Staff Benda Bilili at Café de la Danse

Text Brendan Seibel

Wheelchairs, crutches and handmade instruments don't conjure images of a soulful dance band. Breakout sensation are paraplegics and street kids setting fire to the stage, rising like phoenixes from the ashes of expectation. Their potent concoction of African rumba, uncut funk and traces of Nigerian highlife has been dragging crowds to their feet.

An unhinged assault and raw tales of reality deliver the chaotic slums, back alley bars and rutted streets of Kinshasa. Wheelchairs spin pirouettes, a man with withered legs sends himself rolling across the stage, a microphone teeters on the brink of collapse. Convulsing to the music's fevered pitch, a man violently rattles his crutches while scraping time across a gourd. Rocketing from wall to wall the vocals refuse to be contained, then suddenly drop to the melancholic dirge of a tortured ballad.

Sonically the ensemble is driven by polyrhythmic percussion and throbbing bass, an unrelenting propulsion guaranteed to move the audience. Rhythm guitars mines gritty 60's R&B, shuffling Caribbean grooves, and kinetic West African licks. Cutting through this dense attack comes the alien keening of the satonge, an instrument built from an old tin can, warped piece of wood and solitary guitar string. Lead vocals soar above a chorus of staggered cries. Everything teeters on the brink of collapse, clinging as precariously to the loose structures as the most possessed jazz greats.

A lifetime of hardship, rejection and struggle mark Staff Benda Bilili's ascent. Outcasts, the members coalesced busking in the streets of the Congolese capital. Their debut album, released by Crammed Discs, was recorded direct to laptop on the grounds of the Kinshasa zoo, complete with stray animal accompaniment. To survive they have exploited legal loopholes, smuggling goods over the border. They earn a meager living selling cigarettes outside clubs and restaurants. They run electrical wire, they tailor clothes, impoverished but determined to succeed, to transcend, as musicians.

Sunday, 13th December 7:30pm

Café de la Danse 22€

5 Passage Louis Phillippe

Paris 11

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