Wake Up You! proves there's more to classic Nigerian music than Afrobeat

The wave of reissues of classic Nigerian sounds from the late 60's and 70's that hit its peak half a decade ago courtesy of the likes of Soundway's brilliant Nigeria Special series set out to diversify our understanding of the country's prolific musical heritage. A decade in the making, this strong two-part comp from Now-Again proves that there are still more gems to be found amidst troves of long-forgotten 7" singles and decaying mastertapes pumped out during the boom years of the Nigerian music industry, even if the occasional clunky approximations of "Western" - as opposed to West African - fads suggest that either the cupboards are getting barer, or the compilers have deliberately gone for a warts-and-all, 360 degrees image of ALL the - broadly speaking - rock music produced in the country between 1972 and 1977.

The subtitle's shorthand for the 34 cuts gathered on these two discs is really a bit of a misnomer. Rather than rock music in its traditional sense, we're looking at a collision of steamy funk, testifying soul and wah-wah pedal hogging psychedelic rock, infused with more than a whiff of Kuti's polyrhythmic Afrobeat acrobatics, held together by a reliance on electric guitars rather than any specific shared musical mission, and recorded in the years when the country went through a painful rebuilding following a brutal civil war.

To summarise and simplify, Volume 1 tends to go heavier on brighter tunes that must've got the crowds pumping at the nightspots of Lagos and beyond (for evidence, check out Ify Jerry Krusade's "Everybody Likes Something Good", the groove of which which appears to suggest that the metronomic Euro-funk influence of Can's "Halleluwah" had spread all the way to West Africa) whilst Volume 2 tends to get heavier and more intense. The dramatic "Who Made The World" by The Identicals, for example, proves a particularly compelling slice of heady psych-rock action, whilst The Funkees's rhythmically endowed cover of War's "Slipping Into Darkness" gives an accurate idea of the type influences the acts covered here must have been sampling for inspiration."Wake Up You" by Waves, meanwhile, sounds like something that could have fallen off a classic MC5 record.

The accompanying, generously illustrated 100 page book tells of the changing fortunes of such almost forgotten (until now) Nigerian bands such as the Hykkers on either side of the 1967 - 1970 civil war. You also get an idea of the travails of working as a musician in an unstable country even when it's peace time; apart from newly affluent urban crowd's taste for smoother disco-friendly sounds, the Nigerian guitar band scene was doomed by a particularly vindictive military ruler's decision to impose a huge import tax on musical equipment, a move orchestrated to make life difficult for the increasingly revered Kuti who made few secrets of his disdain for successive military dictatorships that ended up damaging even the non-political practitioners of the country's music industry profoundly. Just one gripe: the book accompanying both volumes is identical, so perhaps it'd have been more user-friendly to turn this into one 2-CD collection.