Interview
Showstoppers
Toto’s David Paich on the story of ‘Africa’
The Serengeti, a UNICEF advert, a synth sound sent from the Gods, Adam Sandler, and the story of Toto’s omnipresent prog-pop anthem
“So, Adam Sandler, I met him in Hawaii. I came out of my room and he called his two girls over who were like, 12 and 13. They started singing ‘Africa’ for me. I mean, really singing it.”
Whether it’s the offspring of Hollywood A-listers, the novelty of new generations of fans knowing the words to ‘Africa’ isn’t lost on Toto’s David Paich. It’s the song he penned for the band, and is undoubtedly their most enduring. “I’ve heard other kids that are in their pre-teens and later teens sing it, just on the beat, singing it back to me. I marveled at the fact that these kids weren’t even born when ‘Africa’ was written. I tip my hat to them.”
‘Africa’ is a misfit prog-pop anthem which could have only feasibly come out of the 1980s, but it’s been pouring out of nightclubs and discotheques around the world ever since. It’s a cultural signifier of the decade.
The track’s billowing synths, earnest story about someone torn between their love interest and their love for the titular continent, and cathartic chorus propelled the 1982 single to No.3 in the UK (complete with an Africa-shaped vinyl record) and No.1 in their native America. ‘Africa’ featured prominently in series like Stranger Things and South Park, as well as video games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which consistently introduced the song to entirely new audiences. There’s an omnipresence to it. In June of this year, the song reached 1 billion streams on YouTube. Most people know ‘Africa’ before they know Toto. It’s a phenomenon that baffles the band’s co-founder and keyboardist Paich to this day.
“I never thought it was going to be a hit,” he professes from his home in Los Angeles via Zoom. “I just know I had the making of a song. But I never thought in the world that it would be a hit. Neither did the band. We thought it was just an album cut. We had ‘Rosanna’, ‘I Won’t Hold You Back’. We thought we were done. I’m still shaking my head thinking ‘how did that happen?’”
Individually, Toto’s band members have played with an illustrious list of musicians. Pick a classic album, and there’s a chance that one of Toto played on it. Collectively, David Paich and guitarist Steve Lukather – the only founding and current Toto members that have featured on every studio album of theirs – have contributed to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and worked as studio musicians for elite artists like Eric Clapton, Chaka Khan, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Nicks, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, Cher, Elton John, as well as countless others. In 1977 when demand for their services was increasing at a rapid rate, Paich, Lukather, Jeff and Steve Porcaro, and David Hungate banded together to make their own music with Toto, with singer Bobby Kimball joining as they achieved moderate success on rock radio throughout the late 70s and early 80s.
But with the release of ‘Africa’, Toto went from revered studio musicians on the sidelines to taking the spotlight all for themselves. Their album Toto IV bagged Album of the Year award at the GRAMMY Awards in 1983, and single ‘Rosanna’ won an incredible five awards alone. The newfound hyper-focus on the band came with a fair share of discomfort according to Paich.
“Until then, the music industry discounted us because we were musicians. We’d worked with everybody in that room, practically. We were kind of embarrassed. We were used to being behind the scenes, studio musicians playing in the pit, watching from afar. For this, we were in the second row, cameras beaming on us the entire time. Couldn’t sneeze or cough without being filmed. We were glad to quickly get that over with. It was our 15 minutes, you know?”
‘Africa’ may have left empty-handed on the night, but its increasing popularity and insatiable choral hook saw it swiftly become Toto’s signature song. It left certain members of the band irked – some more audibly than others – that the rest of their work was overshadowed in retrospect, a sentiment that Paich disagrees with. “I think the whole band was well represented on the album. It was just an experimental cut, what they ended up calling ‘world music’. What Peter Gabriel was doing. We used loops, a flapampa which is like a xylophone. The kinds of instruments Steely Dan used on ‘Ricky Don’t Lose That Number’. There was never any friction about that particular song, because it had such a slow ascension. It was a big hit live, so we started closing our shows with it. But that’s because it was picking up momentum.”
“There was only one little issue, was that it became such a massive hit. I remember Jeff Porcaro saying to me ‘next time you write a hit record, make sure the lead singer gets to sing it!’”. Unusually for Toto, David Paich took on lead vocal duties for ‘Africa’, predominantly because nobody else in the band could match his speedy diction. “It was always a problem, I could sing a lot of words – I came from the Elton John school of music. I was the only one that could get all these words out of my mouth the same. So I sang the verses and split it up with Bobby [Kimball] singing the choruses. That was the only issue that we had.”
