Has the Festival Hall hosted a more joyous show than this? Three songs in, the audience were all on their feet and they didn’t sit down again, electrified by a series of bewitching grooves that took in funk, jazz, afrobeat, reggae and dance music. A fluid on-stage line-up of 20 included three members of Hot Chip, the Anglo-Sudanese musical director Sinkane, the blind Malian duo Amadou & Mariam, the keyboard wizard Money Mark and the Talking Heads polymath David Byrne, who booked the show as curator of the Meltdown Festival and looked understandably cockahoop.
The pleasure of the evening was heightened by the mystery surrounding the man who supposedly inspired it. William Onyeabor, the story goes, is a Nigerian musician who released eight albums of groundbreaking electronic funk between 1977 and 1985, only to become a born-again Christian and turn his back on secular music. His music has been rediscovered in recent years and championed by Damon Albarn and Byrne, who reissued it on his Luaka Bop label.
There’s something fishy about Onyeabor’s sudden elevation from obscurity to pioneer. A show meant to be celebrating his music was remarkably light on references to the great man, who, despite claims on Twitter, did not appear. My apologies to Mr Onyeabor if he is genuine; I’m just wary of emulating the people who once raved about the artist Nat Tate, only to discover that he was dreamt up by the novelist William Boyd.
When the music is this life-affirming, though, does it matter where it came from? Good Name was illuminated by the hypnotic falsetto of Hot Chip’s Alex Taylor, while Love Me Now was an epic African hoedown fronted by Byrne, wearing a red stetson in honour of Onyeabor’s favoured headgear. Then, just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, a choir of 180 trooped on. The final song, Smooth and Good, was a monster of swirling organs and ska rhythms, with the extra voices cranking up the already ecstatic mood to stratospheric. Wow.