Wednesday noon. Monique is asked to appear on a musical TV show where all performances are lip-synched. With no exceptions. Ever. Until now, that is. That’s why Joël and I find ourselves dressed in stage garb at Jao’s Pub, where they’re filming the show. While the other acts pretend their instruments and mics are plugged in, ours really are. So the pressure's on. First we play the powerfully spooky new version of Monique’s old hit, Mausolée, so popular it has basically replaced the national anthem. Then she and Joël do a killer performance of Belina, a song from Njava’s first album Vetse. After the Monday broadcast I’ll try to get a copy. The director is so pleased he says he wants to move to a live format.

* * *

Thursday evening. Set-up and sound-check for our second concert. The venue is an 800-seater here in the capital called CCESCA. Apart from “Centre Culturel” I’m not sure what the acronym stands for. But it’s in the auditorium of a Catholic school founded in 1928, so the caretaker told me, by a trio of Canadian priests. The school is a large, solid-looking establishment, if somewhat down-at-the-heel. I think of all those Sunday school kids back in frigid Montreal dropping their Canadian nickels and pennies through the slot of the collection box.

Jimmy is walloping his kick drum through the clunky, scarred mains - possible relics of the Grateful Dead show I saw at the Paramount in 1972. I gaze left at a faux-Matisse mural of a naked Adam riding a local zebu cow, and right towards a surprisingly full-frontal Eve combing her hair next to a banana tree. No fig leaves. On the wall between Eve’s bare feet and the right speaker stack is an Aryan Jesus looking out benignly from a lurid poster, complete with flaming, thorn-bound heart.

If the stage looks a little emptier it’s because Monique and I fired the trumpeter, who it turns out was recruited by error. Back in November when Monique was shooting the Reolo clip and needed a stand-in, someone recommended Faby, who certainly looked the part. It didn’t occur to us that he couldn’t play. And none of the other musicians said anything, although they surely knew. Maybe it's because the community here is so tightly knit – it’s an island after all – that they hesitate to knock each other. Especially in front of a foreigner.

After rejecting a replacement I decided I would double the lines of the sax player, Nicholas, with a Hammond B3 sound. (He’s testing his mic at the moment with Charles Lloyd-esque arpeggios.) It’ll sound a little less Afrobeat and a little more early 70s funk. Tower without the Power. Anyone want a counterfeit Yamaha Zeno Artist Series Bb trumpet (see March 7)?

At yesterday’s fix-all-the-mistakes-of-last-Friday rehearsal Monique and I both noticed a new level of seriousness among the band. She thinks it’s because they saw how we fired Faby. Take Miary (who’s sound-checking his four opened-tuned guitars now). Uncharacteristically, he didn’t argue when I told him he’d have to abandon his cherished preamps and effects, and plug straight into the DI boxes I presciently brought along. All his knob-turning was slowing us down between songs.

Now it’s Surgi’s turn. He saws away on the lokanga, a homemade violin played by the Antandroy people of the arid south. Imagine Orange Blossom Special if the Cumberland Gap were located in Africa. He’s followed by vocalist Beby, his sister-in-law, who comes from the same region. Bass, percussion, electric guitar already done. Now Monique. Eleven on stage is easier than twelve.

* * *

Earlier, crammed with our musical instruments inside a rattletrap taxi on our way to the venue, we're sitting in a traffic jam when we hear a siren. Soon a police escort and convoy of 4x4s with black-tinted windows whizzes past. “Maybe it’s the president,” I joke. Miary and the cab the driver both look at me. “It is,” they say. The former DJ took power in a largely supported coup during my last visit in 2009.