Lawyer’s album is 20 years in the making

Trained lawyer Ms June Gachui will be releasing her first album on Tuesday. PHOTO| COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • She studied law in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America; but she has stayed away from the courts, preferring the theatre and the music recording studio instead.

By the 30th second, you are convinced that this is an imported rhythm and blues song, the kind that radio stations play at sunset.

At the one-minute mark, it is apparent that the song is delivering a heart-breaking message to the singer’s lover, and the slow beat accompanying the voice captures the mood:

“You’re just not the one for me/

Sorry, sorry, sorry babe/

I’m gonna have to ask you to leave me/

I really don’t want you to hate me/

It’s just a case of mistaken identity.” 

After telling the lover why they should part ways and assuring him that he will find his love some day, she signs off in a near-whisper.

“That’s all I got to say,” she sings, concluding the song Mistaken Identity.

It is a voice that is familiar in Kenya’s social scene. And after 20 years of singing at weddings (more than 350 of them, she says), performing at Nairobi recreation spots and rubbing shoulders with the captains of the Kenyan music industry, Ms June Gachui will be releasing her first album on Tuesday — and "Mistaken Identity" will be one of the 12 songs.

“I’ve been spending most of these 20 years singing other people’s music and now I feel like I’m ready to share mine without fear or favour,” says Ms Gachui, who is a lawyer, singer and actress rolled into one.

The 38-year-old told Lifestyle that the album, titled Twenty Years, is more of a diary than a collection of songs.

“It’s a mixture of experiences, a mixture of good times and bad times because for me, music has always been a point of release. It’s been a stress reliever, the way that I communicate when words fail me,” she says.

It therefore comes as no surprise, for example, that "My Forever Song", one of the tunes in the album, relates to the 2010 death of her father James Gachui, who got into business after retiring from his engineering career.

When the album is finally unveiled in a concert at Kenya National Theatre in Nairobi, it will be a crowning moment of sorts for Ms Gachui, who believes she will introduce a breath of fresh air in the local music scene.

“I don’t think there’s anything like it in the market right now. It’ll be a breath of fresh air, I think,” she says.

NYUMMY MUSIC

She has christened her genre “Nyummy Music” and hopes the album will help her sing her way into Kenyans’ hearts.

“Some of my songs are rock, others are funk, others are neo-soul. But the one thing all of them have is that nyummy feeling in them. That’s why ‘Nyummy Music’ is the phrase we have coined,” she explains.

But it will not be an ordinary singer dropping hit after hit in the podium during the launch.

On stage will be a lawyer, now in the 10th year since she was admitted to the Roll of Advocates, with a Master’s degree in Intellectual Property Law from the George Washington University in the US.

Though she has done very little practice, she is viewed as a legal authority among artistes in Kenya, many of whom have paid to have her as a consultant in copyright issues.

She says the conduct of judges shortly before she was made an Advocate of the High Court demoralised her.

“We could go to court and after four hours, you would have done nothing. You’re looking for the judge then you find that he has moved because he didn’t like the way the sun was in his eyes – you know, some strange reason,” she tells Lifestyle.

“I just felt frustrated, like I don’t want to be that lawyer who is billing clients and nothing is happening. So, I looked for firms that were doing commercial practice. That’s where I started.”

She had a short stint at Salim Dhanji & Company Advocates but left.

“I said, ‘No, this law firm thing is also not working for me,’” she recalls.

After that she was hired as an in-house lawyer at Total Kenya, a post she held between 2004 and 2007. It was during her stint in the post that former Chief Justice Evan Gicheru admitted her to the Roll of Advocates.

“Soon after I got admitted, I realised I didn’t like litigation. It’s not my thing. I keep saying that litigation is the last 10 per cent of every relationship. It means everything else has failed,” says Ms Gachui.

She adds: “It means your meeting to negotiate failed. It means your contract drafting failed. It means your arbitration and your dispute resolution failed. By that time, these people are not even talking to each other.”

That notion informed her decision to form a training and consultancy company for artistes who needed guidance in copyright matters.

The firm’s operations were interrupted in 2010 when she was appointed the general manager of the Kenya Association of Music Producers (Kamp), a title she held till 2014.

Besides being a lawyer, Ms Gachui has starred in more than 20 local plays, among them the Threefold Cord staged recently at the Kenya National Theatre.

“I have been acting professionally since 2003 when I starred in my first play at Phoenix. On average, I would do at least two or three plays a year. By now I have taken part in maybe 20 or 30 productions,” she says.

Ms Gachui has also acted in films including Project Daddy and Nairobi Half Life.

“My very first movie was by Judy Kibinge and Njeri Karago and it was called Project Daddy. Bruce Odhiambo was in it, alongside Wangechi Murage and Damaris Agweyu,” she recalls.

She has also been a presenter on TV and radio shows, notably the Franco Fun programme on NTV and Kazi ni Kazi alongside singer Wahu on Kameme FM.

