Music

It was on the Saturday before Easter 1964 that Radio Caroline sent out its opening salvo, the Rolling Stones’ cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” from a rehabilitated Dutch ferry anchored three miles off the coast of England. For British teenagers, used to a bland diet of children’s programs, 1950s ballads and farm news on the BBC — also known by the nickname Auntie — it was a revelation.And Ronan O’Rahilly, the roguish Irish entrepreneur and showman behind Radio Caroline, who was then just 23, made sure that his operation would become the most famous of the pirate radio stations run from a ragtag armada of ships moored in international waters when the BBC had a monopoly on the airwaves.Mr. O’Rahilly died on April 20 at a nursing home in County Louth, outside Dublin. He was 79. His partner, Ines Rocha Trindade, who confirmed the death, said he had learned he had vascular dementia in 2013.Charismatic, deeply eccentric — he was a committed conspiracy theorist and often went by a pseudonym — and with a flair for the grand gesture, Mr. O’Rahilly was at the center of the music scene in London in the early 1960s, or tried to be. He had left his home outside Dublin at 17, worked checking coats in a London night spot, and was soon running his own club, the Scene.He managed a few acts, too, and when he couldn’t get one of his performers’ records played on the BBC, he began to hatch a scheme to run a pirate radio station from a ship, following the lead of Dutch and Scandinavian operators.“A hustler of the old school, a King’s Road cowboy,” is how Ian Ross, whose father put up much of the cash for Radio Caroline before it launched, described Mr. O’Rahilly in interviews. In “Rocking the Boat,” Mr. Ross’s 1990 novel based on his experience, Mr. O’Rahilly became a beguiling character called Liam O’Mahoney, “a wolfish idealist who if asked at parties what he ‘did’ would smile terribly and say he was in the why-not business.”Radio Caroline’s adventures found their way into more than a few books, as well as a 2009 comedy, “Pirate Radio,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a D.J. and based only very loosely on actual events. Mr. O’Rahilly’s character was played by Bill Nighy. As one story goes, Mr. O’Rahilly named his station for Caroline Kennedy, having been charmed by a photograph of her as a toddler in the Oval Office. Another story proposes that he was inspired by the ideal reader of Queen magazine, a mythical “Caroline” toward whom the editors directed their lifestyle coverage in those days (Queen’s publisher was an early investor in the station). Still another suggests he was inspired by his girlfriend at the time, Caroline Maudling.As Peter Moore, who has been running Radio Caroline since the early 1990s, put it in a phone interview, “There’s truth, and there’s Ronan’s truth.” (Radio Caroline is now based on land and streams on the internet from an office in Essex.)It is true that Mr. O’Rahilly was obsessed with the Kennedy family. He had a bust of President John F. Kennedy on his desk — for a time, Radio Caroline’s headquarters were in swanky offices in Mayfair — and sometimes used the name Bobby Kennedy as a pseudonym. In the last decades of his life, he was at work on “King Kennedy,” a documentary about the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King.Pirate radio of the sort pioneered by Radio Caroline — Top 40 hits, all day long — would go on to be the soundtrack of British and European youth. In the beginning it was a moneymaker, with 20 million listeners and hundreds of thousands of pounds in revenue. Mr. O’Rahilly was no mariner — he suffered from seasickness — and he never spun a record, but he was the station’s handsome frontman and huckster.In 1967, Parliament passed the Marine Offenses Act, making it illegal to advertise on pirate radio or provide any services to the ships, thereby starving them of cash and supplies and turning D.J.s into outlaws. Radio Caroline’s two ships — the ferry had been joined by a 1920s-era cargo schooner named Mi Amigo — were towed away by the Dutch authorities because Mr. O’Rahilly owed money to Dutch suppliers, and the ferry was sold for scrap to pay its debts.Then things got really interesting. Mr. O’Rahilly finagled reacquisition of the Mi Amigo, after which he ran the station as a truly renegade operation — the D.J.s were rarely paid, and they all used fake names — to a backbeat of calamity and financial shenanigans as he outfoxed creditors and the authorities.The Mi Amigo sank in 1980; the five D.J.s on board, as well as the ship’s canary, Wilson — named after Mr. O’Rahilly’s nemesis, Prime Minister Harold Wilson — were all rescued. The next ship was a German trawler called the Ross Revenge, launched with great fanfare from Santander, Spain. After it ran aground in 1991 off the coast of Kent, Mr. O’Rahilly had had enough of Radio Caroline. (Miraculously, Mr. Moore said, despite Radio Caroline’s many mishaps, nobody died or even sprained an ankle.)