Auntie Flo - Green City: Out now

Green City, our joyous 15 min afro-disco odyssey, is out now. Add it to your Spotify, buy the ltd edition green vinyl, transcend! Ft Yohan / Kokoroko, Ambasa Mandela / Sarabi, Laurie Pitt / Ziggy Funk

Five years in the making, Green City is finally released. What a joy it is to be sharing this track with you!

NB: Our Limited Edition Green Vinyl is almost sold out at our Bandcamp. The final few copies remain so please grab a copy today (it is Bandcamp day after all) or check your local record store

It started as a field recording in Nairobi, this time very late at night after a gig when the sun was coming up. We were in a car with about seven people crammed into five seats. Birds were tweeting and a song faintly came on the radio, which I recorded in amongst the chatter. The rhythm of that field recording created the basis for the track, which I took to my studio in London and arranged a bunch of sessions asking some of my favourite musicians to jam on top of the basic track.

The first session I did was with Yohan Kebede (Kokoroko). He toured with the Auntie Flo live band for the Radio Highlife album and I got him in the studio shortly after we finished the tour. He is mega talented and his key playing was a major part of the basis of the track. 

A few months later, I enlisted Ziggy Funk to do a session on guitar and bass - I’d met him on the Havana Rhythm Dance video shoot and checked his work after that. I had no idea just how good he was and he ended up playing on several tracks during that session (more news on them very soon). 

I went up to Glasgow and did a combined session with Laurie Pitt (Golden Teacher) and his mate Joe Howe (Ben Butler + Mousepad) at the Green Door studio. I’ve known Laurie for years, we did some Sun Ritual gigs in 2016/2017 together and he subsequently became part of the band for Radio Highlife tour.

I just asked him if he could ‘play like Tony Allen’ for the radio version and he nailed that afrobeat groove. Joe is a man of many talents and ended up using a bit of his sax on the track too, which helped bring another dimension. 

The track sat as an instrumental for a year or so. I played the white label to Gilles Peterson and he loved it but said ‘it definitely needs a vocal’. I agreed, and went on this 2 year search to find the perfect vocalist, reaching out to many different people before finding Ambasa Mandela who sings in the band Sarabi. He was a connection through the Santuri East Africa project I’d been involved with back in 2015 but we’d never actually met. 

He helped the record come full circle - it had started life as a simple field recording in Nairobi and it was nice for it to return as a fully fledged piece of music for Mandela to finish off. 

It’s called Green City as Nairobi is referred to as ‘The Green City In the Sun’.

Artwork by Sijya Gupta. Mixing by Scott Knapper at Konk and Sam Willis. Mastering by Orion Agassi.