Music Arcades: Bhundu Boys: Shabini

John Peel and Andy Kershaw both went overboard about The Bhundu Boys. Didn't they visit Zimbabwe, in the days when BBC employees still could, to get the full low-down? And Peel would tell stories of him, or his wife, or both, dancing like they were teenagers again. Probably his wife, now I come to think of it.

Their songs never grabbed me when I heard them on the radio — same with The Four Brothers, but I bought this record because those guys were rarely both wrong, and I thought the fault must lie with me. Sadly buying the record didn't help me overcome that fault, and I still haven't over two decades later. It's a trite thing to say, but the songs all sound the same to me. I guess that charge could equally be levelled at King Sunny Adé, Fela Kuti… or The Clientele, but those draw me in until I discern the individual characters of the songs. For some reason, this doesn't.

This album was near the beginning, as far as English audiences were concerned. The end of Bhundu Boys, as outlined on the Wikipedia profile, was very sad indeed. With Peel gone, and Kershaw out of action for the last two years and only recently re-emerging into public view, they seem to have drifted out of collective memory. It's very hard to track down a copy of this album anywhere now, aside from one or two on eBay.