Benga runs on interlocking guitars and a rhythm that does not let up, the sound that owned Kenyan pop for forty years. Winyo has spent twenty of those years playing it his own way, guitar in hand, singing in Luo and Swahili in a voice his countrymen named after a bird. He plays The Jago in Dalston on Sunday 9 August, a room of a couple of hundred, and most of the set is an album he has not released yet.
The one piece of the record anyone can hear so far is “Mapenzi Sumu”, released in April. The title is Swahili for love is poison, and Winyo wrote it after a ten-year relationship ended. He recorded it at Ketebul Music in Nairobi, the studio behind his 2012 debut Benga Blues, with Fiston Lusambo of Afriquoi on bass, guitar and arrangement, then sent it to London for Abubilla’s Elliot Wenman to add keys, piano, synths and drums. Winyo has said he normally writes behind metaphor and this time did not, and there are lines he can barely sing without stopping.
Born Shiphton Onyango on the shore of Lake Victoria, he took the Luo word for bird as his name, and twenty years of singing benga have taken him onto stages with the likes of Gilberto Gil and Vieux Farka Touré, Joss Stone and into the studio with the late Oliver Mtukudzi.
The London end of that record is Abubilla Music, the label behind Winyo’s return and the promoter of this show. Abubilla and Ketebul have been working together for over a decade on Singing Wells, hauling recording gear into villages across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda to get down music that was disappearing, and Winyo has sung on those sessions, sitting in with village groups and building new songs out of what they played.
The Kenyan connection reaches the venue as well. Kwame Otiende has run The Jago since 2018, and he grew up between Nairobi and western Kenya, the Luo country where benga started and where Winyo was born.
Dalston has been dancing to benga in that room for years. On Sunday it comes from a man who has spent twenty years keeping it alive.
Winyo plays The Jago in Dalston on Sunday 9 August Tickets are available HERE