Staff Benda Bilili: Kinshasa’s Wheelchair Street Orchestra
I’m glad to see the increase in press that Staff Benda Bilili has been receiving recently. There have been articles in The Times and The Independent in the last two weeks. It also makes me happy to see that a European tour is still being mentioned, even if I don’t think it will materialize in the current economic environment.
In any event, the long awaited album, Très Très Fort, published by Crammed Discs, is already available for pre-order on Amazon. I’m not too sure I like the direction the cover design above has taken, but as Rob Fitzpatrick wrote in The Times,
“All bands need a back story, a carefully constructed series of ever more improbably tumultuous events and circumstances that aim to grab as much of the potential audience as possible. In the history of back stories, however, none has come close to the Congo’s Staff Benda Bilili, and the more you read about them, the more you listen to them and watch them, the more you think none ever will. How could they?”
In the case of Staff Benda Bilili, the members of the “orchestra” are homeless, disabled polio victims from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They came to the attention of French filmmakers Renaud Barret and Florent de La Tullaye during the filming of Jupiter’s Dance, a documentary about local Congolese musicians.
Barret and de La Tullaye also plan to release a second film, devoted entirely to Staff Benda Bilili later this year. The advance trailer has been on YouTube for a while.