“Any normal group of people would have realized the situation was hopeless,” Mr. Moore said of Radio Caroline’s exploits during the ’80s, “but these were not normal people.”Aodogan Ronan O’Rahilly was born on May 21, 1940, in Dublin, one of five children. His mother, Marion Philomena O’Connor O’Rahilly, was an American from a wealthy Irish family. His father, Aodogan O’Rahilly, was a well-to-do businessman who sold building supplies and owned the only private port in Ireland for a time, which became a handy resource once Radio Caroline got underway. His grandfather Michael O’Rahilly, otherwise known as The O’Rahilly, was a Republican hero who was killed by the British during the Easter Rebellion in 1916. It was in his honor that Radio Caroline began broadcasting during Easter week.Despite a reputation for rarely paying his bills, Mr. O’Rahilly inspired enormous affection. Tony Palmer, who worked on the Ross Revenge in 1990, recalled in a tribute to his old boss, “It became a running joke among Radio Caroline staff that if you heard the ‘Old Man’ start a sentence with ‘Hey, I’ve got this really great idea!’ you knew what followed was going to be challenging, if not impractical, dangerous, or downright contrary to the established laws of physics — nevertheless, it would always be interesting.”Mr. O’Rahilly’s instincts were not always sound. He was, for a short time, the manager of George Lazenby, the Australian actor who played James Bond in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” in 1969. Mr. O’Rahilly advised Mr. Lazenby to turn down the next Bond film, for which he was offered $1 million, because he thought Bond was going out of style, Mr. Lazenby recalled in an interview. “Was it a good or a bad thing? Who can say?” he added. “I ran out of money as a result, but then I went sailing and met the mother of my daughter Melanie.”In 1993, Mr. O’Rahilly married Catherine Hamilton-Davies, a former house model for Yves St. Laurent, whom he met playing snooker at the Chelsea Arts Club. “With his mane of white hair, and Variety in his pocket,” she recalled by email, “he was a Chelsea personality.”Mr. O’Rahilly and his wife separated but never divorced. In addition to her and Ms. Rocha Trindade, he is survived by three sisters, Nuala Price, Iseult Broglio and Roisin O’Rahilly, and a stepson, Caspian Rabone.“He was a rogue without a doubt,” said Tom Anderson, a Radio Caroline D.J. who was on the Mi Amigo when it sank (and who rescued Wilson the canary). “But a rogue with a vision. A charming, lovable man. You always forgave him in the end.” More

Tony Allen, the drummer who created the steadfast, subtle beat of the Nigerian protest funk known as Afrobeat, died on Thursday in Paris. He was 79.His manager, Eric Trosset, said the cause was an abdominal aortic aneurysm.From 1964 to 1978, Mr. Allen worked with the bandleader Fela Ransome-Kuti, who became known worldwide simply as Fela. He was the musical director for Fela’s band Africa 70, which forged music that was both politically committed and danceable, merging West African styles with American jazz and funk.Mr. Allen made more than three dozen albums with Fela and the band, including the indelible “Zombie” and “Gentleman,” as well as solo albums on which Mr. Allen led Africa 70. The music of Fela and Africa 70 reached listeners and emulators all over the world. On Twitter, Peter Gabriel wrote, “As a musician & aspiring drummer, it was thrilling to get lost in their new, smart, sexy & political music full of killer grooves.”The songs that defined Afrobeat, with Mr. Allen’s drumming at their core, move at a deliberate, unhurried tempo, geared for marathon six-hour sets and dancing until dawn. On albums, many of Fela’s 1970s Afrobeat songs stretched the length of an LP side.While Fela (who died in 1997) composed the parts for the band’s other instruments, Mr. Allen created his own drum parts. His playing was open-ended and improvisatory rather than bluntly repetitive; complex patterns drove a shifting dialogue with every element of the band. “You listen to it flowing like a river,” Mr. Allen explained in a 2016 interview with The Guardian.After he left Africa 70 in 1979, Mr. Allen went on to an international solo career, leading his own bands and collaborating with rock, jazz, reggae, R&B and electronic musicians. The composer and producer Brian Eno, a fan since the 1970s, once called Mr. Allen “perhaps the greatest drummer who ever lived.”Tony Oladipo Allen was born on Aug. 12, 1940, in Lagos, then the capital of Nigeria. He was the eldest of six children of James Alabi Allen, a Nigerian auto mechanic, and Prudencia Anna (Mettle) Allen, whose family was from Ghana.As a teenager he learned electronics and worked as a