A couple of 1980s videos for the weekend

I've been slacking on the blog lately partly because I've been busy working on Now Again Records' upcoming Nigerian fuzz funk compilation and partly because I've been having trouble with my FTP since I've been back. The latter is also the reason my sparse updates have relied upon YouTube links, and I hope to resolve the issue soon and start getting some mp3s back up here. In the meantime, though, here are some more videos.

While the blog was on hiatus during my sojourn in Nigeria, I received a number of emails from a particularly insistent reader who wanted to me post the music videos of the 1980s kiddie-pop star, Yvonne Maha. Now as I've mentioned a few times in the past, it is nigh impossible to find pre-1990 music videos in Nigeria because at most television stations, if the humongous U-matic and Quad tapes on which they were stored that were not dubbed over with new content, they were thrown out wholesale to make room for new hardware. So I made no promises to find these videos, but I pledged to do my best.

As it turns out, the best I could do was to unearth this clip of Yvonne Maha appearing on The Bala Miller Show in 1983. I'd like to think that this also will at least partially please my girl Kelechi who requested some Bala Miller. (Don't worry, Kay; I'll be putting up some more Miller stuff a little later.)



Also, here is a 1981 promo (that's what we called music videos way back in the day) for Harry "Mr. Funkees" Mosco's Sugar Cane Baby, during his London period. The color's a bit messed up but that's because whoever digitized it didn't adjust the hue. It's still fun to watch, especially for its evocation of that innocent era when the music video was such a new invention and most performers had no inkling of how to comport their bodies or their faces in them. I mean, look at Harry's awkward shuffling, the band's hammy pretend-playing and the unabashed scenery chewing by the light-skinneded singer gal! I swear, she did that in all the videos Harry shot for this album (I remember there being three or four of them), even the ballad!

One Pound No Balance

It appears a lot of people enjoyed the clip from "The Stephen Osita Osadebe Show" I posted last week and want to see more.*

So here's some more.



I'm still posting these short clips on YouTube just for the sake of continuity (plus, somewhere deep down inside I probably want to be a YouTube star) but I'll soon start putting up longer versions on Dailymotion.

*What I found interesting though is that the clip of the much more obscure Golden Sounds I uploaded to YouTube on the same day has received well over two times the number of views of the Osadebe video--thanks probably to the World Cup-fueled renewed interest in "Zangalewa"/"Waka Waka." I really hope the Golden Sounds can harness this attention into a strong comeback!

The Stephen Osita Osadebe Show - "Osondi Owendi"

It's extremely rare to encounter live performance footage of Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe because like many musicians of his generation he guarded his music and his image jealously. He turned down most invitations to play on television and demanded exorbitant sums for the rights to film him in performance. However, in the early 1980s NTA 10 Lagos finally convinced the Doctor of Hypertension to do a weekly television half-hour show.

The program took the format of a live-in-studio Osadebe concert--no skits, no guest stars, no interviews, no chit-chat, no frills. Osadebe and the band would just perform two or three songs straight. The only variation would be when Chief would step off stage to let one of the other band members lead while he danced in the wings.

Here is an early rendition of the now-classic "Osondi Owendi." It's actually a bit longer than this but I had to get it to fit in at under 10 minutes in order to upload it on YouTube.

The things one finds on YouTube...

Well, this is kinda interesting. To me, anyway. Kinda.

Considering that I've previously expressed dismay over the lousy preservation treatment that's been accorded a lot of old Nigerian movies and TV shows, it kinda makes me happy to see stuff like this.

I don't know where they got this from... For all I know, it could have been ripped from the iNollywood site, in which case it's probably ancient history to the folks who use their service. I don't use their service, so it's new to me:



Basi and Company debuted in 1985, the brainchild of author and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa, then hot off the success of his self-published Civil War novel Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English and collection of poems Songs in a Time of War. Basi was much lighter fare, though; a sitcom centered around a loveable trickster named Basi (or Mr. B) who comes to Lagos with dreams of becoming a millionaire but ends up living in a one-room flat surrounded by a colorful characters like his dimwitted sidekick Alali, Dandy the bartender and the golddigging Segi, all of whom he drags into his weekly moneymaking schemes while trying to stay one step ahead of his flamboyant landlady, "Madam the Madam."

Basi and Company was more than just a hit show--although it certainly was that; it was almost definitely the most popular television program to ever hit the Nigerian airwaves at that point and even gained followings in other African countries--it was an all-over marketing phenomenon. You had Basi T-shirts, Basi books, Basi hats, and the national popularity of buzz phrases like "If you want to be a millionaire, think like a millionaire!" "It's just a matter of CASH!" "I'm hungry, Mr. B!" and "Come in if you're handsome and rich!"

