1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 300. Incredible Bongo Band – Bongo Rock (1973)

 

We reach two milestones at once – three hundred albums, and the end, finally, of 1973. And what a year that was for music. I’d have to check the numbers but I think this has had the most albums for any given year so far [Edit: No – 1969 had 39 albums, 1971 had 38, this year had a relatively measly 30, but a lot of double albums which probably made it feel longer.] 

I’d heard the Incredible Bongo Band’s version of Apache on the radio – it is truly excellent funky fun – but held off on seeking out their other work in case it didn’t live up to this track. 
And in many ways it doesn’t, Apache is definitely the stand-out. There’s a similar lengthy cover of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vidda which does the same thing – funky guitar and horns over a drum and bongo beat, with a percussion breakdown in the middle, but isn’t quite as good as Apache.  

The rest of the album is good cheesy fun, funky tunes with, as you’d expect, a bongo beat, much as if somebody had taken some KPM Library music or Syd Dale Orchestra and stuck bongos underneath it. Listening to it through earpods makes you feel like you’re the character in a 1970s spy adventure, a cheap one made by a studio that doesn’t exist any more full of beige flares and big moustaches. 

Once you’ve heard the original bongo break in Apache, you’ll spot it in a million and one samples, and a lot of the rest of this album has been sampled in places too. It’s also sort of the fore-runner of acid jazz – the funky Hammond bringing to mind, for example, the James Taylor Quartet’s version of the Starsky And Hutch theme. 

I think on repeated listening it could become annoying rather than enjoyable once the novelty wears off, but the beats are infectious and it’s a great fun and light-hearted way to round out 1973.