“When my father died, people said: ‘Oh, Seun inherited the band’, like it was written somewhere that when Fela dies, Seun must take the band. There was nothing like that! Everything was circumstantial, but I was playing with the band already. I love doing it. So when my father died, the family didn’t want the band to keep playing. Nobody wanted that responsibility. The only other musician in the family then was my brother [Femi] and he already had a band and they were doing really well, they’d already gotten his first big hit with ‘Wonder Wonder’.
“I knew that my father really loved his band. It was the most important thing to him, he said it all the time. And also, they’re an African musical institution; we kinda don’t want to let that shit go! So I said to the family, ‘What if I keep playing with the band?’. They said, ‘You can play with the band but don’t come to us when you’re stressing, and you can keep what you make’. I’m like, ‘Really?’ Really. ‘Okay’. And here we are today.
“For me, it was always about duty. Responsibility. I felt that my dad raised me up to that point for that moment, to understand duty, to understand responsibility. So it has never been a burden, in the sense that taking a shower is a burden. I grew up living, breathing, eating, shitting, smelling, crowing, rolling, inhaling, bathing, walking and talking Afrobeat music. That was everything in our life. I went to every show my dad played. He never really said to me: ‘I wanted you to play music’, but he kind of nudged me in that direction.”