Looking back on it now, I'd say a large part of the show's success could be attributed to Saro-Wiwa's skillful use of certain mind-control techniques long employed by British and American TV comedies, namely the laugh track (this was the first Nigerian show to feature one) and characterization by way of punchy catchphrases that are repeated at least once per episode, though often much, much more (a.k.a. The Ever-Popular "Are You 'Avin' a Larf?" Effect).

That much aside, it was pretty well put-together (at first, anyway). I won't claim to have been a major fan of the show (I could probably count the number of full episodes I watched on one hand and still have enough fingers left over to stroke my goatee and thumb my nose--I mostly gave up on watching NTA network shows when my own favorites Second Chance and The Bala Miller Show were unceremoniously yanked off the air in '85) but the few times I checked it out, it seemed pretty entertaining, and its broad lambaste of the mid-1980s Nigerian get-rich-quick mentality really resonated with the audience.

Based on the ads at the beginning, I'm going to guess that this episode is from 1988--not a particularly enriching point in Basi and Company's run, really. You see, the part of Mr. B was originated by Albert Egbe, who I always thought was much too old for the role (he must have been in his late 30s if not early 40s) but was an incredibly engaging and likeable performer who brought the character wonderfully to life. In 1987, Egbe exited the show over money disputes with Saro-Wiwa; considering that Egbe's likeness was so intractably associated with the character, it looked like there was no way for Basi and Company to continue without him. But somehow, Saro-Wiwa reeled in young up-and-comer Zulu Adigwe to fill Basi's cap and T-shirt and soldiered on. This was universally accepted as the show's shark-jumping moment.

(I remember my father telling me that they actually explained Mr. B's radically changed appearance with some bizarre Doctor Who-esque plotline about Basi going to the moon and undergoing a physical metamorphosis! My dad can be a big kidder sometimes, so I was never really sure whether or not he made up that story. But considering the fact that Saro-Wiwa often novelized his teleplays and he later published a children's book called Mr. B on the Moon, I guess it's probably true.)

At this point, it was like Saro-Wiwa wasn't even trying very hard anymore. Production values nosedived as he delegated more and more. The scripts felt phoned-in. It was as if Saro-Wiwa himself was bored with the show, or maybe he was just too distracted to give it his full attention, seeing as he had accepted an appointment from President Babangida to shepherd the proposed 1990 transition to civilian rule (which didn't happen, of course).


The show limped along for a few more years, during which time Saro-Wiwa continued to expand the Basi and Company brand via a successful series of children's books, published teleplays and other spinoffs. Zulu Adigwe even released a record as Mr. B, based on the character's catchphrase (He can be seen singing the song at the beginning of this clip).

Basi and Company finally went off the air in 1990, as Ken Saro-Wiwa began to concentrate more and more on the causes for which he is best-remembered today: Campaigning against the Nigerian government's and Royal Dutch Shell's abuse and exploitation of the environment and people in the oil-producing Delta region of the country. In 1994, when Sani Abacha's government (with the tacit encouragement of Shell) detained him and eight other activists on a trumped-up murder charge, Saro-Wiwa became a cause celebre for human rights advocates the world over. After a rigged trial, Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues were hanged on November 10, 1995. In the years since, he's taken on the stature of a kind of contemporary Martin Luther King-type figure on account of his activism, so it's nice to see some of his other work out there.

Another interesting note: The opening credits list the Production Manager as "Nkem Owoh." I will assume this is the same Nkem Owoh who in recent years has achieved immense fame as a comedic actor, particular in the mega-grossing Osuofia in London films and the accompanying "I Go Chop Your Dollar" clip that generated a good deal of controversy when it appeared online a few years ago.

It was just a satirical in-character novelty song narrated from the POV of a 419er, but some of these onyibo people were piiiiiiiiiiiiiiissed... They even showed the video on 20/20 and Dateline NBC and they were practically exploding with outrage: It was bad enough that scores of innocent, honest Americans were being scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year when all they had tried to do was help a fellow human being out the pure goodness of their hearts and aid the besieged son of a deceased African dictator in laundering millions of embezzled dollars! And now these unwashed cockroaches skittering around in some podunk Third World shithole like Nigeria had the nerve to make a music video mocking them and bragging "white man, I will eat your dollars"??!!??



I think the line that really burned dem belly had to have been "419 is just a game... You are the LOSER... I am the WINNER!" (Probably "I BE THE MASTER!" too.) Chris Hanson was positively brimming with the kind of moral indignation that he's never mustered up when standing in a suburban kitchen chatting with CanIRapeUAnally312, who's insisting that even though he's just driven four hours to meet with a 13-year-old boy with condoms, KY Warming Formula and a ball gag in his glove compartment, his only intention was to caution the kid of the dangers of hooking up online!

