Different beat: how Fela Kuti’s son and grandson are modernising the dynasty Kate Hutchinson
The night 1,000 soldiers descended on Fela Kuti’s home, set it on fire and threw his elderly mother out of the window is etched into his family’s memory and music folklore for ever. On 18 February 1977, Fela’s eldest son, Femi, was at school when the compound – known as the Kalakuta Republic, a raucous commune that the musician had declared an independent state – was raided, a violent retaliation to the album
Zombie, Fela’s biting attack on the mindless personnel of Nigeria’s military regime. Femi returned to find friends had been beaten, women raped.
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A song needs to be exceptional if it’s going to occupy 10 minutes of a 69-minute movie.
Steve McQueen’s “Lovers Rock,” one film in the Oscar-nominated director’s five-part “Small Axe” anthology series for Amazon Studios, tracks the course of a “blues party” thrown by first- and second-generation West Indian immigrants in an apartment in London in 1980. Midway through the night, one of the DJs plays Janet Kay’s 1979 hit “Silly Games,” a sweetly yearning ballad that typifies the sentimental variant of reggae for which the movie is named.
What happens next constitutes one of the most patient and loving celebrations of music ever captured on film. The DJ stops the music so that the slow-dancing partygoers can sing the entire song a cappella, giving it the sacred quality of a hymn. It is a spontaneous ritual of connection and endurance in a hostile world.