Prom 74 (6.9.12): Staff Benda Bilili & Baloji

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Thursday 6 September at 10.15 p.m.
Royal Albert Hall

Staff Benda Bilili
Baloji

A late night Prom with the Congolese street band Staff Benda Bilili, who perform music from their latest Album Bouger Le Monde (Make the World Move) and are also joined by the brilliant Congolese-Belgo rapper Baloji.

Staff Benda Bilili, a group of paraplegic street musicians and ex-street kids from the Democratic Republic of Congo, are one of the most inspiring success stories in the global music scene. They live around the grounds of the zoo in Kinshasa and make music rooted in Soukous (or African rumba) with elements of old-school rhythm and blues, reggae and funk. In this late night Prom they perform material from their latest release Bouger Le Monde, and also join forces with the Congolese-born and Belgian-educated rapper Baloji, who mixes old and cutting-edge sounds with bitingly modern lyrics.

[PhilipT]

This was a good example of what you get at such a Prom. I've been to far worse (e.g. Jose Merce and his so-called modern flamenco, or before that Bruce Gaston and his American-Thai fusion music). As with Jose Merce, although they had a playlist there were no lyrics in the programme; I could make out the occasional word (they sing in what I would describe as Central African French), so whatever the lyrics were they failed to communicate much. As with Jose Merce, the best bit was a guitar solo, though in this case it was an electric guitar, and many of the other numbers had a "when you've heard one you've heard them all" quality, but then, I imagine that those who live and breathe this music would say the same about, say, Bruckner symphonies.

Baloji was a nothing. He only fronted a couple of numbers. I had expected rap - sharply targeted lyrics spoken over a strongly rhythmical backing - but the sharply targeted lyrics were pretty much absent. Why he was invited to join the group is unclear - they could have got on very well without him.

There were only about twenty people in the Arena Season Ticket queue, not all of whom stayed to the end, with a long Day queue. The audience behaviour was pretty much in line with expectations: There was a lot of audience participation (encouraged by the performers, I hasten to add), including dancing or at least swaying both in the Arena and the Stalls, rhythmical clapping and at one point singing (of a single repeated word); too much pushing to the front in the Arena, so that we were packed Last Night tight at the front with space at the back; total incredulity that there were people in the middle of the front row who'd been queuing since 6:30am (the early Prom had been VPO/Haitink/Perahia) who expected others to respect the places they'd queued for; large numbers of people in the Stalls coming down the steps into the Arena with no attempt by the stewards to stop them; more camera phones held aloft than you'd see in the rest of the season put together. A few Day people who had come early for the late night Prom had experimented with the early one ("epic" was one such person's assessment; what would they have said if the VPO had played Bruckner 8 instead of Bruckner 9?).

It filled the time, and just about held my attention. With no lyrics the programme was a complete waste of money. It was a bit disconcerting that one of the wheelchair-bound singer/guitarists of Staff Benda Bilili had his flies open for the whole performance. And maybe, just maybe, one or two of the several hundred in the Arena will have left sufficiently intrigued to consider coming back next year to give European classical mainstream another go.