Atomic Bomb with David Byrne: the music of William Onyeabor | Full Live Performance 

Thats a dream come true :) Nice one.

Holly Brain

Holly Brain wq

I was the big guy, who front-lined the choir, front and centre. We got to do the blow-off, the emotional false high followed by the real high just before the end, and the encore! Most people were up and dancing already, but by the time we were done with them, everyone was, including most of VoiceLab (the Choir)! I'm also a Reiki practitioner, and I just opened the taps to get the feelgood, we knocked the socks off the rehearsals as a result. When you get to their hearts, they stay hooked high for good, there is no going back, they are out of the 'hood. It is down down down down roots. The lesson is to do more of the same. Reach out and bring them in.

I simply stumped upon William Onyeabor via a RU-vid suggestion. I've been listening to Nigerian Music for years (after I'd lived with an Igbo housemate) and somehow I missed this. "What? Who is this William Onyeabor? What is this sound? How was I not aware of this? How is this even possible?" Better late to the party than never. You guys gave this music the performance it demands. Thank you so much.

yeah man

Same and I'm a year behind ya. ;)

He's still going strong to this day. One of the living legends for sure.

hes still alive

I doubt you're speaking of the same person.

+Isä Ankka Byrne, yes, but William Onyeabor unfortunately died in 2017. I just found out myself.

Nice to know! What was it like in the audience? Objectively, from the start. You find your way across from a station, and there's this institutional monolith in front of you. Stale coffee and overpriced sarnies. So you dump luggage, have your tickets checked, settle in to a seat in an orange-lit hall. The lights go down - and?

Yes I was,thanks,exactly what I was looking for when I checked out the comments.Like you knew I would be wondering...smart:)

Ty for letting me know when the meltdown begins 💗💗💗

Love back from the Choir, can you take it on?

True story!

Pure impro, last minute offstage, as the sheer quality of performers we were backing, in the choir, meant our entry had to be appropriate and maintain the vibe!

Who?

Who sings "Heaven and Hell"?

@@marialedacfandrade6631 I want to say it's Jamie Landell. Might be wrong.

Thanks! Liam Evans! He's great, what a voice!

@@liamevans4124 I found Hes Moses Sumney.

That was the real success, getting the audience' bums out of the seats. Compare the start of the gig with the end!

It did - the band took it to a few places, with different local configurations in support. I'm just happy to have been a very small part of it.

No, they kicked the stairs. You come on at floor level and do a sharp turn, because the stage is movable, and is about five feet above floor level. With only one spot and black stairs, it happens.

Yeah! An audio only version of this would be great.

Easy enough to rip and track.. I just did it myself.. :-)

Wow really? That's awasome. I love Damon and Byrne... Now i have new music to check It out

Well the drums are on the left side of the stage ;^)

Robert Syrett haha, makes sense

i totally agree

He's a real multi-instrumentalist. he plays many more intruments

When did you see him play sax here?

@@BIGeSTRING When did you see him play sax here?

@@MauriceMossisitnot i didn't see him play the sax but I have read that he can play many instruments. I don't know if you'll be satisfied with that because I believe you really want proof, don't you?

@RING Yes I've heard of that. I just wanted to know where I could see him playing the sax because that would be cool and I've never seen him do it before. No need to get a wee bit snarky about it, I was simply asking a question. Nonetheless this concert was very enjoyable.

Sarah Jones (Hot Chip and heaven only knows how much else)

Meg White from White Stripes?

@@lancebrown8441 Sarah Jones, now backing Harry Styles. I'm about ten feet behind her!

Alexis Taylor from the band Hot Chip who are also worth looking up.

I have no problem comparing artists. People who doesn't know who William Onyeabor is might get interested and start listening to him if he is compared to more relatable artists that they like. Same goes for new artists from Europe and NA aswell.

