Patience pays o for Kongos
Four brothers’ pop-rocker album Lunatic getting them noticed
The story of Kongos is already an epic one. It’s a tale of one family, four brothers and spans decades and the entire globe.
And it’s only now finally starting to get really, really good.
“It’s been a wild few months for us,” says Daniel, the youngest of the Kongos sons and the guitarist-vocalist of the quartet. “An unexpected few months.”
And all of it based on the band’s debut Lunatic, a stomping pop-rocker that was recorded in 2012, but is only now getting the attention of the North American masses thanks to singles such as I’m Only Joking and Come With Me Now — songs that speak to the scope of their influences and the origins of the band/family.
For that, you have to look at the parents of the four Kongos boys, the mother, an American from Arizona, and their father, John Kongos, a South African musician in his own right, who also had some success in the U.K. (His song, He’s Gonna Step On You Again, was remade by the Happy Mondays and released as the single Step On.)
It’s there he met and married Shelley, and where the pair had three of their four sons/band members, Johnny, Jesse and Dylan.
The family would later move back to South Africa and add Daniel to their ranks before finally settling down in Phoenix, Ariz., where family and the tight-knit Greek community would provide a nurturing environment that would help the four siblings find their own musical direction.
“I think that actually was the biggest thing that influenced us because we weren’t really in L.A. trying to make it with other L.A. bands. We weren’t in New York being exposed to whatever was happening there. So we holed ourselves up in (our father’s) studio and experimented,” says Daniel.
“I think that was the best thing we got out of Phoenix — experimentation.”
He also notes the part his parents’ expansive record collection played in their musical development, from exposure to jazz, classical, funk, blues, metal and Britpop, as well as music from South Africa.
“There’s a kind of joy in South African music that I haven’t really found elsewhere,” says Daniel. “It’s really, really happy music, but it’s not corny. I don’t know how they do that, because lots of times happy music has this cheesy element to it.”
Not surprisingly, it was that area of the world that first embraced the music of Kongos. The foursome recorded three singles (I’m Only Joking, Come With Me Now and It’s a Good Life) and sent them independently to radio where Daniel’s life began.
It was there, in a “completely random” manner, that they began receiving airplay on some larger stations, with their backstory and their connection to that country being yet undiscovered. When it was, the album and momentum followed.
“Maybe a month in, that’s when people became aware we had South Africa roots,” says Daniel, “and that really propelled it because South Africa will claim you if you’ve got anything South African about you.”
Their success in the U.S. followed, with the band releasing Lunatic in late 2013 to little traction until a Chicago station began playing I’m Only Joking and, more importantly, an influential station in Denver began playing Come With Me Now, with other stations across North America soon following suit.
That led to courting by major labels, with Epic winning the wooing, eventually re-releasing Lunatic properly and with a greater push earlier this year.
Now Kongos are in the mode of full-on promotion and touring, including a cross-Canada run that brings them to Edmonton on Tuesday, of their debut — one with songs that may be old to them but has found new life and given them the same.
“That’s the part that reinvigorates the songs for us because they are old, we’re ready to move on to new material recording-wise — we’ve written a lot and we’re excited by that — but when you play a song to a new audience, that changes it. That’s satisfying in itself,” Daniel says.