But like I was saying: It's cool to see these old shows people preserved in some form even though my main priority right now is rescuing vintage musical performances. I'd love to see the musical numbers from Victor Uwaifo's variety shows make an appearance. I know he's got to have every single one saved... I mean, Victor Uwaifo has a friggin' museum where he's preserved his first guitar that he made from an oil can and some string when he was knee-high to a cricket and framed clippings of about every story that's ever been written about him. Considering the fact that he owned his own TV production facility back then, he's got to have all the tapes. Someone should convince him to put them joints out on DVD or something.

(Come to think of it, Saro-Wiwa was an independent producer who owned all his masters, too... And these clips look like they were taken from the masters. How did they get here? *shrug*)



Anyways, if you want to watch the rest of "The Transistor Radio," here's

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Here's to lost tapes found!

One of the abiding tragedies of Nigerian popular music is the fact that there's so little audiovisual documentation of its development. It kinda hurts my heart when I watch, say, the extensive collection of vintage Congolese music performances on Innosita TV because they remind me so much of similar performances I used to watch of Nigerian music stars of the 1970s and early 80s (back when artists used to make videos for every track on their albums!). Not to mention the numerous TV variety shows like The Bar Beach Show with Art Alade, The Tee-Mac Show, Sir Victor Uwaifo's Expo! and The Bala Miller Show.

Today, I don't know if anybody knows for sure where any of that footage is, thanks laregly to the Nigerian Television Authority's shoddy job of protecting their archives. You see, during the lean days of the late 80s and early 90s, it became fairly standard procedure to dub over old tapes. What are you gonna do? Stuff like that happens from time to time, but it's the indiscriminate nature of it that beggars belief. From what I've heard, corner-cutting producers were sneaking into the tape libraries and snatching not just music videos, but even master copies of important television shows like The Village Headmaster and The Adio Family to tape their shows over. Huge chunks of historically significant popular culture disappear with the push of a "record" button (or rather, the simultaneous pushing of the "record" and "play" buttons for my old school heads).

Still, I remain hopeful that at least some of that footage has survived somewhere out there. Lately iNollywood.com has been streaming classic NTA shows like The New Masquerade and Second Chance, and even vintage TV commercials. I have no clue how they acquired this content--and believe me, I have asked--but if they've got it, maybe someone else has some other stuff too, like some heretofore lost performances by the likes of Bobby Benson, The Sunshine Sisters, and Sir Patrick Idahosa & His African Sound Makers.

Fela has fared a lot better than most Nigerian musicians in this regard because his colorful reputation has made him a subject of fascination for filmmakers across the globe. Even then, there's only so much existing performance footage of the man, and a lot of that can be attributed his abrasive personality as well: I can't remember the name of the European filmmaker who traveled to Lagos to shoot a Fela documentary and had to go home with his dreams crushed after the Chief Priest demanded an exorbitant sum for the rights to film him; former NTA producer Chris Obi-Rapu has revealed that plans were in motion for Fela to get his own TV show in the 1970s but network got scared and pulled the plug; and then there was Fela's self-produced hagiopic, The Black President, whose master print was destroyed when soldiers burned down his house in 1977.

This makes it all the more a joy to behold previously unseen footage, especially when its from the less-documented early periods of Fela's career. I'm talking, of course, about the DVD Ginger Baker in Africa.

For those who don't know the story, here's a quick recap: In 1971, Ginger Baker, the drummer of the legendary rock group Cream, decided to take a trip to Nigeria, traveling across the Sahara desert. Once in Nigeria, he situated himself within the local music scene, built the first multitrack recording studio in West Africa, and planted the seeds for the "Afro-rock" era by forming the band SALT (featuring Berkley Jones, Laolu Akins and Mike Odumosu--who would break off as the power trio BLO--and the Lijadu Sisters).

Apparently, Baker filmed some of his travels but sat on the footage for more than 30 years. Now, finally, he's unveiled it and given us an intriguing (if nebulous) inside look at the Nigerian music scene in the immediate post-Biafra period. To be honest, the film is very clearly a product of its drug-addled times, with incoherent editing reminiscent of the LSD scene from Easy Rider and meandering narration by Baker. But it's worth it all to see the documentary's centerpiece: Baker reunites with his old friend Fela Ransome-Kuti as the rising king of afrobeat performs in a rain-soaked open-air nightclub in Calabar:



Apropos of nothing, I'll mention right off the top that I was rather tickled to see the "Luna Nite Club" sign at the end, because that place was still rocking on Fosbury Road when I was growing up in Calabar in the 80s.

Other than that, while the sound isn't great, but I think it's still a lot of fun to watch what a good time he seems to be having onstage (especially as he playfully "manhandles" his dancers and players). The show seems a lot looser than than his later performance style, and he's still rocking that weird snakeskin vest thing he used to wear before he got into the custom-made embroidered jumpsuits. Ginger Baker has got to have more stuff like this, and I hope he puts it out soon. (Come to think of it, Roy Ayers has said that he's got a boatload of footage from his stay with Fela in 1979/80... Give up the goods, Roy!)