0
0
By Toyin Akinosho
Afrobeat band leader, Kola Ogunkoya, has competed the construction of two live music performance venues in Lagos.
They were opened in the week of July 12, 2021: the Gbedu Music Village in Ayobo, in Ipaja, in the city’s north, and the Gbedu Music Village on the Lekki expressway, in the east of Lagos.
With a venue each on Lagos Mainland and Lagos Island, Ogunkoya has, on his own, tackled the mainland-island dichotomy in the consumption of culture in the city.
He will be performing his own songs as well as others in the Afrobeat and highlife genres, every Friday at Lekki and every Thursday at Ayobo.
The Ayobo venue was opened Thursday July 15, but the Lekki opening, on Friday, July 16, was grander; featuring a load of celebrity musicians, actors and performers, from red carpet event at 5pm, through to midnight.
Ogunkoya’s was one of the several promising Afrobeat bands that emerged to stake territory on the Afrobeat perimeter after the passing away of Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
Like many of those band leaders like him, he travelled out of the country. He had been in America for most of the last 20 years. These lounges are, in a way, his own diaspora investment.
His experiment with two performance venues, with functioning bars and restaurants catering to guests round the clock, is an update of Lagbaja’s performance-only Motherland space in Ikeja, which now stands defunct.
Ogunkoya is a creation of the 90s transition, a period just before the explosion. He had emerged with a band, fresh after secondary school in 1991, and he contested the space as much as he could, in the hazy period before the emergence of the singer-led, machine enhanced ‘Afrobeats’ revolution, which has now fused disco music with highlife and has captured the global imagination.
Most of the acolytes of that immediate post-Fela period like Ogunkoya, did not survive the punishing economics of band-leadership, live performance and recording.
It would be interesting to see how these new venues, which look like significant contribution to Lagos’ return to the era of lounges with live bands, will turn out to be.
