Skip to main content

Andy Hall looks beyond appearances.

These guys are the real deal

A couple of months ago, I did a story that reminds me of why I got into photography in the first place....(editorial photography is getting increasingly difficult to maintain as a career - its fast becoming the preserve of the "gentleman" photographer).

A little-known band called Staff Benda Bilili from Kinshasa were making waves in the international music scene, having just won a big music prize.

So what, you might think, but this group of people have a different story to most "rock n roll" bands...they come from the most deprived areas in one of the most deprived, war-torn pats of the world, and if that wasn't hard-core enough, the core members are disabled from polio, that means they can only get about in wheelchairs or crutches.

Only a little while ago they were living on the streets or more specifically, in the grounds of Kinshasa Zoo, living on their wits and talent.

Staff Benda Bilili - which means "look beyond appearances" in the Lingala language, are the funkiest band you will hear, often sliding out of their wheelchairs to breakdance or body popping on their crutches.

The Drummer works an intricate beat on a plastic beer crate,and a nineteen year-old plucks on his home-made string instrument consisting of a piece of wire strung tightly from an old can, dropping to the floor, playing it like Jimi Hendrix would... and during their raucause, hypnotic gigs in the dusty bars of backstreet Kinshasa, the small crowd lap it up.

Whilst most bands have stylists and teams of marketing men behind them, trying to foster reputations of rebelliousness, and globe-trotting, hard-core lifesyles; these guys, mostly in their thirties and forties, do it for real.

Theyr'e not phased or particularily impressed by their new-found fame, and think nothing of touring Europe, (which they are doing right now), America and Japan - a world away from the squalor of back home. They have an energy, and a devil-may-care way thats amazing and totally different to this day and age of corporate ambition.

.
Labels:

Comments

Philip Hall said…
My bro' is the best.
Thursday, 26 November, 2009
Philip Hall said…
And so is staff Benda Bilili
Thursday, 26 November, 2009
The Quiet Busker said…
Funk me, Some lovely images.
Sunday, 29 November, 2009
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A warm welcome

. Why blog on ARS NOTORIA? I have set up this website,  ARS NOTORIA ,  (the notable art) as an opportunity for like-minded people like you to jot down your thoughts and share them with us on what I hope will be a high profile blog. . ARS NOTORIA is conceived as an outlet: a way for you to get things off your chest, shake those bees out of your bonnet and scratch that itch. The idea is that you do so in a companionable blogging environment, one that that is less structured - freer. Every article you care to write or photograph or picture you care to post will appear on its own page and you are pretty much guaranteed that people will read with interest what you produce and take time to look at what you post. Personal blogs are OK, but what we long for, if we can admit it, are easy-going, loose knit communities: blogging hubs where we can share ideas and pop in and out as frequently, or as seldom, as we like. You will be able to moderate and delete any of the comments made on 
6 comments
Read more

Phil Hall: The Taleban are a drug cartel disguised as an Islamist movement

Truly the Taleban could have arranged as many bombings and terrorists acts as they liked in the UK. There are many Pashtun young men and women in cities in the UK who still have large extended families back in Afghanistan and who could be forced into doing something they should not. But guess what. So far there have been no attacks by Afghans on British soil. Why? It is a mystery. News comes from Afghanistan and the recent UN report that the Taleban and the drug trade are intertwined and that now the Taleban, who are mainly Pashtun, are officially in command of an international drug cartel.  News comes from Afghanistan that Taleban drug lords go to Dubai to live high on the hog and gamble and sleep with women and luxuriate in all the that the freedom to consume has to offer, while their footsoldiers, peasant fighters, are deluded and told that they are fighting a patriotic religious war.  And though they are told they are fighting a religious war what really matters to them in tr
21 comments
Read more

Our Collective Caliban

At the risk of seeming digitally provincial, I’m going to illustrate my point with an example from a recent Guardian blog. Michel Ruse, who is apparently a philosopher, suggested that, whilst disagreeing with creationists on all points, and agreeing with Dawkins et al on both their science and philosophy, it might be wiser and more humane (humanist, even) not to vilify the religious as cretinous and incapable of reason. Which seems reasonable, to me. According to many below-the-line responses he is a ‘half-baked’ atheist, ‘one of the more strident and shrill New Apologists’ and, apparently, “needs to get a pair’. And that’s just from the first twenty comments. A recent article by a screenwriter at a US site was titled ‘Why I Won’t Read Your Fucking Screenplay.’ Tough guy. I wonder how his Christmas cards read. I’m going to sound like a maiden aunt dismayed by an unsporting bridge play and can perhaps be accused of needing to ‘get a pair’ myself (although, before you
14 comments
Read more