The Public Opinion Afro Orchestra

The other essential ingredients of Afrobeat are polyrhythms and politics. Talking about the original Afrobeat – Fela Kuti’s late-1960s blend of traditional music from Nigeria and Ghana with James Brown funk – The Public Opinion Afro Orchestra’s Zvi Belling says: “That music was all about political voice and a party at the same time. It’s music made for dancing, maybe even a very deep form of dancing; a very meditative and very trance-like, induced type of dancing. The songs can go well past ten minutes each – they generally sit tonally in the same place for a long time and they’re designed to create a trance-like effect.”

This is the music Belling grew up with in Africa, and which has only in recent years started to gain traction here in Australia. “That was the music that was around me. I come from a musical family. My father’s a jazz musician. Some of his best friends played in Fela’s band in the ’60s. They would be staying with us, talking about that music, playing that music to us. It was very much around me as a kid. It wasn’t a discovery, if that makes sense. I think in Australia it certainly has been a discovery – it’s probably only five years old, the revelation of Afrobeat in this country.”

There’s a common experience among music fans – that alienating feeling of meeting people who like the same kind of music you do and then realising you have nothing else in common. That’s something Afrobeat fans don’t suffer from, explains Belling. “Afrobeat particularly, and I think different from other types of music, Afrobeat has a politics attached to it, and so there is some sort of – how can I put it? – like-mindedness, maybe, on a social, political, maybe on a human rights or some sort of other level. If you subscribe to Afrobeat, you subscribe to a whole bunch of other ideas too, which isn’t the same for most types of music.

“Fela Kuti, the originator of that music, he was a champion of the underdog and I think that idea travels with the music. Whoever plays that music, some of those ideas, general ideas, go with it. And so that way, if you’re a fan of it you’re also a fan of those ideas. You have to be.”

But as Belling says, it’s about the party as well as the politics. A live performance from The Public Opinion Afro Orchestra is an energetic affair, with their vocalists doubling as dancers, flipping and leaping and twerking across the stage. “They wouldn’t like to be called back-up singers,” Belling says. “They’re our singers and the frontline; they’re the dancers, they’re our fire to the performance.”

The Public Opinion Afro Orchestra’s first album, Do Anything Go Anywhere, was nominated for an ARIA, and they’re currently finishing up work on their second. While they split the recording of their debut between studios in Africa and Australia, this time they settled down to record the whole thing here. “The new album, we did it all in one place, all the gear’s beautiful old analogue gear, we managed to recreate that sound of the ’60s,” says Belling. “I think we’ve got it, I think we’ve nailed it a bit better this time.”