Tony Allen didn’t pioneer Afrobeat with Fela Kuti – Femi Kuti

Tony Allen was Fela’s lead drummer and music director from 1968 to 1979.

Multi-Grammy-nominated artiste Femi Kuti, and son of the legendary Fela Kuti, has refuted claims that the late ace drummer Tony Allen co-pioneered the Afrobeat genre with his father.

Afrobeat was pioneered in the 1960s by Fela, who popularised it within and outside Nigeria.

Allen worked as Fela’s lead drummer and music director from 1968 to 1979. This has made him widely recognised by both local and foreign media as a co-pioneer of Afrobeats.

He died on 30 April in Paris, France.

In an interview with a Canada-based platform, Sonically published on Monday, Femi dismissed claims that Allen or anyone else contributed to Fela’s music.

“They tried to sell Tony Allen, so they decided to lie. Yes, he was a good drummer, but Fela taught him his style of drums. Fela came up with all his drum patterns. We saw it”, he said.

He acknowledged his father’s versatility in playing instruments: “My father was a multi-instrumentalist and composer. He studied music. He knew every single part of his instrument.

“You probably have read that they said Fela said, ‘Without Tony Allen, there is no Afrobeat.’ That is the biggest bullsh*t ever said about my father. It is such a big lie.”

Furthermore, he took a walk down memory lane just to clarify that his late father wrote the score for every song and instrument. “When I was a child, a teenager, and a man, we saw Fela do it. Fela wrote all his patterns,” he said.

Unanswered questions

He also questioned why Allen didnt publicly share compositions he made for his late father.

“I keep telling them, why didn’t Tony Allen tell us which songs he did for Fela? He couldn’t because there was no song, so Fela asked him to put on the drum pattern. It is impossible”.

He also emphasised that no one could have contributed to his father’s craft and gave reasons.

Femi said: “When Fela was writing, no one could give any input because he went into a trance while making music. Everyone around him must maintain calmness and listen to his composition and instructions.

“So, I asked those saying Fela credited Allen for Afrobeat where he did, and they can’t produce it. No article, recording or footage from any interview proves it. It is impossible that Fela would make such a statement, and there is no copy anywhere.”

Takeaways

Femi also said that being self-taught doesn’t mean being untrained, revealing how he learned saxophone and trumpet by ear and willpower, after being handed instruments but no instruction.

He said it shaped his relentless approach to practice and originality.

From embracing spiritual discipline to rejecting outside influences in order to find a sound that was purely his, Femi challenged creators to build from within, not to chase trends.

“Music is a philosophy, not just a product.

My upcoming album Journey Through Life (out April 25) was born during a family crisis and reflects on love, loss, spiritual resilience, and why the hardest revolution might be working on yourself,” he said.

Additionally, he also broke down the difference between Afrobeat and Afrobeats, and sets the record straight on decades of music history including what people get wrong about his father’s legacy.

Fela was born on 15 October 1938 in Abeokuta, Nigeria and died on 2 August 1997 in Lagos. He was a Nigerian musician and activist who launched a modern style of music called Afrobeat, which fused American blues, jazz, and funk with traditional Yoruba music.

As a youth, he took piano and percussion lessons before studying classical music at Trinity College London in 1959. While in London, he played piano in jazz and rock bands, encountering various musical styles.

When he returned to Nigeria in the mid-1960s, he reconstituted Koola Lobitos, a band with which he had played in London. That group’s experiments created the Afrobeat sound.