Pat Thomas

Highlife from Takoradi to Berlin

This is the Ghanaian vocalist, not other Pat Thomases. He was born Nana Kwabena Amo Mensah, in 1946 per Wikipedia and Ghana Remembers and 1951 per MusicBrainz, in Agona in the Ashanti Region; his uncle was the Kumasi highlife musician King Onyina. His nickname is the Golden Voice of Africa, which Wikipedia flags as unattributed. He started in the 1960s, singing with the Broadway Dance Club in Takoradi at about 19 when its singer could not perform a Twi song, per Pan-African Music, and joined Ebo Taylor's band in 1968 per his Afropop interview; the dates differ by source. He played with Ebo Taylor's Blue Monks at the Tip Toe nightclub in Accra, recorded with the Big 7, and formed Sweet Beans, which became Marijata, whose Wednesday nights at the Tip Toe made it, in his words, unmissable: if you didn't go on Wednesday night, you weren't in Accra.

His debut album False Lover is dated 1974 by Wikipedia and 1975 by Thomas. After the 1979 coup and curfew ended nightlife he left Ghana, by routes sources give differently (Berlin, or London then Berlin, or Germany then London then Canada), became a key figure of German burger highlife in the 1980s, spent about ten years in Canada and returned to Ghana in the late 1990s, where Sikiya Mogya was his biggest hit. In 2009 Kwame Yeboah and Ben Abarbanel-Wolff proposed a stable band and tour, which led to a Strut deal. Pat Thomas and Kwashibu Area Band came out in 2015 and marked his 50 years in music, followed by Coming Home, a 23-track retrospective of 1967 to 1981 (Strut, September 30, 2016), and Obiaa! (October 4, 2019), which Songlines scored 4 of 5. He toured Glastonbury and Roskilde, played WOMAD in 2018, and held a Pat Thomas Highlife Night in Accra on August 4, 2023. He appears on Sarkodie's "Bra" and R Hustle's "Guy Guy".