From selling roasted mice to playing WOMAD: how the Mouse Boys' gospel feel mixed with African sounds is reaching audiences far beyond dusty Malawian roads.
"Business is slow - there aren't that many motorists", says record producer Ian Brennan of The Malawi Mouse Boys' former profession. We are backstage after the group's eagerly anticipated performance at WOMAD.
Brennan is referring to the fact that the Mouse Boys used to eke out a living selling barbequed rodents on sticks - a fact to which the name of their musical collaboration pays homage.
To a non-Malawian audience, this way of life may seem to epitomise a hand-to-mouth existence, but this practice actually has a long history in the country. In the intervals between serving customers roasted mice, the group would sing gospel songs and play homemade instruments.
Harmony amid discord
He is #1 is a snapshot of this lifestyle. It is impossible not to love the swelling optimism of their ukulele-like guitars, offset against the kind of natural vocal harmony that comes from many years of musical partnership; the Malawi Mouse Boys have now been singing together for the majority of their lives. When Brennan compares lead singer Zondiwe Kachingwe to Sam Cooke, he does so with unfazed confidence.
Natural harmony is not the only theme apparent in their music. As in American gospel, Jesus, or "Jesu" as the Mouse Boys credit him, is a recurring subject. He is also the eponymous '#1' in the album title. Brennan insists that the Mouse Boys dedication to religion is unconnected to some of the worrying trends in the region. "There's been a wave of right wing Christian influence in Central Africa which has brought a lot of homophobia with it", he notes, "so certainly that presence is there, but it's not in the Mouse Boys' church. Their religion isn't cultish."
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The isolation of a Malawian highway can help preserve a sound; the Malawi Mouse Boys have captured beautifully something from 1960s America. Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, the blind Aboriginal Australian guitarist who looked like a startling throwback from the Great Depression-era Southern US States, had a similarly anachronistic quality when he appeared in 2008.
Having said that, Shona and Bantu harmony traditions give The Malawi Mouse Boys a rich African feel too, which becomes more obvious when seen live. And, as Brennan points out, all African American music can be traced to its African roots.
This has been caught here with crisp purity, despite the interruptions of the "tiny spiders that kept crawling into the hard-drive" during the recording sessions.
He is #1 is released by Independent Records Ltd.
