William and me - Musical adventures in Africa

Chapter 2

The Railway Inn gig in Winchester, William went back to Reading and was at a crossroads in his life with no job and no income to sustain him or send back to Malawi's starving family. He stayed for the weekend with Shadreck and his wife Tracy in Reading, who were Gospel musicians and leaders in a local African Evangelical Church. Shady worked at a tyre fitting place and his brother Samson, who also lived with them and was a mean guitarist in his own right, worked shifts as a security at Reading FC Madjeski stadium. The Chimanimani line up of 2008 was classic: Tomson Chaulke on drums, Shadrick Mugede on bass, Simwinji Zeko (from Bristol but originally from Zambia) on rhythm and twin lead guitar, Chander (a Zimbabwean who had washed up in Plymouth of all places) on lead vocals and Agatha Pulu (from Bristol but originally from Bulawayo) on backing vocals and dancing. Bristol had a thriving African Music scene (and still had in 2019 pre-Covid), with some city-center events entirely consisting of acts from the African diaspora, with gumboot dance, Zulu jive, Traditional Ethiopian music, hip-hop and rap as the main shows.

William then went back to Rotherham on the coach, as that was where his rented room was, and he struggled. We kept in touch by text and phone (he did not, and still does not, have a smartphone or access to any modern free messaging apps). After a week or so, I decided to step in and offered him a National Express coach ticket from Rotherham to Winchester and a bed in my spare room in exchange for him to teach me his guitar style and jam with me in the evenings. After all, he was the man who taught Rise Kagonga from The Bhundu Boys guitar when he was a kid living in his neighborhood. The Bhundu Boys were and still are the only Zimbabwean band that had any breakthrough success in Europe and UK. They did it by mixing western pop, country and Zimbabwean guitar styles, even doing a recording with a UK Country and Western artist Hank Wangford.

William ended up staying with me for four months in the spare room. My wife Jude and I provided him with a family environment, meals and a bed. He was happy. He got on well with our daughter Emma who was 12 at the time and our son Charlie who was 7. He calmed Emma down whenever she flew into one of her hormonal pre-teenage rages and used to make Charlie giggle by jumping up and down. Chanting "Ice Cream, Ice Cream, Ice Cream," then pulling up his tee-shirt sleeve and make his bicep bulge before making another sign below like a reverse bicep saying: "inside out, outside in." Sometimes he would put his finger to his nose like a bone through it, then turn it the other way, I have no idea what this was all about, but Charlie loved it. This was a man who had brought up children and knew how to calm them down and make them laugh.

We had some well-off friends in the village. Jude and I started looking for unofficial gardening work for him. We started with our good friends Ange and Elliot Trodd and James and Kim Marshall. I used to drive him and our lawnmower and petrol hedge trimmer about a mile up the road to where they live in Otterbourne and he would spend a few hours cutting their large lawns and hedges for cash. He always had a ready smile and greeted absolutely everyone that he met. He was also the only black guy in any of the four villages that made up the area: Compton and Shawford, Hursley and Otterbourne. His charm and un-fatigable friendliness got him more customers. More off the radar gardening work in big gardens owned by wealthy, mostly retired people or dads who were commuting to London every day on the 6.27 am from Shawford train station to Waterloo. He ended up with 30 cash customers who asked no questions and he worked seven days a week during all daylight hours. After four months, he had enough cash to rent a room in nearby Eastleigh, and then a bigger one on St Marys Road in Southampton, near the football stadium, where all the Indian, Pakistani, and Polish food shops are and rented rooms are cheap.

Both were on the Solent Bluestar, No one bus route to Otterbourne and he used to alight at the nearest bus stop to his customers, where he had chained up an old mountain bike that one of his customers had given him, cycling to his place of work that day and borrowing the home-owners gardening equipment. Those were happy times; he loved the villages and his customers, and they loved him. This lasted for 6 years and he managed to pay his room rent, bus season ticket and send his family cash so his kids could go to college.

William and Junior’s two older girls Rachel and Sharmen, now live in South Africa where they work, Rachel as a security guard in Cape Town and Sharmen as a pharmacist (the gardening money put her through her a pharmacy degree). His eldest boy Gilbert stayed in Zimbabwe as he was already working in a mine when they fled Harare (maybe the same mine where William worked as a Chibuku (African maize and sorghum porridge beer) in the 1960s. His second eldest boy Bobby moved to South Africa almost as soon as the family fled and is scratching an existence in Atlantis with Rachel. Atlantis is a poor suburb of Cape Town where displaced Zimbabweans live in squalor with the constant threat of violence from within and from the South African Police.

