In 1988 I was living on a Kibbutz, a few miles from Lebanon.
I was being very nearly starved of decent television (apart from Moonlighting, Israel wasn't big on showing Western programmes and I had only brought with me two videos, containing This Is Spinal Tap, Mister Jerico and A Clockwork Orange), books (I managed to find two books in English that one volunteer had left - although I can read Hebrew, I don't really understand it - one was a Bowie biography and the other a harrowing autobiography by Linda Lovelace. I read them both from cover to cover. Twice) and music for several months.
Then this track became a favourite of some of the people I was working alongside, and I was hearing it several times a day. I was enchanted by this record. Quite a departure from my pop-loving-self's tastes.
It seems I wasn't the only one who liked it. 'Yé ké yé ké' was the first African single to sell over a million copies.
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