13/06/2025
Happy release day to W.I.T.C.H - their second for titled SOGOLO is out today on all platforms. They spoke to the and alongside the director of 2019 documentary We Intend To Cause Havoc! Gio Arlotta and Now-Again Records Egon Alapatt . Article by read in full in bio.
Blending the style of The Rolling Stones with African beats and instruments, Zambian group Witch were revolutionary – then disappeared. No one could have predicted their amazing return.
In the early 1970s, Zambia produced a unique music scene of its own creation. Zamrock, as it became known, was the southern African country’s take on western rock music – a take that mixed the sounds of The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath with its own fuzz-guitar psychedelia and African instrumentation, beats and rhythms. Forged out of the country’s independence from its British colonisers in 1964, its blossoming came during one of the most significant, fascinating and prosperous periods in Zambian history, and its decline and fall mirrored that of Zambia itself in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A once thriving local music scene became devastated by economic, cultural and health factors that also decimated the wider population, leaving Zamrock as a relic, unknown outside of its own region.
Yet over 50 years later, Zamrock is enjoying an ongoing revival. While many of the scene’s originators – acts like the influential Rikki Ilonga and his band Musi-O-Tunya, The Ngozi Family, The Peace and Amanaz – have long since either died, stopped performing or are little known, one band has brought Zamrock to a contemporary global audience. Formed in 1971, Witch (an acronym for “We Intend to Cause Havoc”) were the scene’s biggest and most popular band. Fronted by the charismatic Emmanuel Chanda – better known as “Jagari”, a name inspired by Mick Jagger – Witch released five albums between 1972 and 1977 that epitomise the Zamrock sound. “We had the influence of rock and roll, but we were Africans, so we couldn’t play the actual rock and roll,” Jagari tells the BBC. “We had to fuse some things in.”
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