Police Room 619

It starts like a news bulletin.

September '77
Port Elizabeth weather fine
It was business as usual
In police room 619

It ends like a harbinger of hope.

You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher

It was the perfect song released at exactly the right time, for scrupulous reasons. Peter Gabriel Biko is a thing to be treasured indeed, curse the fact that it was ever necessary.

Raised in a staunchly political family I was aware of Donald Woods book Biko long before I ever heard the song it inspired. Later I can remember the the shock of reading it as a teenager and the tears that came* as I read about the injuries Bantu Stephen Biko sustained in police custody.

There is something beautifully funereal and solemn about ‘Biko’, bookended as it is by songs recorded being sung at his funeral**; there aren’t enough solemn songs out there I say. The beat, such as it is slow, the backing stark, clear and minimal. The moment when Gabriel sings his first words on the track is amongst my very favourite in music.

‘Biko’ does what a great protest song should, it never detracts from the story, it just enhances it. The track makes great use of the rougher edges of Gabriel’s voice and reminds me, yet again, what a gift that man had in that. The use of the Xhosa phrase ‘Yila Moja’ (‘come spirit) to punctuate the song really elevates it, adding to its unearthly edge. That a large part of the backing is a synthesised bagpipe, is a fact I am still struggling to process all these years later.

The climactic chanting towards the end of the song is moving enough on record but live it really was something magical to participate in. That the song is ended by the funeral singing, stopped by two drum beats that ring out like shots is (struggles to think of a way out of using the word ‘perfect’) perfect.

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Flipping Biko we get Peter Gabriel’s reading of the Nguni song ‘Shosholoza’, which is interesting and pleasant enough but fails to really stick in the mind. To be fair though after ‘Biko’ what would? had Gabriel sung a cover of the Anti-Nowhere League’s ‘So What’ backed solely by Acker Bilk, Youssou N’Dour and Bryan Ferry all on kazoo it would have failed to register.

I rather like ‘Jetzt Kommt Die Flut’ the German version of ‘Here Comes The Flood’. I’m nerdy enough to be quite the fan of Gabriel’s German output – I bought the two LPs for my son when he was studying German^. I remember Gabriel talking abut how he had to change the music and rhythms when adapting the songs for a different language, something obvious that had never occurred to me before.

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The cover picture on Biko is also pretty stark, emblematic of state power with all those massive pillars dwarfing, belittling almost, the black figure. There are an admirable set of sleevenotes on the back of this 12″, saying why the song had been released and what it was all about, together with some pictures of Biko’s wounds.

Everything about this record is sober, moving and classy.

1250 Down.

*on a bus after rugby practice, I seem to remember.

**in a recording smuggled out of South Africa by a journalist.

^he asked for them, it wasn’t an unprovoked attack.