radio technician — skills that would come in handy in his early days as a touring musician, when he repaired the band’s amplifiers. He didn’t start playing drums until he was 18.He had grown up listening to West African music, but he also immersed himself in jazz, studying the drumming of Gene Krupa, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones, Tony Williams and others. “These guys were telling a story by playing different rhythms, and they were doing it with independent coordination,” he said in the 2013 book “Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat,” which he wrote with Michael Veal. “That’s the way the drums should be played, man.”As he taught himself to play, Mr. Allen became particularly interested in the pedal-operated pair of cymbals known as the hi-hat, which he felt other African drummers neglected. The whoosh, rustle and ping of his hi-hats animated Mr. Allen’s drumming with an additional layer of polyrhythm.“I’m creating different patterns with my four limbs,” Mr. Allen told The Guardian in 2014. “They are all playing something different, which means you need to split your mind into four elements with the one central idea running through.”Martin Perna, the founder of the Brooklyn-based Afrobeat band Antibalas, which performed with Mr. Allen in the 2000s, said Mr. Allen “was the embodiment of rhythm.” He added, “What’s so magical is with all that variation, he’s somehow more hypnotic than a pattern that doesn’t change.”Mr. Allen soon found work in Lagos highlife bands and groups that played whatever was popular. In 1964 he auditioned for Fela Ransome-Kuti, who was putting together a jazz band, beginning a 15-year musical alliance that survived chronic disputes over getting paid.That first band’s pure jazz drew only small audiences, and Fela soon decided to combine jazz with African pop; as Fela Ransome-Kuti and His Koola Lobitos, the band played what it called “highlife jazz.”The group toured Nigeria and neighboring Ghana. In the late 1960s a Ghanaian promoter, Raymond Aziz, came up with a new name for their musical hybrid: Afrobeat.During a lengthy stay in Los Angeles in 1969 when the band was on tour in the United States, Fela grew politicized by the Black Power movement. When the band returned to Nigeria, Fela renamed it first Nigeria 70 and then Africa 70. His new songs were more streamlined and merged James Brown-style funk with Mr. Allen’s rolling, crackling rhythms.“I had developed the drumming concept for Afrobeat from many things that I heard while I was growing up,” Mr. Allen said in his autobiography. “It was a fusion of beats and patterns. There was highlife, there was local Yoruba music like apala and sakara, there was jazz, and there was Western popular music like funk and R&B.” Fela’s new songs also carried messages, at first couched in proverbs and then increasingly direct, that condemned corruption and taunted Nigeria’s military dictatorship. Although Fela and Africa 70 recorded extensively and performed regularly at his club, the Shrine, Fela was repeatedly arrested and beaten.Africa 70 persisted, and Mr. Allen stayed on as bandleader until September 1978, when, after years of feeling musically fulfilled but financially exploited, he quit.Mr. Allen was backed by Africa 70 on his 1979 album, “No Accommodation for Lagos,” but he struggled to start his own band in Nigeria. Eventually, after recording in London, he settled in Paris in 1985.In 1987 he married Sylvie Nicollet. She survives him, as do their three sons and four children from an earlier relationship in Nigeria, along with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He lived in Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris.Mr. Allen was frustrated with the first recordings he made in France, on which trendy-minded producers smothered his drumming with electronics. But in the 1990s he forged the blend of Afrobeat and dub electronics that he wanted on “Black Voices,” which featured guest appearances by singers from Parliament-Funkadelic. He found more compatible collaborators in the next decades.A longtime fan, Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz, appeared on Mr. Allen’s 2002 album, “Home Cooking,” starting a long affiliation. Mr. Allen joined Mr. Albarn in the band the Good, the Bad and the Queen and in a project with Flea, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist, called Rocket Juice & the Moon. He also made small-group jazz albums and recorded with the reggae guitarist Ernest Ranglin and the techno producer Jeff Mills. This year he completed “Rejoice,” an album featuring the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who died in 2018, that was begun at sessions in 2010. On Saturday, Gorillaz released a new song with Mr. Allen and the grime rapper Skepta, “How Far?”“I still challenge myself every time with my playing,” Mr. Allen wrote in his autobiography. “I still want to play something impossible, something that I never played before. That’s what I’m after.” More

