A great back story can make a band. Take Staff Benda Bilili, a bunch of veteran Congolese paraplegic musicians, discovered living on the streets around Kinshasa zoo, playing home-made guitars and driving around in scary-looking motorbike wheelchairs that might have done earlier service in a Mad Max movie. How could they fail to make international headlines?

Accompanying their huskily soulful voices with the wiry wail of a one-string lute knocked together from a tin can and a length of wire, their music appealed both to the urban African DIY aesthetic made popular by the Congotronics series and the vintage good-time vibe of bands such as Orchestra Baobab. Yet amid the world tours and the accolades, there was the suspicion that the music came second to the story – and wasn’t there something very slightly patronising in the West’s readiness to pat these defiant spirits on the head?

Happily, I can report, on the strength of this rousing second album, that both the back story and the possible patronisation are red herrings in the appreciation of some fantastic music. Staff Benda Bilili play Congo rumba, the classic dance music that dominated the continent’s night clubs in the Fifties and Sixties, before dissolving in a haze of synths and manic guitar-soloing in the Eighties. Here it’s heard raw and semi-acoustic, the musicians ploughing into the propulsive rhythms with a vigour that belies their age and disabilities. The emphasis, though, is on the earthily plaintive vocal harmonies, and the interplay of the warm and characterful lead voices.

That whooing tin-can fiddle is still there, with some surprising results. The howling solo on the driving Kuluna makes the track sound weirdly like a Congolese reading of All Along the Watchtower.