Recently I was trawling through late night radio and heard a familiar sound in my earphones. It was immediately recognizable to me as by The Real Sounds of Africa and their Congolese rumba song ‘I am a football fan, I am a soccer fan’. Now the programme was a late night world wide football phone in on Radio 5 Live, but this wasn’t the aspect I was really interested in, but hearing the song sparked a long buried memory.

I go back in time to Rhodesia in the year 1972 and my last year in school, before leaving the country a few months later. This was in August and the news came out that two British pop bands were going to be touring the country. This was exciting news as hardly anyone came to the boycotted illegal country at that time, where the guerilla war was just beginning to have an impact. (I can only remember The Byrds, minus David Crosby, doing a show in the late 60s, but I wasn’t old enough to go to that one and according to my sister Roger McGuinn spent the entire show with his back to the audience.) The Musicians Union had a ban on performers touring the country so hearing that Edison Lighthouse ‘Love goes (where my Rosemary goes)’ and Christie with ‘Yellow River’ were coming was exciting news. The two bands had a hairy time in Zambia and after not going on in an electric storm generated a riot and arrived in Rhodesia missing half their equipment. Now the venue for this gig was The Seven Miles Motel, named because it was approximately seven miles from Harare, then Salisbury, on the road to the Midlands. I had been there before as a kid on car journeys with my folks. Being 1972 the crowd at the gig was almost exclusively made up of young white Rhodesians. I remember going with a few friends and my memories of it were of two pop bands doing their thing on a constructed stage, we knew the hits but nothing else, it was fairly conventional middle of the road pop music, but still exciting to be part of it. The bands were rapped over the knuckles by the Musicians Union but had their worldwide ban rescinded because of the difficult position they found themselves in.

I now fast forward exactly 14 years to 1986 when I returned to the young Zimbabwe as a photographer to witness the Non Aligned Movement Summit in Harare and to visit my Mum and Dad, who were coming to the end of their time in the country. It was like visiting a different country. The guerilla war was over, independence had been won, Bob Marley and the Wailers had played in a stadium at independence and Robert Mugabe was then Prime Minister, (before becoming president) and in his pomp. There were disturbing rumours circulating about how his ZANU PF loyal armed forces had suppressed a rebellion in Matabeleland, with reports of mass killings.

To get back to matters in hand the music scene in Zimbabwe had exploded with the sounds of Thomas Mapfumo, the Bhundu Boys and Oliver Mutukudzi amongst others, and this band The Real Sounds of Africa. They were originally from The Congo, which was then still called Zaire, but had taken up residency in Harare and had a weekly gig at The Seven Miles Motel. Their sound was rumba and soukous so I had to go and check them out, having heard them prior to this on Andy Kershaw’s Radio 1 programme. This acrobatic eleven piece band just got on with it and they performed not one, but two football songs, one was a memorable football song about an exciting (!) goalless draw called ‘Dynamos vs Caps 0-0’, the second was a 3-3 draw between Dynamos and Tornados and featured a brilliant commentary describing all the action and name checking almost every single player. These were top teams at the time in the local league. One other highlight of this day was an African take on ‘Country Roads Take Me Home’. Think of a journey from John Denver into Toots and the Maytals and then into The Real Sounds. They also did a song called ‘Non Aligned Movement’ where they name check amongst others Tito, Nkrumah and Nehru.

This Saturday afternoon was a very relaxed affair with the driving infectious music getting people onto the dance floor, beers were flowing and the contrast to my previous visit to the Seven Miles couldn’t have been greater, for here was a very mixed crowd of black and white just there to enjoy the sounds and atmosphere. This is one of my fondest memories of this visit to Zimbabwe.

Footnote: The next year I caught the Real Sounds at the Africa Centre in London and even later on they performed at Hinksey Park in Oxford one sunny day in the early 90s. Great band, I wondered what happened to them. I’ve so far failed to locate the photos I took that day, but will keep on searching.