She thanks her brain for her ability to execute her many assignments with finesse.

“I think I’m blessed,” she says. “I don’t know how it works but I think I’m just blessed like that.”

One of the people Ms Gachui is sure will attend the album launch is her mother Anne, who she says played a big role in shaping her music career.

“My mum was the first person who noticed that I could sing, so she sent me to music school because I was making noise in the house,” says Ms Gachui, the second born of three girls.

“Mum would come and say, ‘We’re trying to sleep. Can you stop with the noise?’ I would say, ‘Noise? Noise?

“The things that are coming out of my mouth, I think they’re just wonderful.’ So she secured me admission at Real Music School in Westlands. That’s where I started my music classes.”

STRUCK BY PASSION

Colleagues at the learning institutions she has attended — among them Green Acres, Real Music School, St Mary’s School in Nairobi, the London School of Economics, the Kenya School of Law and the George Washington University — must have been struck by her passion for music as she sought to be like her icons Madonna, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey.

“At some point I used to be called the singing lawyer. And people used to joke: ‘Oh, that’s what you do when you’re losing in court? You start singing so the judge rules in your favour?’ But interestingly enough, I never went into practice,” she says.

By 1998, when she was taking her undergraduate degree at the London School of Economics, she had found a niche in wedding performances.

“I was like the furniture in a wedding. You know, the way you have chairs, you have a tent, then you have June. In a weekend I would do two or so weddings minimum,” says Ms Gachui.

She says that since 1996, the number of weddings she has performed in is between 350 and 400. Four among those were in the United States as she pursued her Master’s degree.

Other people who have seen Ms Gachui perform besides wedding goers are revellers at various entertainment joints in Nairobi (some now closed), among them The Cork, K1, Tamambo Tapas and Safari Bar at Hotel Intercontinental.

For those who have seen her perform before, she says her album will have a dose of the songs she has done but most of them come with a twist.

“The version that is on the album may not even be what we perform on stage because we’ve watched how people react. In some, we’ve added a reggae thing just to see whether people will start dancing. I think they’ll be interested to hear some of the songs that they’ve heard before,” she says.

The oldest song in the album is "Right Direction", written in 1999 when Ms Gachui was adapting to her new life in London.

“It was during my second year of study at the London School of Economics. It is a song with a gospel message and basically is speaking about when you’re at a place in your faith where you’re not so sure. It was sort of just saying, ‘Okay, I feel like now I’m headed in the right direction,’” she says.

CREATE A COLLECTION

While Kenyan musicians release albums shortly after entering the music scene, Ms Gachui says she took two decades to finally create a collection as she was getting ready.

“It took 20 years because it just wasn’t the right time to record and release music.  I was still honing my skill, my voice, searching for my sound. Now I’ve met the right people who were a perfect fit for this project with whom we had great music chemistry and everything else fell into place,” she said.

The people she has worked with in the album include Eddie Grey, David Hunter, Pete Odera, Kaligraph Jones, Blinky Bill, the Nairobi Horns Project Band and popular producer Musyoka.

Ms Gachui spoke to Lifestyle late on Wednesday after a long rehearsal session in preparation for the launch.

She said she was preparing a show like none that has been staged in Kenya before.

“It’s the first time that we’ll see a combination of dance, of visual art – or rather what we call visual performance – of bands, actual live performance and vocal performance with lights and screens properly choreographed with a storyline,” she says.

The artiste describes it as “a bit of a journey”.

“I’m using a bit of my acting background to make the audience feel like they’ve come on this journey with me,” she says.

She will be performing with her two bands — an all-girl band known as the Flower Project and another one that comprises mostly men.

One of the tracks scheduled for performance is "Everything is Fine", which she recorded in New York in 2013. Producer David Hunter gave her the beats and a piece of paper at around 9 pm. By 3 am the song was ready.

“I know, everything is fine/

So sweet and divine/

Whenever I’m with you.”

And on Tuesday, she hopes everything will be fine as her adoring fans join her in marking a career milestone with the album launch.  

 

QUICK-FIRE QUESTIONS

If you were to write a will today, which item will you not miss?

My shoes. I would want them to have a good home. They are like my children right now. So, I will put them in my will and I will say, “They must go to a person who’ll treat them with kindness.”

Is there a phone number of somebody close to you that you’d wish to memorise but you quite can’t?

Yes, there is. I can’t tell you who it is. It’s a boy. And I think I like him. But now I can’t cram the number. I’ve tried, it has refused.

When you’re a passenger in a car, which seat do you prefer?

The passenger seat at the front — because I can apply the brakes, I can slap the driver [laughs] and ask them, “Where are you going? What are you doing?”

In the morning when you want to wake up at some hour, do you set an alarm or you let your mind do it?

When I go to sleep, I allow my body to sleep because I try and do as much work at night as I can, till like 1am or 2am. But there are days when I must set the alarm.