With an unconscious nod to John Peel, I put on the B side of this record at 33 rpm instead of 45. It was sounding pretty reasonable and I didn't remember until quarter or a third of the way through that I hadn't changed the speed. I put the B side on the turntable first because it turns out the A side can be found in multiple mixes all over the net. Here's the original version, as on my record, with what looks like the original video (I never saw it at the time, so can't be sure).
All those web references give the release date as 1983, but I associate it with our time in Cosin Court, which would put it at no earlier than October 1984 — perhaps, for once, Peel didn't pick up on it straight away, as I see it's in his Festive 50 for 1984.
I'm pretty sure you weren't keen on it at the time, but do you get the appeal now? I love it as much now as I did then, particularly for the way it seems to reference so many diverse sounds from Peter Gabriel (think Biko) and Giorgio Moroder to Lee Perry and Fela Kuti.
Many of the lyrics are not very easy to discern, but "Give me the power" is clear as a bell, and I always thought I could hear mention of an Armalite in there. So I always imagined Masimbabele as a rebel song, assuming that the chorus was a chant of resistance, similar perhaps to Amandla. So it's with a slight sense of let down that I read here that
The words are about a Reggae-musician, who was called Mataya Clifford and his children Masimba and Maya. They play together. He keeps putting his hand on Masimba's "belly" and on Maya's "belly", and they start laughing. Because it sounds so groovy, so hooky, "Maya bele, Masimba bele", we repeated it so it became the chorus.
We7 features Masimbabele on a compilation of electronic dance beat 1983. Blimey! I had to listen all the way through. I'm sure the music of 1983 wasn't so exciting at the time — at least not in my little world.
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