The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Bwani Junction:
Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline, April 15
For Edinburgh’s Bwani Junction, the sounds of exotic musical genres like Ghanaian highlife and Zimbabwean jitjive weren’t something they had to discover, because they were always part of guitarist Dan Muir’s musical history.
“My dad used to manage a band called the Bhundu Boys,” he says. “As a kid I was always on the road with them, and they’d sometimes look after me and my older sister.
“The music has always been around me and when we started playing together it just came naturally – it took other people to point out that I had a very ‘African’ guitar style.”
A quartet of schoolfriends who went to Edinburgh’s Merchiston Castle School, Bwani Junction are children of that wave of African music co-opted by Western musicians in the 1980s.
The Bhundu Boys were so famous that Madonna asked them to open for her at Wembley in 1987, however it was Paul Simon’s 1986 album Graceland which opened the door to the music scene.
In controversial defiance of the Apartheid-era cultural boycott at the time, Simon recorded the album with musicians from South Africa and brought a new sound to popular music.
“Everyone in Bwani Junction has a huge nostalgia for the record,” says Dan, who is in his 20s along with bandmates Rory Fairweather, Jack Fotheringham and Fergus Robson.
“If my parents didn’t have James Taylor on in the car on a Sunday afternoon, it was Graceland. It’s an incredibly uplifting and moving album, and there’s a great story behind it.”
Bwani Junction had been playing together for seven years when, in 2015, they asked their fans to vote online to decide which one of five classic records they should learn. Paul Simon’s classic won out over the Clash, Led Zeppelin, Elvis Costello and Fleetwood Mac. “We realised we should have been careful what we’d wished for,” laughs Dan. “It’s such a massive, diverse record with so many instruments.”
Their response was to call in eight other musicians to avoid a “butchering” of the album at what was intended to be the only performance in Edinburgh.
However, Donald Shaw, director of Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival, later invited the quartet to perform in 2016, securing appearances from original Graceland players Diane Garisto, Barney Rachabane and Morris Goldberg. The band have since played the record at festivals in Edinburgh and Belladrum.
“We’re just four guys from Scotland, we know we can’t sing like Ladysmith Black Mambazo or learn Xhosa for some of the lyrics,” says Dan. “But we’ve done the best we can, and it’s been a learning curve which has pushed us as musicians, songwriters and people.”