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you are handicapped, it’s difficult to find people to take care of you, so I just found myself in the street,” he declares.
Theo had previously been playing in a band of handicapped musicians for a cou- ple of years in Brazzaville (the capital of the Republic of the Congo, visible across the river from Kinshasa) but with the out- break of war there in June 1997, he had to come back to Kinshasa, where he ran a small shop that functioned as a kind of deposit/lock-up for local businesses.
“I was working with my little shop and Ricky and Coco were playing with Raka Raka, this backing band of Papa Wemba, and Coco was always coming to my shop and asking me to come to sing with them, but I didn’t want to, as I had too much work.”
Congo into Europe, Raka Raka fell apart. “Then this band stopped and after Ricky started Staff Benda Bilili in the city with Coco; after this they again approached me, because I had a guitar… So I used to give them my guitar. And then one day, when my shop was suddenly finished, I decided to join the band.”
W
Curious about the veracity of other ‘fairy tale’ claims about Staff Benda Bilili, I ask how Theo’s life has changed since the band became successful. “Well, now every- thing has changed. I have a bought a little piece of land in Kinshasa and I’m building a house. My children are going to school and I’m not sleeping in the street any more… and my life has changed!”
hen Papa Wemba was arrested in France in 2003 for his alleged role in smuggling people from the Democratic Republic of
Theo says he was sleeping in the street since 2003, when his busness failed, until things with Staff Benda Billi took off. So has his perception of Europe changed since he became a regular visitor? “Before, I imagined it as like a kind of paradise… and now I realise it’s just like everywhere else. It’s just a little bit better. But probably not like Kinshasa!” he laughs.
35-year-old Montana has lived in Kin- shasa since he was a child. He also joined Staff Benda Bilili in 2003, and although his name doesn’t appear in the credits for the album, his picture does; Cubain Kabeya played the drums, but left the band when he met and married a French girl and moved to France.
“Renaud and Florent were doing a
film (Jupiter’s Dance) about my band which I was the drummer of and we were telling them, ‘There is this band of handi- capped people, you must meet them’… so I started to come to all the rehearsals of Staff Benda Bilili and I started to play per- cussion with them, and helped them with the rhythm arrangements. Then when Cubain – my friend who plays on the record – left Kinshasa, I took his place.”
Montana is a charismatic presence during shows, raising his arms theatrically aloft at suspenseful points and often encouraging audience participation. He made his unique kit himself, using hol- lowed-out tree trunks with rubber inner tube skins as his toms, palm leaves and umbrella spokes in place of brushes, tin cans for cymbals, bamboo logs and a wooden frame which he partly uses to get a kick drum effect. Even though a conven- tional drum kit would be too expensive for most musicians in Kinshasa, he bridles at
Rehearsing at the BBC for Later With Jools Holland
the suggestion that this was his motivation for such a DIY appoach.
“It’s not for reasons of economy! It’s for ‘research’. I’ve been searching for something new for ages. I’m doing research of sounds. I listen to the birds, to everything, to melodies I can hear all over – in the forest or in the city – and I’m always adding new things that I find.”
Montana says he got the idea to build his own kit after an American friend noticed his experiments in creat- ing percussion instruments. “He said to me:’Why don’t you make a complete drum kit in this way?”
As for influences, Montana says he has almost too many to name. “I’ve played with lots of groups in Kinshasa! I like Tony Allen a lot,” he says, and although his kinetic style bears little resemblance to Allen’s minimal movement at his kit, it’s true that the track Staff Benda Bilili does have a strong Afrobeat feel. “Yes, except we don’t have brass,” adds Montana. “But [on Polio] you do have frogs,” I observe, to the great amusement of Theo. “Yes, the first fans of Staff Benda Bilili were the frogs, because they saw and heard every- thing we did!” chuckles Montana.
According to Theo, Staff Benda Bilili’s preference for an acoustic ambience isn’t really about trying to hark back to the early days of rumba Congolaise. “It’s because we’re making a new sound for the world,” he claims. “It’s not for going ‘back to the roots’, because the roots of rumba as we know it were always with electric Fend- er guitars and a normal drum kit. We just want to have our own sound, which is why we use acoustic guitars made in Kinshasa and the satonge… it’s like our trademark.”
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