Femi Kuti and Positive Force, review: riotous music and fierce politics performed with a big smile

Femi Kuti performed at Koko
Femi Kuti performed at Koko - Dave Burke/Shutterstock

“We come with awesome positive energy to give you good propellant spirit to face the challenges you meet in the world outside this music hall,” announced Femi Kuti as he led his afrobeats ensemble onto the stage of Koko in London. It proved a fair assessment of highly entertaining proceedings, blending riotous music and fierce politics with a big smile on its collective face.

Afropop is belatedly becoming a global musical superpower, producing such crossover arena and stadium hitmakers as Burna Boy, Wizkid and Davido. But the blended digital rap, R&B and afrobeat hybrids of today are almost unrecognisable from the fierce Nigerian political grooves that once so proudly represented that continent on the world stage, particularly in the figure of Kuti’s passionate, controversial father, Fela Kuti.

Femi himself started out in the early 1980s as a member of his late father’s band Egypt 80 and has stuck throughout his own career to the same bright and belligerent principles, attacking social injustice with an outrageously colourful jazz, funk and highlife fusion. In today’s parlance, Femi might be considered a nepo baby, but world and folk music traditions are far more respectful to notions of musical family lineage than our celebrity-obsessed culture. Femi hasn’t just kept the flame burning but made it his own.

His 12-piece Positive Force ensemble isn’t quite as expansive as his father’s notoriously sprawling 20-piece bands, but their tautly disciplined arrangements deliver a rich and powerful sound. The bass is deep, constant and fluid, drums and percussion drive incessantly forward tilting rhythms, jazzy keyboards and staccato guitar hold the jittery centre, while four horns swing in punctuating unison. Kuti takes the lead with wild, raspy free jazz-influenced runs on his saxophone, in between stabbing at his organ or just jiggling frenetically around the stage, singing and chanting in a harsh, hoarse, bossy tone.

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Dressed in a shiny outfit of eyeball-scorching red, there is something comically cartoonish about Kuti’s stage presence, his jerky, repetitive movements suggestive of sped-up film. At 62, the son is the old man of afrobeats now, but you are unlikely to witness a more energetic or committed performance all year.

Femi Kuti performs at Koko, London
Femi Kuti performs at Koko, London - Shutterstock/Dave Burke

He was flanked by three female backing vocalists old enough to have been with Kuti throughout his career, attired in a skimpy cross between tribal costumes and luminous rave gear. They shook percussive instruments and harmonised on call-and-response choruses. It was discombobulating yet inspiring to watch women old enough to be grandmothers doing ribald, exhibitionist dance movements that make twerking look polite, but it added to the playful atmosphere. Although driven by the same fierce political spirit as his father, Femi seems determined not to take it all too seriously. He interspersed highly charged songs about African political corruption (Sorry, Sorry) and imperial rapaciousness (Oyimbo) with long comedic spiels focusing on some of the ruder aspects of the Nigerian character that probably went over the heads of his majority white London audience.

“My daughter ask: ‘Why you no take anything seriously?’” he declared at one point, but humour is a big part of the political thrust of his music: using life, laughter and dancing as an oppositional force. Whenever someone called out a request for a song, he would snap back, “Go and buy the album! I’m not your f---ing DJ!” and laugh abrasively.

He ended his set with his latest single, Politics Don Expose Them, which contrasts a lubricious funk horn groove with lyrics disdaining “liars, hypocrites, pretenders / Politicians with their corrupt and hidden agendas”.

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For encores, he dipped into his father’s oeuvre, blasting through the classic Water No Enemy and a rare up-tempo version of 1989’s Beasts of No Nation. “I never do this,” he said at the start of a song old enough to namecheck Thatcher and Botha but performed it anyway to the crowd’s delight. “That’s one of the beauties of getting old,” he grinned. Femi Kuti is keeping the afrobeat flag flying high.


On tour until Wednesday 29 January; tickets