Culture
21 Sep 09

Jungle Fever

Thirty-five years before going to Ennis to meet his relatives, Muhammad O’Ali and a 122-strong security detail journeyed to Kinshasa for his Rumble In The Jungle with George Foreman, who as far as we know doesn’t have any Irish blood.

While Ali was floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee, South African musician and anti-apartheid campaigner Hugh Masakela was overcoming huge bureaucratic obstacles to stage the tie-in Zaire ’74 festival.
“Oh man, we shipped 50,000lbs of equipment in there and 400 people, we built a stage and, you know, everything just worked,” Masakela reminisces. “We had the greatest musicians, we had the greatest recording crews, the film crews were of the highest calibre, everybody got paid well and we all just had a ball, man. It was basically a celebration of what was going on, and when we look back at it, it was really the golden moment for black American music.
Happening as it did before the global media age, a lot of those classic performances by the likes of James Brown, Bill Withers, B.B. King, The Spinners and Celia Cruz & The Fania All-Stars have been lost… until now that is.
Courtesy of Jeff Levy-Hinte who previously edited the When We Were Kings Ali-mentary, 125 hours of raw Zaire ’74 has been turned into Soul Power!, which hits screens here in the autumn and could just be one of the greatest music films of all time.
Get a sneak preview at www.sonyclassics.com/soulpower, and see highlights of the fight at www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNTdUfByIhY.
Caught In The Net is indebted to Paul Nolan of this parish for reminding us of another great cinematic moment – Ireland’s first (and to our knowledge only) martial arts film, Fatal Deviation.
Shot (and the cast really should have been for their crimes against acting) in County Meath, it features Boyzone’s Mikey Graham spouting such immortal lines as, “You made me look bad, and that’s not good.”
Try not to laugh yourself senseless at www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX4td1XCkP0.
Which just leaves time for quick visits to freshpics.blogspot.com/2009/08/funny-family-photos.html (embarrassing family snaps); www.snapbuzz.com/view/video/8233 (the naughties Stylophone); replay.calottery.com/wbrscratchers (rock ‘n’ roll scratchcards); and cbs2chicago.com/topstories/depaul.twitter.class.2.1157280.html (Twitter degree course).