BORN in Cotonou, Benin, in 1973, the brilliantly unique guitarist Lionel Loueke played percussion in his childhood before saving up for a year in his teens to buy his first guitar. Its strings had to be imported from Nigeria and he would replace broken ones by discarded bicycle brake cables.
“The language I use as I’m playing is mostly from Benin,” he tells me, “and playing percussion in my early years greatly influenced the way I play guitar today.
“My struggle to find knowledge in my earliest stages of learning helped me to find my own way of expressing myself musically. I was always committed to that necessity is the mother of invention.”