If watching Ebo Taylor doesn’t put a big stupid grin on your face then there must be something very wrong with you. I’m being serious. Go to the doctor. You can’t keep living this way. You’re broken. He is a man who seems so incredibly happy to be alive and doing what he does that you can’t help but catch some of his enthusiasm. This is joy in musical form, and it would take someone with a heart of stone to disagree.
For those who don’t know, Ebo Taylor is a Ghanaian highlife legend. Born in 1936 in Saltpond, Ghana, Ebo has fronted many afrobeat and highlife bands in his 74 years and is still going strong. It is clear tonight he is not merely reliving his past, however: his band are all young, highly skilled musicians from all over the globe who expertly flesh out his songs with razor-sharp rhythms and piercing horns. Ebo himself has a beautiful voice, well complimented by his band who all contribute to pitch-perfect harmonies and seem totally comfortable riffing off his improvised chanting, leading to some pseudo-rap call-and-response sessions. Ebo focuses mainly on vocals, dancing and crowd gesturing (he spends a good 20 minutes waving his handkerchief at several members of the audience), but he occasionally picks up a guitar, playing a bizarrely disjointed and tossed off series of improvised riffs that probably shouldn’t work but somehow seem to fit. You just can’t dislike the guy.
Fool’s Gold seem inexperienced young upstarts in comparison, having only been around for a few years. Their 2009 self-titled debut fuses rhythms and melodic ideas from various African and Middle Eastern musical traditions with a Western pop aesthetic, coupled with lyrics partially sung in Hebrew. The sheer variety of influences and musical ideas running through the record could easily have lead to a muddled Frankenstein’s monster of an album, but they managed to fuse all these styles into a unified aesthetic entirely of their own. Tonight, however, they are primarily showcasing songs from their upcoming sophomore effort, many of which have never been played to a British audience before. They begin their set with a Congolese soukous inspired number, picking up where debut single ‘Surprise Hotel’ left off. It is immediate and infectious, sending the dancing audience into something of a frenzy. Unfortunately this is the shining moment in an otherwise hit and miss set. The next new song sounds almost exactly like The Cure. The next sounds like Talking Heads. These songs lose all of what made the band fascinating: they just sound like two Western pop bands. They might have well have been covers. When they play songs from their debut, the difference in quality (and audience enjoyment) is apparent. When they eventually play ‘Surprise Hotel’, for example, the audience goes crazy.
The night ends with a joint set by both bands, a special one-off performance arranged specially for this gig. The stage is crammed full of people, all five of Fool’s Gold and all seven or Ebo’s band, most musicians swapping instruments and playing off one another. They play through a greatly expanded version of one of Ebo’s tracks, followed by an extended Fool’s Gold-led jam based around a two chord motif. It’s upbeat, danceable and has a huge sense of collective joy resounding between everyone on stage and the dancing masses below.