Review | Songlines

Fisherman

Rating: ★★★

View album and artist details

Album and Artist Details

Artist/band:

The Mighty Cavaliers

Label:

Want Some Records

December/2024

If you were a music fan in Nairobi back in the 70s, you would almost certainly have spent time at the Starlight Club and enjoyed listening to The Mighty Cavaliers, who often played there for five nights a week, giving five-hour sets at a time. The band only released two long-deleted albums, the second of which, Mapendo (1977), was revived by the German label Want Some back in the autumn (and reviewed in #192). Now comes the first, Fisherman, from 1976. It’s another fascinating slice of African musical history, and a reminder that the band had to give their audiences what they wanted, which in this case was a mixture of driving dance songs, soukous and Western pop. The slow pop ballad ‘Look at Me’ hasn’t survived too well, but there’s rousing keyboard work on ‘Trying to Get You’, and the brass-backed soukous tracks are glorious.

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