Fair enough. However, if you look at where he took trad hilife, he DID blend some of the Western synth techniques of groups like Kraftwerk and Focus with it, and I was an extra link myself: when I was at college at Loughborough in the mid 70s, I was lucky enough to join the University Radio Station at the exact moment when Mike Smith, the Program Controller, launched Kraftwerk: Radio 1 picked them up from him. I took over the job from him, so I'm very much part of that heritage, which was partly driven by the presence of Nick Phillips as Professor of Laser Studies on campus: he designed all the early laser light shows, and so we did the gigs, I (purely notionallly!) was actually Stage Manager for Queen playing for 500 students the week Bohemian Rhapsody hit. 500 in the hall, and 10000 outside - how we got the lads away is my secret. I actually stood back and watched and learned while their team did it, and that and my background knowing something of where they were coming from is how I got to frontline the Choir in this gig (I was just behind Sara on the drums, and we had a little competition going to see if she could drown me, so I surfed her drums as I'm also a drummer too. I'd learned stagecraft from some of the masters, ELO, Mud, too, and my drum mentors were Reuben Blades and Steophan Hannigan... So yes, I did know hilife before it started to drive rap, when it was as likely to be accompanied by thumb pianos and was still very much "roots" in the way you'd like, a purely local tradition., and that is why he has ben "likened to ..." because that is where some of what he added to the trad did indeed come from, much reworked. It's a perfectly fair comparison, and doesn't diminish him in the least: it's not what you did, or where you come from which matters, it's what you're doing now, in the present, and what we did then took William's work further still. I'll probably put this on loop tomorrow, the anniversary of his passing.

You'll also find a link to Alexis' Taylor's explanation of the connection to LCD Soundsystem further down the page.

Live gig, it was about 90 in there. I defy you to sing for an hour and a half in those conditions!

@@JelMain not saying he's a bad singer, he's just too white

@@bugpwdrdust Welcome to World Music. When I last checked, the UK wasn't in outer space. William took ideas from 1973-4 UK, Kraftwerk for sure, and did the same in an African culture Mike Oldfield had done in an English. We had a new instrument to play with, W. Carlos and Isao Tomita had given classical a shake-up, at exactly the same time HIP was rocking the Early Music scene. It's not done yet. The core African is secure, so we can play with it. To quote Sarha Moore's blurb for her City Lit course, "There is a musical narrative that begins in Africa, travels to the Caribbean and South America, then back to Africa, carrying musical styles and rhythmic patterns." And that's just within the ethnic style: I've pointed out how the same works in North America too.

@@JelMain sir, this is a RU-vid comment section

@@bugpwdrdust And I, sir, am not a numptie

Sometimes it sounds like they're doing the same thing, but they aren't. Most drum set rhythms are by their nature polyrhythmic, so sometimes it's hard to realize that the two drummers are actually playing separate rhythms that come together. I haven't actually gotten to the drums in this video yet, so I might come back and agree with you. But my guess is that they are, and that it's just not easy to hear.

In the first song, the drummers are playing two very different beats, but their bass drum hits are in synch. One is lose on the ride, the other is doing 16th notes on the hi-hat. It sounds like one rhythm, but that's the goal of lots of polyrhythms. It doesn't have to be obvious. In the second song they're basically playing the same beat, with differences in how they hit the hats, and what they do as fills--one is playing an open hi hat every two measures, the other is doing something on the floor tom that you can't hear because it's not mic'ed correctly. But it still gives a way richer sound than one drummer would. I think there should be 4 or 5 of everything, myself!

@@mrpollo3470 Add in Atomic Bomb's, a talking drum, our feet...

The guff was from the pre-performance blurb, when nobody knew who'd be able to make it - some of the gang where straight off taxis from Heathrow, it was that tight. Speaking personally, I was part of the team at Loughborough which launched Kraftwerk to Radio One, and I was in the Choir, frontlining because I knew HighLife from the 1950s, so there is connectivity. - and that's just a small bit I can talk of because it's mine. Many many other performers have much greater links. You miss the entire message of the end, so listen again, and again, and again. That way you might begin to understand, this isn't about the history, it's about where it goes next.

Perhaps you'll allow Alexis Taylor to explain: www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/19/hot-chip-alexis-taylor-william-onyeabor . So yes, seriously.

Why so angry?

In some ways, that's Southbank's admin for you. Their usual Summer Meltdown series is curated by a star performer, and this was just the umpteenth of the same to them. The choir was more at home with Beethoven 9 or one of the other warhorses, I was very much on the experimental edge, doing a shanty for the London Literary Festival's continuous reading of Moby Dick, for example, about a decade back. The family's RN, so I'd been with a crew in the EFDSS choir. Anyway, the Curator, David, gets to do his own gig as thanks, and that's about as much as we knew in the Choir. To turn up and find the quality of the band was a shock, and switched me into my old Producer mode, adding the shuffle dance at the last moment.

It was too difficult to get everyone together to rehearse, the core band had been travelling for some time, but the guests and choir only came together on the night. But that's the essence of HighLife, it's not over-rehearsed, it was a form of folk and still keeps that spontaneity, so it's a performance and not a recording played live.

William Onyeabor is dancing in his grave😈