The Session Man on the Schoolboy Record: What Ofege Did Not Play on Try and Love

The story sells itself, which is the first reason to distrust it. Five boys at St Gregory’s College in Obalende, Lagos, borrow instruments, get signed by EMI, and cut a psychedelic rock album while still in school uniform. Try and Love came out on EMI Nigeria in 1973, catalogue NEMI (LP) 0032, with a parallel Ghanaian pressing on His Master’s Voice. Fifty years later it sits near the top of every Nigerian psych want list. The schoolboy framing is what every reissue campaign leads with, and it is doing a lot of work.

Start with the credits. The Lead Guitar line on Try and Love does not belong to any member of Ofege. It belongs to Berkley Jones of BLO, a working professional brought in for the session. Strut, who reissued the record, say plainly that Jones contributed the solos. Eothen Alapatt, writing for NPR in 2009, goes further and credits the album’s Hendrix inflected fuzz to him directly. So the most celebrated thing about the record, the wild lead playing that supposedly proves what untrained teenagers can do, is the one part they did not do.

This is not a scandal. It is how a label works. Ofege were Melvin “Noks” Ukachi, Paul Alade, Mike Meme, Dapo Olumide and Felix Inneh, and they had songs, a singer and a sound. What they did not have was a lead guitarist who could carry three minutes on his own, so EMI supplied one. The interesting question is why the schoolboy version survived and the session musician version did not.

The room mattered more than the band

EMI Nigeria ran an eight track studio on Wharf Road in Apapa, Lagos, built as a scaled down Abbey Road with an engineering staff under Emmanuel “Emma” Odenusi. Odenusi and Kayode Salami are the engineers credited on Try and Love. That same room, on that same eight track Studer, is where Wings recorded most of Band on the Run between the first and the twenty third of September 1973, with Geoff Emerick engineering, a faulty desk and one working machine. Those tapes went back to AIR in London to be transferred to sixteen track. Ofege’s did not go anywhere.

The producer was Odion Iruoje, EMI Nigeria’s staff producer and A and R man, who had joined in 1969 and been sent to St John’s Wood for a spell while Abbey Road was being made. He signed Fela Kuti to EMI Nigeria and produced BLO, Mono-Mono and Sonny Okosuns. When people describe Try and Love as sounding impossibly assured for a teenage band, they are describing Iruoje’s ear, Odenusi’s room and Jones’s hands as much as anything Ofege brought through the door.

The grail that costs twenty five dollars

The other half of the myth is scarcity, and it collapses faster. As of this week the 1973 Nigerian original shows 445 copies held against 1614 wanted on Discogs, with a median sale price around twenty six dollars and a low of under six. The most recent recorded sale was the nineteenth of August 2026. A record can be genuinely wanted and still be cheap, because EMI pressed at scale: Record Manufacturers Nigeria Ltd in Ogba, Ikeja, was running twenty presses by 1979. This was not a private pressing hidden in a garage. It was a major label product from a major label plant.

Which leaves the actual reason the album is good, and it is the boring one. Ofege had a rhythm section with genuine feel and a singer in Ukachi with a light, unforced delivery that sits oddly and beautifully against heavy fuzz. Put that in a well run eight track room with a producer who had watched EMI operate in London, and add a professional to cover the one gap, and you get a record that still holds up. None of that requires anyone to have been fifteen.

Two things worth flagging. Sources disagree on when the album was cut: Strut places the sessions in 1972, while Ukachi’s own account in The Guardian Nigeria puts the full five piece together in the 1974 school year. And the sales figures repeated everywhere, hundreds of thousands of copies, trace back to no primary source at all. Paul Alade died of COVID-19 in New Jersey in April 2020.