“Today, we’ve just lost the best drummer that has ever lived. Rhythms and patterns so complex and on such a high level of communication, there are not words yet created to describe what he created. It was otherworldly. He was otherworldly! A master musician and a master thinker.” -Jeff Mills
I was lucky enough to have witnessed master drummer and co-creator of Afrobeat Tony Allen on three occasions during my life. Before that had happened, however, my musical life had been changed forever after hearing a set of only Fela Kuti tracks by Earl Gateshead at the legendary Hoxton Square club Blue Note (on one of my rare nights there when I wasn’t actually working). Four or five sprawling, seemingly endless grooves of such vitality and power propelled by Tony Allen’s elastic playing, rhythms that created and left spaces for my body to move in ways I’d never experienced before. I was an instant fan but had no idea pre-internet where to start with this. Then one morning after work, I grabbed a private cab from one of the many Nigerian drivers that prowled outside the club and unlike many of the more conservative Nigerian drivers I encountered, this guy was a rebel at heart. He was on the side of Fela and proceeded to play a cassette of Africa 70 tunes that he had and my god, they were magnificent! You have to remember that most of Fela’s songs easily ran over the 12 minute mark and a cassette player didn’t just magically jump to the next track like a CD or MP3, I had to listen in full while I wrote down the titles of every song. It took about 25 minutes to drive to my house so I asked the driver to just keep on cruising around (at my expense) in order for me to listen to and document every track that I could. The most expensive taxi journey of my life and I’ve never regretted it. It was probably the next Saturday morning when I began what would be a weekly pilgrimage over to Honest John’s in Portobello Rd to spend my cloakroom tips on vinyl and would you believe it, racks of original Fela Kuti records for sale! I bought all I could afford in those days and they remain some of my most prized and overplayed pieces of vinyl.
Anyway, back to the gigs. My friend Nikki Lucas worked in Honest John’s (we co-ran at one point a DnB night at Plastic People on Oxford St with another Blue Note staff member Lynford) and was also part of a collective that put on incredible nights at what was Mass in Brixton under the title ‘The Shrine’ (named after Kuti’s Shrine venue in Lagos). They attracted the best of African acts like Femi Kuti and if my memory hasn’t failed me, Tony Allen at their debut event. I recall that a younger drummer began the gig (maybe Allen was a bit unwell?) and they cooked like all good Afrobeat bands do but at some point, Allen took the sticks and boom, what a difference! He was only a small man but the power in those wrists and the nuance in his rhythms, they slipped and swerved in and out of the other instruments without ever losing the perfect metronome. The band up till now had been tight but now they were locked, we were all locked. Afrobeat (or Afrofunk) has to be experienced live i tell you. The second time I caught him, my recall is more hazy. It was the Barbican Centre, London’s brutalist centrepiece of the higher arts and who knows who the main act were but in the entrance space sitting atop a pop-up stage was a small five-piece with Tony Allen leading. Two thirds of the crowd were milling around, greeting each other, in Roy Keane’s words ‘eating prawn sandwiches’ while the greatest living African drummer and his band were killing it. Grotesque. The third and final time that I experienced Tony Allen was at the debut Houghton Festival. We were recovering after an insane 14 hour shift (plus afters) running and DJing a stage at Craig Richard’s brand new music gathering in the Norfolk countryside. There weren’t many live acts booked, this was all about the best of the underground electronic pulse (with a few exceptions, Truth & Lies included) but on the Sunday there was a huge reason to get out of the tent. A lifelong jazz fan, Allen had finally made a jazz record, for Blue Note Records no less. A sublime and unique new take on the Art Blakey canon and he was going to perform it at the most contrasting of spaces to the most contrary of audiences. We dragged our tired heads and bodies over to the main stage, the sun was burning and small clusters of baked (in more than one sense) ravers sprawled on the bare earth, there was nobody within 20 feet of the barriers and the stage seemed too big. Numbers grew but still no big buzz as the band took the stage. Like all great jazz, it’s all about expression. A well known song deconstructed, motifs floating and fragments of recognisable moments taken into new territories and this is exactly what Tony Allen managed to do with his crack band of French players. He didn’t play like many jazz drummers, no showboating, just the drum on the right place, the odd space, painting the music, his recognisable double hit on the kick the heartbeat, while he effortlessly moved around the kit. The crowd were here now and even if they had only spent their young adult life listening to minimal house in black Berlin basements, they recognised something special was happening. By the end of the set, the once sparse arena was rammed, the cheers were truthful and life had been restored to many who had felt empty. As good as it gets.
There is so much to say about Tony Allen’s career and his never-ending quest to explore and create but I’ll leave that to others to say. Since my mid-twenties, his rhythms and music have provided as much of a soundtrack as any musician and for that, I salute you Tony Allen. Au revoir to one of the greatest…X
Words: Justin Turford 01/05/20