as world music - that accolade could go to anyone from Ravi Shankar to Bob Marley - but they were the first African band to make an appreciable impact upon the archetypal NME-reading, gig-going, Peel-listening Eighties music fan.
And when it fell apart, it did so in truly tragic fashion: Aids, suicide, prison, poverty. Kagona now lives hand-to-mouth in a farm cottage in Scotland and is only just beginning to pick up the threads of his life and career.
His friends weren't quite so lucky.
The Bhundu Boys did not arrive in Britain as unknown entities. They were met at the airport by 'Champion' Doug Veitch, a Scotsman whose unique brand of Caledonian Cajun swing had briefly made him an NME favourite in his own right.
Veitch was a world music pioneer. He had founded the Discafrique label with Owen Elias and discovered the Bhundu Boys when in Harare, subsequently releasing three of their songs on the 1985 'Discafrique' EP. The music entranced Andy Kershaw and John Peel, who championed the band and other Zimbabwean groups such as the Four Brothers on their Radio 1 shows.
Post-Live Aid and amid the growing clamour to end apartheid, the cultural and political climate in Britain was ripe for the Bhundu Boys. According to Veitch, they arrived for the six-date tour, starting that night in Glasgow, clutching only their toilet bags. 'Not an instrument in sight,' he laughs today.
"We flew up to Scotland to buy them instruments while they took the slowest train possible to Glasgow and walked straight onstage.' Although he had released their records, Veitch had never actually heard them perform live and was 'praying' they could play. 'Ten seconds into the first number you knew,' he says.
News RSS