Wally Badarou

The Compass Point sound

Waliou Jacques Daniel Isheola Badarou was born on March 22, 1955 in Paris, with ancestry in Benin (Dahomey). He told the Boston Hassle he discovered Dahomey at seven, took piano lessons at 16 for about a year and was self-taught after. In 1979 he played on M's "Pop Muzik" and did session work for Miriam Makeba and Alain Chamfort. At Red Bull Music Academy in 2006 he said he met Level 42's drummer Phil Gould while rehearsing "Pop Muzik" for Top of the Pops and bonded over jazz fusion. He is not an official member of Level 42 but is called a de facto fifth member of the classic line-up; he played on all their studio albums and co-wrote and co-produced much of them, though not their concerts.

At Compass Point Studios in Nassau he was part of the Compass Point All Stars with Sly and Robbie, Barry Reynolds and others. Chris Blackwell conceived the group for a Grace Jones album, and Badarou credits the engineer Alex Sadkin for the spacious sound of Nightclubbing. His credits include Grace Jones, Gregory Isaacs, Black Uhuru, Talking Heads' Speaking in Tongues (1983), Tom Tom Club, Robert Palmer and Foreigner, and he produced Fela Kuti's Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense (1986) and Salif Keita's Folon (1995). "Mambo" was sampled by Massive Attack on "Daydreaming" (Blue Lines), which he says was agreed in advance.

Solo records include Back to Scales To-Night (1979, 1980 or 1982 depending on the source), Echoes (1984, Island), the Chief Inspector EP (1985), Words of a Mountain (1989), So Why (1997), Colors of Silence (2001) and The Unnamed Trilogy (2009). He co-founded the African Music Academy in 2014 and scored Mati Diop's Dahomey (2024). Back to Scales was reissued on vinyl in 2016 and Echoes by Proper Records in 2026. The Vinyl Factory called him one of the most significant, if not recognised, musicians of the 80s.