Superlatives don't begin to approach how phenomenal this show was. I think SBB may be the hottest new band touring out of Africa at the moment. Yes, some of the oldies still make the circuit but as I said to IJ, Salif Keita may be great live but having seen him five or six times, he was only on fire once. Yes, IJ replied, and for every Salif Keita or Youssou Ndour there are 50 people who are equally incredible performers who don't get to tour. For 90 minutes Staff Benda Bilili tore up the stage at Slim's, a perfect venue for dancing or lounging at the back by the bar, with a great sound mix so you could hear it all perfectly from anywhere in the house.

The front line of the band is five polio victims: four of them wheelchair-bound, one on crutches. The upright members of the band are the backline: bassist, drummer and young virtuoso Roger on satonge. ALL of the instruments are home-made, even the drumkit, which looks like a packing crate with a skin head for the bass drum. Drummer Montana Kinunu Ntunu played on top of the crate; he also had three tomtoms that were hollowed-out logs of different sizes, covered in skin, mounted to the crate with T-brackets, and a couple of different sized cans for cymbal crashes. He also played bull-roarer. The bassist, "Cavalier," was inspired, sounding like 3/5ths Bootsy Collins and 3/5ths Leroy Sibbles with the other 3/5ths his own invention. But the main sound of the band is comes from two guitars and Roger's eerie voodoo-like wailing one-stringed satonge. Loud and live really upped the ante from their two fantastic CDs.

Imagine for a moment some celestial mixing board: one channel has "Liwa ya Wech"-era Franco -- haunting acoustic guitar with two-fingered leads and heartfelt if raggedy vocals. In the other channel is Jimi Hendrix playing "All along the Watchtower" with his tube-screamer on "stun." That's the effect of Staff Benda Bilili live. IJ asked me what effects they were using. It's a contact mike in a tin can, I told him, and those guitars are homemade. Look, the "holes" are painted on! They are solid body; they only look like commercially made guitars because the machine heads are "real," but the necks and bodies are hand-carved.

Seeing SBB live was a revelation because you could distinguish the different vocalists and their styles, also the different guitarists which you can hear on the disc, are now associated with the players. Seeing what each member contributed was important and they all bring equal parts to the group. If you'd said it was a soukous show, I probably wouldn't have gone out. It's folk music but it has been updated to include soukous in its grasp, obviously these guys grew up listening to Franco, but I heard Viva la Muzika in their harmonies, even some lyrics seemed to borrow from popular soukous hits. And they performed a wonderful oldie "Djambula," which I recall from 30 years or more ago, but can't recall who did it originally, though I am thinking Cameroun more than Congo. It's memorable because of the "masked" voice and haunted harmony.

SBB turned it out and the crowd was ecstatic. Their handicap is barely noticeable on stage: I was even reminded of the great shows in the first wave of soukous when Loketo & Arlus Mabele came to town and had three dancers who jumped and spun in unison. The SBB front line were limited to waving their arms and moving their upper bodies, until Djunana, the clown of the group, jumped out of his wheelchair to boogie on the stage. And when they did their James Brown riff, "Get on down, get on down, Sex machine!" in "Je t'aime," you realize how a handicap can destroy your sex life. Otherwise they were just a regular bunch of talented blokes who had got a lucky break and were enjoying the accolades they deserved.

People are always asking me when I going to write my memoirs. I think they are expecting me to write about buying gold in the Congo, but that's not very interesting other than the fact that going to Zaire in 1983 led me to discover my "soul music," and it has played a big part in my emotional well-being ever since. My brain needs Congolese music. Without it I'd probably be listening to Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle and Velvet Underground and clinically depressed! But a part of my biography that I want to bring up here is the fact that in the 1960s I was Assistant Scout Master to a troop of spastic boy scouts. These lads had cerebral palsy, which is different from polio, but were keen to be accepted as normal, even though they were mostly wheelchair-bound. We had to bend the rules to get them their merit badges, like the 15-mile hike -- it's hard to roll a wheelchair along a dirt road in the rain, but we had memorable times camping and teaching them survival skills. The band members have had a similar struggle to survive, and congregated at the zoo in Kinshasa, probably a safe place to be at night, unless the big cats get out. The animateur of the band made wild animal sounds at once point & I wondered if that's where he got them. Call & response with a leopard! But the Congolese landscape is never quiet and in the bush at night there's the terrifying shriek of the tree hyrax, sounding like it's about to be murdered. It's very unnerving.

For me the standout at the show was Coco Ngambali, singer and lead guitarist, though I agree with the critical consensus that teenager Roger Landu is a genius and, as an able-bodied member of the band, the one most likely to go off on his own, or even disappear because he seems young and impressionable and the world tour will undoubtedly go to his head. But hopefully he will escape the Jeremy Spencer fate.

The documentary film about them "Benda Bilili (Look Beyond Appearances)" by Renaud Barret & Florent de la Tulaye has opened in limited release in the USA. If you can't catch them on this tour be sure to look for the film.