Catching Up With Rudy Tambala of A.R. Kane, the Best ’80s Dream-Pop Band You’ve Never Heard – Warungku Terkini

A.R. Kane might just be the greatest indie rock group you’ve never heard. But back in their late ’80s prime, the band didn’t lack for attention and acclaim. Centered around the core of Alex Ayuli and Rudy Tambala, with help from producer-mentor Ray Shulman, singing sister Maggie Tambala, and various musician friends, A.R. Kane recorded for the mighty independent labels 4AD and Rough Trade, garnered rave reviews and cover stories from the British music press, and topped the UK indie chart with their debut album, 69. As half of the alternative supergroup M/A/R/R/S, they even scored a No. 1 UK pop hit with the pioneering sample-based dance monster “Pump Up the Volume.” Alongside their peers My Bloody Valentine and their personal idols Cocteau Twins, A.R. Kane supplied crucial DNA for the shoegaze genre, while their experimental approach to guitar soundscapes influenced early post-rock.

So why has A.R. Kane’s profile faded when it comes to subsequent accounts of what went down between post-punk and Britpop? Partly it’s because they never toured extensively, like My Bloody Valentine did, nor did they reform to cement the legend and the legacy (like MBV and others have done). It’s also because their records have only been sporadically available in recent decades. That changed earlier this month, with the release of A.R. Kive: a remastered box set of their core work from 1988-89, with essays by the late Greg Tate and Neil Kulkarni, plus a fan feast of information about the group. And 69 and its poppier follow-up “i” are also available on streamers like Spotify and Tidal for the first time.

As someone who wrote about A.R. Kane in their heyday, I jumped at the chance to speak with Rudy Tambala for the first time in three decades. After he and Ayuli went their separate ways in the mid-’90s, it’s Tambala who remained most active in music with groups like Sufi and Jübl, and he’s been the driving force behind the A.R.Kive project. “Some of the earliest releases aren’t on this box, but Up Home!, 69 and “i” —to me, that’s the body of work, the creative sorcery,” says Tambala by Zoom from his home in Cambridge, England. “I view it as a cultural legacy that hasn’t been appreciated. We don’t get the credit—and I would like it! The impact that we had—and could still have—is enormous.”

warungku: Back in the day, A.R. Kane didn’t talk much about being Black British operators in a pretty white indie scene. Nor did journalists like me who loved the band play up that angle.

Rudy Tambala: Right at the start, we got stung—one of the first interviews, the journalist described us as “the Black Jesus and Mary Chain.” We grew up in Stratford, East London… we’re an English band! And it wasn’t like we were doing hip-hop or playing reggae. We were playing the music we fucking loved—on guitars, noisily. Equally, when Greg Tate and Vernon Reid [of Living Colour] sent us a letter inviting us to join the Black Rock Coalition, we were like, “No, we’re not going to ghettoize ourselves.” We refused to be categorized in any way, shape, or form. And one of the categories was race. But, over time, you mellow. And there’s no point in denying it—it’s not going to go away.

A.R. Kane loved being an enigma, so not talking about backgrounds seemed part of the mystique. But your backgrounds are interesting: Alex’s family came from Nigeria, your dad was from Malawi. That’s West Africa and East Africa—quite different cultures.

Nigerians are more different from Malawi than Germans are from Irish! So there’s no connection, except that we both had parents from Africa. Everyone in Malawi looks exactly like me–small, skinny. We’ve got a certain approach to life. But my mum, she’s a third-generation immigrant from Holland. Her ancestors fled Holland because of Jewish persecution. So I’ve got Dutch, Jewish, German, and some Irish on my mum’s side.

That feeds into my music lineage, because I grew up hearing waltzes—my mum loved Strauss and Austro-Germanic culture. Blasting the Blue Danube every Saturday afternoon! Which is why there’s 3/4 time in some A.R. Kane songs. Meanwhile, my oldest brother would be playing ska and reggae. There was a period of my brothers and me going out on the soul scene, dancing to jazz-funk. Whereas Alex’s brother worked on the reggae sound system Lord Creation Hi-Fi, so Alex had a deep background in dub and going to blues parties. We were both into post-punk and Public Image Ltd, but also synth stuff like Japan. At university, through my best mates Dan and Julian, who later formed the shoegaze group Kitchens of Distinction, I heard prog rock. I’m discovering cannabis, sitting in my room smoking and listening to Pink Floyd and Genesis. After a year of studying biochemistry, I quit college and became a complete dropout – doing Zen Buddhism, taking LSD, and listening to Hendrix and Velvet Underground.

Legend has it that the spark for A.R. Kane was you and Alex separately seeing Cocteau Twins on television.

That was 1985–they were doing “Pink Orange Red” and they looked like they were from another planet. I rang Alex—and Alex, it turned out, was ringing me. Because his phone was engaged, I went straight round to his house and said, “Did you see that? Let’s start a band.” All we had was Alex’s battered old acoustic guitar. He taught me how to play Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” and Joy Division’s “Atmosphere”—the two influences on our first single “When You’re Sad.”