Hamilton Bohannon, a drummer whose disco records propelled people onto dance floors in the 1970s and ’80s, and then lived on as popular samples for major hip-hop artists, died on April 24 at his home in Atlanta. He was 78.His daughter, April Bohannon Binion, said the cause of death had not been determined.Mr. Bohannon began his career primarily backing Motown acts like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross and the Supremes, before going off on his own.Danceable rhythm was the defining characteristic of Mr. Bohannon’s most successful compositions. He was an early devotee of the so-called four-on-the-floor rhythm, which became the backbone of disco and many later forms of dance music, especially house.Mr. Bohannon became known for long-running tracks like “Foot Stompin’ Music,” “Disco Stomp” and “Bohannon’s Beat,” which often featured straightforward vocals chanted over a driving beat. They were made to keep dancers on the floor, and many of them became staples for disco D.J.s; his highest-charting single, “Let’s Start II Dance Again” (1981), reached No. 5 on Billboard’s dance/club chart.Some of Mr. Bohannon’s songs, like “South African Man,” skewed funky; others, like “Save Their Souls,” were closer to traditional soul or R&B. But they all shared a propulsive beat, as Mr. Bohannon told The Newnan Times-Herald of Georgia, his hometown newspaper, when the street next to his childhood home was named after him in 2017.“The foundation is that beat,” Mr. Bohannon said. “Even a deaf man can feel that vibration.”Mr. Bohannon’s music endured long after disco floors cleared. New generations of producers discovered his work, which was sampled by more than 100 artists, among them Jay-Z (“Cashmere Thoughts”), Craig Mack (“Project: Funk da World”), Justin Timberlake (“Strawberry Bubblegum”) and Digable Planets (“Pacifics”).His music also inspired contemporaries like Talking Heads, whose drummer, Chris Frantz, wrote in an email, “The thing about Bohannon’s musical style that influenced us were his relentlessly driving rhythms, four to the bar, performed by his entire rhythm section on guitar, bass, drums and percussion.”“While Bohannon’s approach to music was easy and fun to dance to, his production values were not overly slick and polished like so many disco records,” Mr. Frantz continued. “There was something very visceral about his songs.”Hamilton Frederick Bohannon was born on March 7, 1942, in Newnan, about 40 miles southwest of Atlanta. His father, Willie, worked in a local warehouse and ran a barbershop; his mother, Sarah (Taylor) Bohannon, was a homemaker. He started learning percussion when he was quite young, banging on books, furniture and anything else at hand.He told The Newnan Times-Herald that he persuaded his high school band, and his parents, to let him play in its rhythm section when he was still in elementary school. By seventh grade he had formed a group, the Bob Dads, that performed at venues in the area and eventually became regulars at the Royal Peacock in Atlanta, where luminaries like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Dinah Washington and Gladys Knight and the Pips performed.Mr. Bohannon was hired as the house drummer at the Peacock, and while working there he met and played with Jimi Hendrix, then a young, obscure guitarist, shortly before Mr. Hendrix became a sideman for Little Richard.After graduating from high school in Newnan, Mr. Bohannon studied music at Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black institution in Atlanta, earning a bachelor’s degree in music with a minor in education in 1970. He met Andrea Mundy there, and they married a few years after she graduated.Mr. Bohannon taught high school music in LaGrange, Ga., by day, and kept playing at the Peacock by night. His essentially sleepless lifestyle caught up with him, and he badly injured his foot in a car accident. The injury kept him from being drafted during the Vietnam War.After he recovered, he became the drummer for Stevie Wonder, then a teenage prodigy, whom he had met in Atlanta. Mr. Bohannon followed Mr. Wonder to Detroit, and in 1967 he became the drummer and band director for touring Motown acts. After Berry Gordy, the label’s founder, moved Motown Records to Los Angeles in 1972, Mr. Bohannon returned to Georgia and resumed teaching for a time before he started recording and producing his own music.Dakar Records released his first solo album, “Stop & Go,” in 1973. His other albums include “Insides Out” (1975) and “Summertime Groove” (1978).His wife, Andrea, died in 1996. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a son, Hamilton Bohannon II; a sister, Annie Lee Cook; two brothers, Levi and Howard; and three grandchildren. More