The Good Ones - Boogaloo, London 24/07/14

20 years ago, Rwanda was torn apart by a brutal genocide, with up to a fifth of the entire population murdered in a conflict brought about in part by the tensions caused by artificial racial distinctions imposed by European colonial powers. The scars of Western influence are still keenly felt throughout much of the ancient continent, but what happened in the Hutu-Tutsi war of 1994 is a dark monument to human tragedy that still casts a lengthy shadow. Estimates of the death toll are as high as 1,000,000 in just 100 days. The country’s economy has certainly recovered and grown since the turn of the century, but the impact on the lives of the victims’ families, let alone the affects of war rape and mutilation will likely last for generations.​

The four who men who make up The Good Ones lived through both this and extreme poverty, surviving on the equivalent of 50 cents a day and only owning one broken guitar between them. They ended up meeting Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan and, over the course of a single evening on a porch in 2009, recorded their astonishing album Kigali Y’Izahabu. How might a band formed out of this sound? For most of us, it’s pretty much impossible to imagine. But as the four men take up their instruments and begin to play, the wall-to-wall crowd in this North London boozer is instantly hushed by an explosion of sheer and undiluted joy. Cynicism, if there was any, evaporates on first hearing those sweet harmonies shine through.​

The Good Ones broadcast a clear signal of the elemental power of music. The songs carry a simple structure, with blurred edges at the beginnings and ends. A fourth live member (playing through the pain of a recently broken foot) holds down the rhythm by bashing the soles of a pair of boots together, while chief songwriter Adrien Kazigira and Jeanvier Havugimana’s vocals lock together as if they were coming from a single source. The melodies are infectious, as is the enthusiasm of the musicians. They may not speak any English, and there may be few people present tonight who possess much Kinyarwanda, but a line of communication and dialogue has little trouble establishing itself regardless. The cheers and applause of the audience are matched by the band. They love their music, and they love that we love it too.​

It is tempting, and indeed near impossible in the circumstances, to get hung up on the story that led to these joyous folk love songs being played in a room full of people in London. But the truth is that these tunes would maintain their transcendental power regardless of context. The melodies lodge in your head and make a home there. The songwriting alone would make set this band apart. It is a testament to the globalising power of music that the group’s influences come from every corner of the earth. Kazigira cites Bob Marley and Santana among his inspirations, and these sounds and ideas blend with the local street ballad tradition to concoct something which is at once fresh and feels though it has been around forever, drawn up from a well of feeling that can only be translated and understood through song.​

We’re told that these songs are about life and unrequited love on the streets of the Rwandan capital Kigali. But what they tell us is that hope and peace in the darkness are not hackneyed ideas, and that sometimes a band can say more than any words ever could. If we could divide the world and the things that happen in it in binary terms of dark and light, The Good Ones would be on the right side. There’s a Rwandan proverb that goes Izína sí lyó muntu; “a name isn’t a man”. This may be, but we couldn’t think of a more apposite moniker than this band’s.​