Charles Kraus: From street to screen: the story of Staff Benda Bilili

Staff Benda Bilili's remarkable story is coming to UK cinemas. Robin Denselow talks to the men who made it all happen.

It's an intriguing imponderable of the African music scene. If Renaud Barret, a Paris-based graphic designer, hadn't had a girlfriend who went to eastern Congo to write about child soldiers, then would the most successful African band of recent years still be busking on the streets of Kinshasa? It's quite possible. And it's certain that a most extraordinary music documentary would never have been made.

Benda Bilili! follows the (almost literally) rags-to-riches story of Staff Benda Bilili, a band of musicians who've had polio playing guitars from their wheelchairs, along with a former street child, Roger Landu, who performs on an instrument constructed from a tin can and a piece of wire. They were hailed as a sensation when they first appeared in London in 2009, and continued to build up their following at the Glastonbury and Womad festivals last summer. And yet, according to Barret, they had "no future" when he first came across them, "begging for money outside a fancy Kinshasa restaurant" in December 2004.

Barret had arrived in the Congolese capital the previous year, after visiting his girlfriend in Goma, in the east. He had originally planned to spend only 10 days in Kinshasa, but fell in love with this sprawling city and its wild energy, and rang his friend Florent de La Tullaye, a photojournalist working in Russia, and said: "This is the craziest place in the world. We have to buy cameras and do something here." So they did, staying for six years with no outside help, "which made it a wonderful adventure, but we were very poor ? practically like bums! We lost friends in France, we lost girlfriends. Everyone thought we were crazy. We shot three movies with our own money; we needed to film and record people, and we dreamed that one day it would work."

The chance meeting with Staff Benda would change the lives of the Frenchmen and the musicians alike. When he first heard the band, Barret says, "it was a shock, because they weren't doing covers, but had their own songs and their own style ? a crazy mixture of rumba, funk and tribal music. We listened to them until the early morning." Ricky Likabu, the band leader, remembers the meeting like this: "We were in the street rehearsing, and the film-makers happened to come across us. They asked what sort of music we were playing and we said rumba-blues, a mixture of rumba and European music. We had a beer together and the film-makers said we'll come back tomorrow and record three of your songs and then see if we can find a recording deal for you." According to Barret, Likabu had no choice but to work with them. "It was his last and only chance to be heard, and they trusted us pretty quickly ? they had no other option."

The idea was that the French duo would produce an album with the band. But they started filming them "on a daily basis, to get material to promote them". They filmed them at the Kinshasa zoo, in a squalid shelter for disabled people that was home to many musicians, and on the streets, where, Barret says, "they are godfathers: the wise guys teaching all the street children to stay safe, sleeping on cardboard boxes and getting out messages of education. Their music is linked with their lives. We had a crush on them, and we couldn't do other than to record them."

They were even present when the band first met Landau, then a shege, one of the thousands of street kids trying to eke out a living, with the homemade instrument he called a satong�. Landau has since been compared to Hendrix. "When we first met him, he was begging, and came up to us to get food," Barret says. "He was 12 but looked eight, and hadn't been eating. But when he started playing the satong� we were amazed: it was so precise, and the sound was amazing. Then he vanished for a year, but turned up when Ricky was looking for new blood for the band. You see in the film the day he was accepted in the band."

The film is remarkable for its vivid insights into Kinshasa street life. Barret and De la Tullaye were there when the band made their first attempt at recording. But the sessions failed, partly because the shelter where many of them were living burned down. "They couldn't work ? everything went upside down in their heads."

The situation changed thanks to the involvement of the Crammed Discs label and its producer Vincent Kenis, who had been responsible for the success of the Congotronics albums and bands such as Konono No 1. He did justice to Staff Benda Bilili's songs, while back in Europe Barret and De la Tullaye found the finance to complete their film, after surviving in Kinshasa by organising concerts and shooting beer commercials.

It's a remarkable achievement, not least because Kinshasa can be such a difficult city to work in. In 2009, after the filming of Benda Bilili! was completed and just before the band's UK debut at the Barbican, I made a more modest report on the band for television. We filmed them at the zoo, and watched Ricky and his wife (another polio sufferer) selling cigarettes from their wheelchairs in the market. All went well until we moved to Kinshasa market, when a crowd turned on us, attacking our van and trying to steal the camera.

So how did the French duo avoid such problems? "It was easy at first, because we were crazy," says De la Tullaye. "We were out of our trolley and not frightened. We had so many doors slammed in our heads." Says Barret: "The true problem is the cops and the army, not the gangsters." Likabu sees it rather differently: "We grew up with street kids, and they acted as security guards for the film crew. They never had problems because we were so well organised."

Today, the film-makers are back in the Congo, and Staff Benda Bilili have been touring the world. When I last met Likabu, in Kinshasa last September, he was looking smarter than ever as he drove across town in his motorised wheelchair. He was seemingly unshaken by his change of fortune: "Because I always thought we would succeed in the west one day." And how was his wife? "She's still down at the market selling cigarettes."

? A gala screening of Benda Bilili! is followed by a performance by the band at Union Chapel, London on 11 March. The film is released on 18 March.

Robin Denselow

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