Segun Bucknor is a semi-forgotten figure in the history of Nigerian music, so much so that the only somewhat decent photo I could even find of him is the obscure image from the cover of the compilation Strut released a few years ago. His records are as hard to find as hen’s teeth, and he’s usually only mentioned as a footnote to Fela, as one of his lesser contemporaries on the late-1960s Lagos music scene.
Actually, the connection to Fela goes back a bit further than that. Segun Bucknor was born in 1946 into a well-regarded Lagos family of musicians; his cousin Wole–as part of the Afro-Jazz Group that also included Bayo Martins and Zeal Onyia–was a Nigerian jazz pioneer who tutored young Fela Ransome-Kuti on the piano.
(Wole Bucknor also featured as a member of an early version of Fela’s Koola Lobitos and fathered at least one child with Fela’s younger sister, Yemisi Ransome-Kuti. He went on to become the Nigerian Navy’s director of music, and I think he is also the father of popular Lagos wedding planner and socialite, Funke Bucknor.) (Edit: Actually, he is not; Funke Bucknor-Obruthe is Segun’s daughter, as is media personality Tosyn Bucknor.)
As a student at the venerable King’s College, Bucknor sang in the choir, and at the age of 15 he got the chance to play and record with highlife bandleader Roy Chicago’s Rhythm Dandies dance band. By 1964, highlife was becoming an old hat for post-independence Nigerian youth; a Beatles-aping quartet called The Cyclops had inspired a wave of high school rock & roll bands. With three school friends (including future esteemed photojournalist Sunmi Smart-Cole) and played mostly covers of popular pop and rock songs. The following year, he left the band to study liberal arts and ethnomusicology at New York’s Columbia University, and it was during his three-year sojourn in the US that his imagination was captured by a sound that had heretofore not made much of a splash in Nigeria–soul music, particularly the music of Ray Charles.
Bucknor sought to introduce soul music to the Lagos scene when he returned to Nigeria in 1968, but he found that he had been beaten to the punch by new bands like The Strangers (led by organist Bob Miga), the Hykkers (featuring guitarist Jake Solo, later of The Funkees, Osibisa and general awesomeness) and most of all by “Nigeria’s James Brown,” Geraldo Pino (who was actually Sierra Leonean).
Bucknor swiftly reconnected with his Hot Four buddies and they formed a new band called The Soul Assembly, recording two sides “Lord Give Me Soul” and “I’ll Love You No Matter How.” The Soul Assembly disbanded in 1969 and reformed as Segun Bucknor & The Assembly, this time moving away from straight imitations of US soul and toward a more organically African expression of soul music. As has often been the case throughout the history of African popular music, Afro-Cuban rhythms served as the bridge between the Motherland and the New World, as evidenced on tracks such as “That’s The Time” and “Love and Affection.”
As Bucknor further developed his brand of Afro-Soul, he cultivated a flamboyant visual style to accompany it. Eschewing the sharp western-style suits that characterized popular musicians of the day, he and his band (now renamed The Revolution) appeared shirtless, festooned with cowrie shells. Bucknor shaved his hair into a demi-mohawk and added to the stage show a trio of insane, booty-shaking nymphettes called The Sweet Things:
Oh yeah, I should mention that this here footage is, of course, poached once again from the Ginger Baker in Africa DVD (and to think that I said there was hardly any good stuff on it!) Director Tony Palmer is obviously quite entranced by the Sweet Thing dancers (and can you blame him?) so Bucknor barely gets any screen time here, but if you can control your blink reflex, you can spot him barking into the microphone behind the organ, wearing a green waistcoat. But Palmer sure loved filming those Sweet Things, ah tell yuh whut… He even had them stage another performance in Fela’s Afro-Spot in Surulere specifically for documentation purposes (ah… yes. “documentation.”That’s what we’re calling it!):
Sorry for the crappy quality at the beginning of both clips, y’all… I’ll try to fix that later.)
Lately, a lot of music writers have tended to write Bucknor off as a Fela imitator or follower, but watching that footage, I can’t help but wonder about the degree to which Bucknor influenced Fela in terms of visual presentation (he rocked the “jungle” costumes and the scantily-clad girl dancers first) and even in terms of the fusion of soul and African sounds.
One area in which I am fairly certain that Fela influenced Bucknor, though, is in the increasing social commentary in songs like “Son of January 15th,” (the date of the 1966 military coup d’etat that usurped Nigeria’s First Republic) and “Pocket Your Bigmanism” (an indictment of the new Nigerian upper class).
In 1975, feeling that the cycle of Afro-rock/soul bands had run its course and was losing out to both the encroaching DJ culture as well as to the new generation of Yoruba juju musicians that had emerged in Lagos since all the Eastern musicians deserted the city during the civil war, Segun Bucknor disbanded the Revolution and concentrated on journalism. He still lives in Lagos and very occasionally performs, but I kinda wish he had kept going through the 1970s like Fela did and claimed his rightful place in the pantheon of innovators in Nigerian popular music.
Here are a couple more tracks from him:
- “La La La (Hard Version) (Part 1)”
- “Smoke”
- “La La La (Acoustic Version)”
- “Who Say I Tire”
- “Dye Dye”
- Happy Memorial Day, everyone!