The two younger boys Ropafadzo (Ropa) and Frank stayed with their mum in Blantyre Malawi and even had a stint at Malawi National Cricket Team and had a test match in South Africa. They had to buy their whites and equipment, so William sent it from the gardening money, but after the trials and selection in Malawi, they found that did not get a penny for the trouble. It happens all the time in the Malawian National Cricket Team and the boys could not cope with the injustice. Indians living in Malawi run the Malawi cricket team and get funding from ICC but do not pay black players, so they quit unless they are continuously funded by their family. In the team, only Indians got food and money and the blacks were just given transport, a low-class hotel room and meagre rations. The boys could have been world-class cricket players had things worked in their favour, but that did not happen. Despite having gone through a season paid for by Williams’s hard work doing gardening work in my friends' big gardens. I mentioned this to a friend who lives in Hampshire and works as a cricket correspondent for a broadsheet newspaper. He said that happens in all Southern African cricket nations except South Africa itself (which has better governance), and nothing can be done about it.

Aleck “Papa” Phiri (AKA William Aleck) was born in a village called Chiradzulu in Southern Malawi in 1947. It is a very rural, subsistence farming village made up of hills and low mountains at the bottom of the East African Rift Valley, not far from Mulanje mountain. He is Yao, a minority tribe who live in pockets in Southern Malawi and Mozambique. Most of Malawi is made up of Chewa people (the people of the lake) and their language Chichewa is the language of the lake. Chichewa is like the Nyanja language that is spoken in Zambia. The Yao are marginalized as they are poor farmers who speak their language and have their customs, they are marginalized by the dominant Chewa who hold the majority of the positions of power, finance and government. William travelled with his father to Harare in 1954, at the age of 7, when his dad went there to work in a mine. He left behind his older brother James Phiri, who stayed in the same village until the time of his death in 2012 at the age of 78.

His first guitar was built out of an oil drum and a stick with a fishing line. Like those made in other countries across Africa at the time. No one taught him, and he did it by himself. A natural musician he acquired an electric guitar in the 1960s and played in the mine dance band. In the late 60s, he got noticed by the big names of the time. Started with James Chimombe (1951-1990). Followed by Leonard Dembo. He played with Leonard until he died from AIDS in 1996. One by one he watched his musical compatriots die of AIDS through the late 80s and 90s. James Chimbombwe, Jonah Sithole the Biggie Tembo to name but a few. Sithole transcribed mbira music to guitar and thus invented chimurenga music which was taken up by the resistance army led by Mugabe as their music, with singles being released to empower them and boost their confidence to continue the struggle in the bush. The songs had messages that the resistance soldiers could feed off: Traditional tales of courage and village life and also direct instructions from the leadership. Thomas Mapfumo is the most famous exponent of this style. He is still alive but renounced Mugabe after independence and is in exile in Oregon, the USA still making music that is both traditional and political anti-Zanu PF.

William was spared from the scourge of AIDS that swept through Southern Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, as he was faithful to his wife. His music career took him high into the lap of luxury and stadium fame. He had a house in the countryside, a house in the suburbs of Harare and a new pickup truck. Life was good to him until his colleagues began dying of AIDS at young ages and the Sunguru and Chimarenga music that was the most popular music in Zimbabwe at the time began to wane as the exponents either died or moved abroad. It was replaced by hip-hop, rap and Gospel as the most popular homegrown music genre, but elements can still be found in the work of new Zimbabwean artists like Jah Signal and Jah Prayzah. In William's day, there were hundreds of guitar bands in the country, all feeding off each other, playing live shows that lasted all evening and all night, until the last person left the dancefloor. Bands like The Four Brothers and The Bhundu boys. Some made it onto Western World music compilation music labels such as Earthworks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Earthworks put out a fantastic 3 part compilation set of Zimbabwean Guitar music called Zimbabwe Front Line: The Spirit of the Eagle. They are well worth tracking down. There was a resurgence of talented popular guitar music in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

Having lived and played through the golden age of Zimbabwe guitar music and survived he landed as a nobody in the UK. Luckily, destiny brought us together after which life became more bearable for him.

