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a way that belies his age. He’s a master of accents, repeating the
same phrase over and over with subtle variations, and occasionally
slipping into a strangely nasal high register voice that sounds not
unlike reggae maestro Burning Spear. His guitar playing has rough-
hewn, self-taught simplicity and a soulful touch that’s highly original.
Two weeks later we meet again at the east London club
Cargo. On this occasion, the second guitarist of his pick-up band is
a London-based Italian jazzer called Antonio Marzinotto. Having
just backed Fatai on a couple of gigs in Nigerian restaurants in
Brixton, he’s becoming more familiar with his repertoire and the
style of playing required: “Technically, its not difficult at all. The
only thing is, you’ve got to go into the vibe. 70 to 80% is heart.
Basically, it’s like to play blues, but in a major key… using [a] pen-
tatonic [scale] but the sound is more bright, it’s full of joy. It’s the
same scale [as the blues] but …they start from another point.”
Fatai assures me he’ll be back in London in September with
his full band, when we should be able to hear the earthy plunking
of the giant ‘thumb piano’ that gives many of his recordings such
an ‘old school’ feel.
“I didn’t bring the agidigbo this time because my boys are
not come,” he explains. The sound of agidigbo is a reminder of
the music Fatai played as an amateur, paid by his listeners only in
palm wine, during the late 1940s, before he became a full-time
musician. And the Caribbean/ calypso-flavoured Allah Na Tu Bah
hints at one of the roots of highlife, at the peak of its popularity
when he wrote the song in 1957. Although Ghana’s E.T. Mensah is
generally credited with introducing highlife to Nigerians on pio-
neering tours in the early 1950s, local elements had been brewing
in Nigeria before then, and helped give the Nigerian variant its
own local flavour – aside from the use of local languages.
atai’s first language is Yoruba, but he’s also fluent in
F
Hausa, the official language of Nigeria’s northern
regions. He sings in it on Awure Bansa, given a housey
remix on Papa Rise Again. He explains that the song
contrasts the traditional marriage conventions of Hausa
and Yoruba culture: “I talk about married life of Hausa… if you
have a fine girl and you like her and you decide to marry her, you
spend money, you buy clothes. Later on, she run away!” he laughs.
“After that you have to fight to get your articles back. In Yoruba
culture your wife just says what she needs from you. Ordinarily,
my ring, that’s all.”
He compares this with the Igbo (Nigeria’s third largest ethnic
group), where a man is expected to build a house before he mar-
ries. But as he also observes, these traditions are breaking down.
In the oddly titled I Am Not A Banker (from Won Kere Si Num-
ber) Fatai castigates a woman who sees her man as little more than
a cashpoint: “Monthly, you come, you ask for money, and one day I
decide, hey girl, I am not a banker! The best thing [is] to find your
[own] way. You can go to bank and do whatever,” he chuckles.
“If you are singing, you must have message. If you don’t have
message in what you are singing, nobody will like it! You have to
say something better. All the people who are playing hip-hop in
Nigeria, some are saying the truth, some are just opening their
mouth, saying what they like!”
Financial matters are a recurring theme in his lyrics, and have
been at the root of many of this artist’s troubles – but not always.
Fatai Olayuwala Olatunji was born on 22nd July 1927 and got his
nickname from his habit of carrying round two shillings that his
father would give him to spend on his brother and sister for two or
three weeks, while his work as a driver took him to Ghana (then
Gold Coast), and so away from his mother, who was a market ‘chair-
lady’. This amount was more money than most of his peers had on
them and so, from around the age of nine he was conferred the
honour of performing the toss at football matches. For some rea-
son, they referred to this amount as a ‘dollar’.
“When we want to pick a side of eleven, they would call me:
‘Fatai, bring your dollar. Let us roll it, head or tails.’ That’s where
the name comes [from]. To choose the players… if it is head, we
are the first one to pick, if it’s tails the second man to pick.”
Fatai left school in 1944 when his father died while in the
Gold Coast, and he then began to train as a mechanic, on the job.
“When I finished there, I still have a young nature. By then I was
rascal,” he laughs raucously. “Not so bad, but I always fight my
people as soon as I heard something annoy me.”
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