It is never going to be easy to be objective about a group of disabled street musicians who have somehow managed to eke out a living in Kinshasa. Très, Très Fort, the album from Staff Benda Bilili (which roughly translates as “look beyond appearances”), has already generated a degree of excitement to rival the adulation lavished on the blind Malian pop stars Amadou & Mariam. A standing ovation at the end of the first night of the tour suggested that it was a case of mission accomplished. But anyone who had reservations about the hype surrounding the group’s record will have had them compounded by this show.
In lots of ways, of course, the very fact that the musicians are playing to an international audience is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit. How many of us would last five minutes in the lower depths of the Congolese capital? The truth remains, though — and I feel unbearably hardhearted saying this — that once you look beyond the wheelchairs, the crutches and some of the more high-flown claims made for the group, you come face to face with a standard-issue soukous band that generates an enjoyable party mood but that has some serious limitations too.
The most obvious of which is that it works with a very narrow palette. There may be eight members onstage — a large contingent of them vocalists — but the core can be boiled down to the impassioned drumming of Montana Kinunu (using an eye-catchingly improvised kit) , the disciplined bass of Cavalier Kiara and the curious, single-wire instrument that is the creation of the young Roger Landu. Dressed in white and standing slightly apart from his colleagues, Landu embarked on a string of frenzied, high-pitched solos. Unfortunately, he inevitably exhausted all the permutations early on, soon lapsing into guitar-hero posturing.
The Barbican was not the ideal venue for what was, in truth, an energetic festival act. Even so, people were on their feet at the end. But as with Amadou & Mariam, you cannot help asking if they were responding to the music or the story behind it.