The song’s melodic composition was something of a bolt from the blue. Paich found himself fiddling around with his new Yamaha CS-80 keyboard one night, eventually stumbling on the sound that’d form the opening riff to ‘Africa’. From then onwards the floodgates opened – like “the rains down in Africa”, you could say.
“I got that riff down and all of a sudden I started hearing the melody in the verse,” David recalls. “So I sang it to myself instrumentally, kind of, and then I started putting words to it. I just jumped into the chorus as somewhere to go, and just started singing the chorus the way it came out on the record, you know? I stopped after I said, “I bless the rains down in Africa”. I stopped right there and said, ‘Man, this is above my paygrade. God, thank you very much’.”
Though Paich was one of Toto’s principal songwriters, it took him several months to refine the lyrics. “It took me a while to get the lyrics right. I was going through my Bob Dylan phase – I’m still going through my Bob Dylan phase – as he was one of my mentors at the time,” he says, having sat on the idea for nearly six months.
“I brought the song to the band, because I always find the verse and a chorus, and then stop. Confounded, usually. I told Jeff [Porcaro], I wanted the percussion and the drums to be very important in this song, and wanted him to compose a loop or beat that we could play to. So, Jeff got Lenny Castro out in his studio, and they started playing this groove that you hear in the beginning of the record – the ‘bah b-bah b-bah bah bah’. Jeff really thought about all this stuff, he was really authentic. So it was pretty heartbeat-ish, pretty primal. Al Schmidt made a loop, like The Beatles used to, where he cut two inch tape and rolled it around two mic stands. After we had this loop playing we started stacking sounds on it. I put my keyboards on it, [Steve ‘Luke’] Lukather was next to put his guitar on it, and then David [Hungate] with the bass. Then it started taking shape, taking form.”
In an attempt to depict the continent as some kind of fantastical land, the ‘Africa’ music video received its fair share of criticism for its heavy-handed portrayal of African culture, as well as the song’s lyrical inaccuracy. Not to mention when US television channel CBS played the song during the funeral coverage for the late, great Nelson Mandela.
Paich, having never been to the continent before, admitted that inspiration for the lyrics came after seeing a UNICEF aid commercial, which merged with a movie he’d watched around the same time. Though he couldn’t remember which film. “I forget who was in the movie, but it was about a guy who lived in Africa, who loved Africa, and had a mail order bride that came in. He’d never met her, and when she got to Africa, she had to choose between staying there in Africa and living that lifestyle, or going back home. So it’s kind of an old-fashioned, romanticised story about that film in my imagination. I used to daydream a lot, – according to the teachers I had growing up – and I just put this story together in my head. It just came out that way.”
There are few songs which possess the cultural staying power of ‘Africa’. It’s kept rearing its head in each era since its 1982 release, featuring in various forms of media and ensnaring a new and giddy fanbase over and over. Only Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ can match it for the amount of times it’s been resuscitated.
The popularity of ‘Africa’ swelled again during the advent of social media, which oddly resulted in a fan-led campaign for Weezer to cover the song. In 2018, they duly obliged. “I thought that they would do something totally, totally different. A different kind of genre thing,” David says. “But their version is true to the original record. I think they’re regretting it, because they have to play it at all their concerts now. They have to play it – it’s a hit record!” Naturally, Toto responded by covering ‘Hash Pipe’, though it’s seldom made their own setlists since.
A year later, Namibian artist Max Siedentopf created a solar-powered sound installation in the Namib Desert which plays ‘Africa’ on loop, seemingly into infinity. “I get a kick out of that one,” joked David. “But, if you’re not there to hear it, how do you know it’s actually playing…?” Not that it’d affect their streaming figures – in 2021, Toto reached the hallowed billion barrier of streams on Spotify, and a year later, ‘Africa’ was confirmed as a third most streamed song of the 70s, 80s, and 90s behind Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’ and Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Some company to keep.
You can bet your bottom dollar that you’ll hear Toto perform ‘Africa’ on their upcoming UK tour, which sees the prog-rock mainstays perform at Glasgow’s OVO Hydro, bp pulse in Birmingham, Manchester’s AO Arena, before a final date at OVO Arena Wembley in London. Though Paich won’t be in attendance, having hung up his road boots and taken on the role of “musical director” for the band in recent years, only joining them on stage on rare occasions.
Being able to belt out the chorus alongside their fans sends shivers up Paich’s spine still, however. Nowadays, the band engage in a call-and-response section with their audiences, which frequently serves as the set’s crescendo. “I’d like to think that it affects people spiritually, a little bit,” David ponders. “When you hear the crowds, it sure affects me and the band, when they sing the chorus back at us. There’s a sense of communion with the audience. It’s a great live experience.”
