Black Voices Revisited

Released in 1999, two years after the death of Fela Kuti, whose band was fired for so long by Allen's powerhouse drumming, Black Voices was at the time regarded as a new horizon for Afro-beat. After Allen had recorded the album's five extended tracks in Paris with a band that included ex-Parliament singers Mike ‘Clip’ Payne and Gary ‘Mudbone’ Cooper, the DJ and producer Doctor L remixed the album in a trip-hop style. He brought up the keyboards and added clavinet and lots of DJ effects, resulting in Afro-beat that had never sounded so modern. The problem with ‘modernity’, of course, is that it is based on fashion and so what was once cutting-edge can sound dated very quickly. And so it is with the original Black Voices. Fast forward a dozen years and today it sounds like a great record struggling to escape from a gimmick-laden production, full of gratuitous squiggles and electronic squelching. Eric Trosset, founder of Comet Records, came to the same conclusion. He went back to the pre-Doctor L tapes and found that the raw tracks as laid down in the studio have stood the test of time much better than the contemporary remix. The album has now been re-released with both versions presented alongside each other. Nowhere is the difference between the two better illustrated than on the title-track, which is now revealed as an stunning maelstrom of simmering, subtly dubbed grooves, with keys and bass weaving irresistibly around Allen's complex rhythms. Nicolas Giraud adds a magnificently spiralling trumpet solo and Payne vocalises thrillingly. The results render Doctor L's additions quite redundant.