root salad Kobo Town
Drew Gonsalves only discovered the calypso roots of his native Trinidad after emigrating, hears Jamie Renton.
A
s often as not you’ve got to move away from your roots in order to really dig ’em. That’s certainly the case with Drew Gonsalves, who
only discovered a love for calypso after he’d left his native Trinidad for the somewhat chillier climes of Canada. This ultimately resulted in the formation of his band Kobo Town, whose second album Jumbie In The Jukebox (Stonetree/ Cumbancha) is a lovely blend of old-style calypso wordplay and a modern mix ’n’ match roots-pop sensibility, produced by Ivan Duran (of Andy Palacio/Garifina Collective fame).
Drew moved to Canada in his early teens with his mother, he explains when we grab a few minutes between sound- check and stagetime at the Old Queen’s Head, Islington, where the Kobos are mak- ing their only London appearance at Sam Lee’s Nest Collective night. “I don’t know if it was the abruptness of the move, or just feeling out of place in this new country, but it really sent my thoughts back home a lot.” He was a bookish teen who read up on Caribbean history and through this dis- covered calypso. “I’d heard lots of calypso growing up, but wasn’t really interested. Like most middle class Trini boys, my tastes were directed outside.”
Once bitten by the calypso bug, Drew
was soon snaffling up any CD reissues he could get his hands on and rummaging through secondhand bins in search of rare vinyl. And we are talking the old stuff here: Roaring Lion, Roaring Tiger, Lord Invader… calypso’s roots royalty. “I was interested in the history and there was no music that sang the experience and told the story of Trinidad and its people like calypso. I always remember this quote from Albert Gomes who was a contestant in Trinidad’s first election (he lost to Eric Williams), he said ‘Long after most of us have died and gone, calypsos will be the only things to remind people of how we loved and laboured, laughed and sinned!’ and I found that was very much the case.”
Drew was playing in Canadian rock- reggae band Outcry at the time but, inspired by the live old-style calypso he heard on trips back to Trini to visit his father, found he was increasingly writing in that style and in order to accommodate this, started Kobo Town (named after the Trinidadian village where calypso was born) initially as a studio project and sub- sequently a fully-fledged live band.
Jumbie In The Jukebox is the follow-
up to 2007’s Independence (Skycap) and, like its predecessor, is chock full of stories and social comment. The opener Kaiso Newscast harks back to “the time when
calypso brought the news”, responding immediately to events like a musical 24- hour rolling newscast. “There are songs about everything from Pears soap to the Graf Zeppelin flying overhead,” Drew explains. “So I started thinking about how some of the headlines of recent years, like finding Saddam Hussein in that dugout pit in the ground and the oil boom in Trinidad, would be delivered if they were still delivered by calypso.”
Half Of The Houses deals with the immigrant experience. “I wrote it thinking about the first time I went back to Trinidad and in those five or six years since I’d moved to Canada, half the people in my neighbourhood had left and were all in Washington DC, London, New York and a lot of them in Toronto. So it’s really a song about going home to find that home had followed me!”
Road To Fyzabad was written in the town of that name in southern Trinidad. “It was the site of a huge labour revolt led by a preacher called Uriah Butler. It spread across the island and was echoed on other islands in the Caribbean,” in the summer of 1937. “Every year on Labour
L
Day all the unions run buses to Fyzabad to the accompaniment of steel bands, brass bands and fiery political orators. I remember going through there thinking that history was alive. So I wrote the song about the revolt and the hope that it offered Trinidad, because it was also one of the very few moments in our history where the ethnic divide between our two majorities of Africans and Indians was transcended for a while.”
ater that evening Kobo Town deliver two sets of hot-as-you- please calypso spiked with rock, funk and reggae. The tiny upstairs room is packed with the great and good of London’s world music scene, not always the easiest crowd to fire up, but by the end, pretty well everyone seems to be dancing.
“I’ve got one foot in the tradition and one foot outside of it,” chuckles Drew, as we bid our goodnights. “I’ve always felt like the ‘insider-outsider’. I don’t know what the word for that is… confused, I suppose!”
Maybe? But if so, it’s the best kind of
confusion.
www.kobotown.com
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