“Well honestly – what did you expect was going to happen?” That’s a question many of the audience at the Forum might have been asking themselves during and after this show. Most would have been expecting the chance to see a pivotal figure of African music in action, which they did see, but many would have been expecting something a little more – a chance to really understand just what it was that made Tony Allen that pivotal figure, and a chance to find the overdrive gear that great performances find. For the latter group, there may have been just a tinge of disappointment as they left.

Jimmy Sing was playing some well-chosen selections as we entered the Forum, with just enough time to grab a beer before the Strides came on stage. Expect big things from the Strides; mixing jazz, afro-beat and reggae flavours, and fronted by Ras Roni (from, amongst other places, the Resurrectors) their sound is drum-tight whilst also being wonderfully warm and organic. The horn lines are jazzy, jangling; angular and muscular, and the criss-cross rhythms produced by drums, congas, and percussion. Barbados-born Roni provides a focal point at the front and tonight he was joined by Ghanaian-born Afro Moses, who burst onto stage wearing a gold and green dashiki and what looked like a peaked footstool on his head. The footstool was removed to let Moses’ dreadlocks swing freely, and his vocal range, and arms, swung just as freely. Moses is a tremendously energetic performer and gelled with the band as though he had been performing with them all his life. The Strides’ set was over much too soon, and perhaps the best indicator of how good the Strides were came from two blokes I overheard talking in the bathroom. “Bloody hell”, said one to the other, “We’ve got a gig on the same bill as the Strides. We’ve got some serious work to do”.

Jimmy Sing then returned to the decks for was to be a half-hour interlude, but which stretched out to an hour and a quarter as Tony Allen and band were, despite the set times, nowhere to be seen. This was most unfortunate for Mr Sing, who appeared not to have brought enough Afrobeat tunes with him cover such an eventuality and was reduced to playing, well, other decidedly non-Afrobeat tunes (and yes, those tunes had a beat, but no, 50% is not a pass mark in this regard).

Tony Allen finally appeared on stage with his band; a percussionist, guitar, bass, keys, trumpet and sax (although just about everybody also had a go at the shekere at some point as well). The immediately settled into a tight groove, in which they stayed for pretty much the whole of the two hours (including encore) that they performed. And therein lay the problem. You couldn’t fault the tightness of the groove, but you stay in a groove for long enough and it starts to become a rut; and that was the way it sometimes felt. Every so often, you’d get a point where the music would grab you, but never for too long. Of course, that’s the nature of highlife, one of the primary genres from which the fusion that is Afrobeat was formed. But I was hoping for and expecting a little more funk, which is not to say that the problem wasn’t my expectation rather that what Allen provided. As a whole, this was a show a bit like watching the Concorde taxiing along the runway – it looks pretty impressive, and you are glad that you got a chance to see it, but when you’ve heard about the capacity of the thing to lift off the ground you are left wondering what it was that you were missing.

The point closest to lift-off was towards the end of the set when Afro Moses and Ras Roni joined the band on stage, and there seemed to be, once again, a focal point on stage. Certainly, when Tony Allen went off stage he got a tremendous response for an encore, but I’m left wondering whether this was a show which might have worked better to a seated crowd (say, at the Opera House) than one hoping to hear some “dance the body music”. That setting might have better allowed for the appreciation of a drummer who, at nearly 70 is, reservations aside, still able to lead a band in a set that I felt privileged to have heard – for all that it might not have lived up to my Great Expectations, this was certainly no Bleak House.