I was also lucky enough to meet Bothwell Nyamandera, William’s good friend and master record producer from Harare who produced all the 80s and 90s Zimbabwe music including the famous shed sessions by The Bhundu Boys. William introduced me to Bothwell in the UK around 2010. William has asked me to find someone who could record his next album. At the time I was playing with Southampton Ukulele Jam and a spin-off 5-piece band led by John Hayward called the Ukofonics. I played many events with SUJ from October 2008 when I joined to March 2020 when Covid lockdown prevented any large social gatherings in the UK and killed live music. John is a retired headteacher living in central Southampton off the leafy Avenue, near the Common. He has built a studio in the back of his garden. A brick shed with a mixing desk in one room and a soundproof room with a 1960s drum kit and various amplifiers in the other. There is a small window between the two rooms where John gives instructions to the band or performer that he is recording. John built this for his son Matt who was a keen musician and drummer in an up-and-coming band called Fleeing New York, who changed their name to Band of Skulls in 2004 and have been playing stadiums worldwide since they found themselves in America in the Summer of 2008 (the same summer that I met William). Band of Skulls have been old world tours ever since sometimes returning to their hometown of Southampton on the south coast of England, to play gigs at the venues where they started. An incredible success story for three high school mates from Southampton. In 2010 I was honoured to have all three of them in the audience at one of my gigs with a SUJ spin-off band called the Ukofonics. John Hayward led the band and hand-picked me and 3 other ukulele players to go electric and tackle complex genres such as funk and disco. I played my trusty semi-acoustic Black Lanakai Tenor Ukulele through a Fender Valve amp with an original Dunlop Wah pedal and an analogue delay pedal. For musicians playing the Ukulele is like playing the guitar with a capo at the 5th fret. A G on the Ukulele is a D on the guitar, an F on the ukulele is a Bb on the guitar. Do you get the idea? I found that by playing through a valve amp and a wah pedal and reverb I could get a disco-funk sound like the choppy rhythms played by Nile Rogers of Chic and other funk/disco guitarists. The Ukofonics went semi-professional based on the talent, song choices and demand for our services at functions such as weddings and big birthday celebrations. I played with them until 2016 and left because of the demands on me in my new management position at work. It was like a second job and I could not make the mandatory rehearsal every Thursday due to meetings in Brighton and Worthing.

The Fleeing New York EP was recorded in John Hayward's shed studio along with the first Band of Skulls album Baby Doll Face Darling Honey which was released on their label You Are Here Music/Band of Skulls in September 2009. It quickly got international attention and propelled the 3-piece band from Southampton to international stardom. That first album was re-released in the USA on Shangrila Music. They have released four albums since then in the UK and US.

The drum kit in the studio is John’s old Pearl kit that he used when he played in a local beat combo who, as he proudly says, supported The Rolling Stones when they played the Southampton Gaumont (now Mayflower Theatre). In those days, bands picked up local support acts, a different one for each venue on the tour. Chuck Berry went even further by choosing an entire band when playing a city, rocking up a few days before in his huge Cadillac and placing an advert for musicians.

I asked John if we could use his studio to record Williams albums and he gladly agreed as he knew William because I had been bringing him along to the Ukulele Jam nights every second Monday at The Talking Heads. Those were the classic days of SUJ when there were around 50 jammers. It started with two friends Colin McAllister and Catherine Wright in June 2008, when I heard about it and joined in October 2008 there were around 12 members and John was one of the organizers. Now there are over 250 people and the Talking Heads has been demolished and turned into flats. Just before the first UK lockdown, SUJ were meeting at the 1895 club, the old Dockers Club which has been turned into a 900-capacity venue. We had outgrown both the old and new Talking Heads such as the inclusivity of the group, the popularity of Ukulele clubs in the 2010s and Colin's charisma. As Colin famously says at each gig "SUJ is a triumph of enthusiasm over musical talent" and "we meet every other Monday at the 1865 club in Southampton, so if you turn up and we are not there you have picked the wrong Monday".

Bothwell was sat beside John Hayward in the mixing room whilst William laid down. Three guitar tracks (lead, rhythm and sub-rhythm), a bass line and a drum machine beat. John and Bothwell then mixed these and two albums of music were produced, all from William’s head. They were entitled Likoswe Express and Likoswe Express Africa. At the time I had no idea that Bothwell was such a famous and well-regarded record producer in Zimbabwe as he sat on a camping stool humble and quiet, in a shed at the back of a garden in Southampton, where rhubarb, runner beans and onions grew in the kitchen garden outside. Such was the humility and dignity of the man. William got a hundred copies of the albums produced on CD with his design of album cover and words printed on the album covers. He sold them to his gardening customers whenever he could and would tout them around at the bi-weekly Monday Southampton Ukulele Jam, where, at that time around 60 crack ukulele players would gather for an hour and a half of jamming pop and rock songs at the Talking Heads Pub and 250 capacity venue in Portswood (now a block of apartments) then go to the bar for a beer. During his short time at SUJ William was a unique and exotic character and his talent shone through even on this tiny acoustic instrument, which was a far cry from the loud searing treble-soaked electric guitar which is his heart and soul and former professional tool of the trade. "Let me work out how this thing works," William said to me picking up my Ukulele, which had already become an extension of my body and I would always play strapless, enabling me to adjust my ukulele position to awkward and odd angles whilst pressed into the 60 strong throngs of the jam on the Talking Heads stage, or on every other stage, we played. These positions would have been impossible with a strap on. Going strapless also enabled me to throw rock and roll postures, avoid moshing audience members in the most intimate gigs and jump up and down and play at the same time with the band and the audience on our last number.