Jinxed: the curse of the Bhundu Boys

Zimbabwean group first flew into Britain 20 years ago, and became stars overnight, world music pioneers who supported Madonna. But their fall was equally dizzying - as tragedy wiped out the band. Founder and survivor Rise Kagonga tells a story of optimism and despair to Graeme Thomson.

Rise Kagona is sitting in an Edinburgh cafe. It's a warm August afternoon but he is dressed for winter, swaddled in a bomber jacket and a thick woollen shirt, the ever-present baseball hat glued to his head as he sips his tea and wonders. A quiet, thoughtful man, he wonders about a lot of things: the way humans impose boundaries on a world belonging solely to the Creator; how the value of life back home in Zimbabwe continues to deteriorate; above all, he wonders what on earth happened to the Bhundu Boys. It was, the band's guitarist, singer and founder member recalls with surprise, 20 years ago.

In May 1986, Kagona and his young compatriots - singer and guitarist Biggie Tembo, bass player David Mankaba, drummer Kenny Chitsvatsva and keyboard player Shakespeare Kangwena - landed at Gatwick and stepped into the unknown. For a short spell they were welcomed with open arms, the infectious, virile joy of their music seducing all-comers and earning them a support slot for Madonna at Wembley and a record deal with Warner Brothers. The Bhundu Boys were by no means the first stars of what we now understand as world music - that accolade could go to anyone from Ravi Shankar to Bob Marley - but they were the first African band to make an appreciable impact upon the archetypal NME-reading, gig-going, Peel-listening Eighties music fan.

And when it fell apart, it did so in truly tragic fashion: Aids, suicide, prison, poverty. Kagona now lives hand-to-mouth in a farm cottage in Scotland and is only just beginning to pick up the threads of his life and career. His friends weren't quite so lucky.

The Bhundu Boys did not arrive in Britain as unknown entities. They were met at the airport by 'Champion' Doug Veitch, a Scotsman whose unique brand of Caledonian Cajun swing had briefly made him an NME favourite in his own right. Veitch was a world music pioneer. He had founded the Discafrique label with Owen Elias and discovered the Bhundu Boys when in Harare, subsequently releasing three of their songs on the 1985 'Discafrique' EP. The music entranced Andy Kershaw and John Peel, who championed the band and other Zimbabwean groups such as the Four Brothers on their Radio 1 shows.

Post-Live Aid and amid the growing clamour to end apartheid, the cultural and political climate in Britain was ripe for the Bhundu Boys. According to Veitch, they arrived for the six-date tour, starting that night in Glasgow, clutching only their toilet bags. 'Not an instrument in sight,' he laughs today. "We flew up to Scotland to buy them instruments while they took the slowest train possible to Glasgow and walked straight onstage.' Although he had released their records, Veitch had never actually heard them perform live and was 'praying' they could play. 'Ten seconds into the first number you knew,' he says. 'They played for three hours and were absolutely …… sensational.'

They had learnt their trade in the less than salubrious nightspots of Harare, playing from 7pm until 4am without a break and often without acknowledgement or recognition. 'In Zimbabwe, if you play for only one-and-a-half hours, people will stone you to death,' says Kagona, matter-of-factly. Glasgow must have felt a little like home. Newly independent Zimbabwe was intrinsic to their identity. Under the old Rhodesian regime, traditional African music wasn't allowed on the airwaves and Kagona grew up playing rock and pop music: the Beatles, Stones, Hendrix. Around the same time as Robert Mugabe's Zanu PF were sweeping into power in 1980, Kagona met exuberant singer and guitarist Biggie Tembo, who became his chief foil as their band, the Wild Dragons, mutated into the Bhundu Boys.

Although never a political group per se, the Bhundus were forged in the fire of independence: they took their name from young bush guerillas who aided the resistance fighters, wore army fatigues, and viewed Mugabe as a hero. Once they started writing their own songs and singing in their native Shona rather than English, they were almost immediately successful. Between 1981 and 1984 they had a string of hits, including four number ones. After coming to prominence, the band would occasionally be summoned to meet their president. 'He was a decent man,' claims Kagona. 'Everyone was proud of him after 1980, but as time went on things started to change. He started ignoring the promises he had made.' It's fair to say Kagona is no longer a fan, comparing Mugabe to Idi Amin. 'How is he helping his own people now? High rate of poverty, high rate of unemployed, people suffering. Bulldozing their homes where some of them were living pretty.'

In Britain, the band had to adapt swiftly. Although they had arrived in the UK with a manager in tow, he swiftly vanished with much of their money. The volatile Veitch, drowning in a sea of alcohol, soon disappeared too. It was left to his school acquaintance Gordon Muir, a graphic designer with no experience of the music industry, to take charge. Muir was based in the small Scottish Borders town of Hawick and soon the band were also living there, five of them sharing two small rooms in his basement, quietly absorbing the culture shock. 'When we lived in Hawick, we were the only five black people in the whole town,' recalls Kagona. 'Children would cry! Old ladies would shout.' It was anything but glamorous. They toured relentlessly through 1986 and 1987, promoting the Shabini and Tsvimbodzemoto albums on Discafrique, both major hits on the indie chart. What made the Bhundu Boys unique in UK terms was not so much their 'jit' music, which was a superior but fairly generic representation of the Zimbabwe Shed Studio sound, with zinging guitars, bubbling bass and throaty, percussive call-and-response vocals, but the fact that here was an overseas band who were willing to put the hours in.

'They came over to play the British club scene: B&Bs, sleeping in vans, travelling all over the country in uncomfortable conditions,' says broadcaster and OMM contributor Charlie Gillett, another early champion of the band. 'Very, very few groups from outside the UK are prepared to surrender to that fairly humiliating grind. I have great respect for them for making that connection with the British audience - you almost need to see them as an extension of the British indie rock scene at least as much as a world music band.' Tembo, in particular, was a magnificently garrulous frontman, but the whole band had a gift for communication which hurdled the language barrier. 'If you don't make them dance, they're not going to sit there and listen to you because they don't understand what you're saying,' explains Kagona, who remains an expert at getting a crowd upstanding. 'We wanted everyone to feel happy, [although] some of the songs are very sorrowful.'

They made swift inroads. Little over a year after their Glasgow debut the band were supporting Madonna at Wembley and had signed a two-album deal with Warner Brothers. The music, however, was already suffering. The truth is that the Bhundu Boys created their best work before they ever reached Britain. The Shed Sessions - a still-available compilation of tracks from their early albums - knocks several spots off their 1988 major label debut, True Jit, slickly and soullessly recorded by Sade producer Robin Millar. Most of the songs were in English and called things like 'African Woman' and 'Happy Birthday'. It was, without question, a disaster. '

They were already very commercial,' says Doug Veitch. 'You've got a product that is hugely popular and you think, "Right, we'll change it completely." People liked it being sung in Shona. They didn't want brass sections and "Come on, let's join hands" and all that rubbish.' The follow up, 1989's Pamberi, was an improvement but fared little better. They were dropped by WEA and inter-band tensions began to open up. Most of the Bhundu's £80,000 advance from WEA was spent buying a house in Kensal Rise, a decision which divided the group and which Kagona still fumes about today. He wanted to keep the money and put down roots back in Zimbabwe, but he was outvoted.

To be continued...