For the last few weeks, his mobile phone has not stopped ringing, and the smiling 47-year-old smilingly comments: "At the Zenith, I’ll be seeing my old childhood friends from Kinshasa". Even though they will be in the audience and he will be on the stage, it is a distance that he barely seems aware of.

Unlike some of his illustrious compatriots, he rarely performs in France. Even less so in Paris, although he lives there. He last show in the French capital goes back to 1996! The drummer had just left the back of the stage to launch his career using his first name. His last name is already linked to a Congolese music heritage: Vicky Longomba, his father, started as singer in Franco’s OK Jazz before setting up the Lovy group in Zaire. For a long time, he tried to keep his children away from the music scene "because at the time, it was considered to be a thug’s job that couldn’t feed a man".

The parental message was hammered home so insistently that the young Awilo tried to convince himself it was true, even if he could feel the music inside him. His maternal grandmother, with whom he grew up, let him bang on bits wood with his friends. They had no instruments but the boy got noticed fast, and joined up with some better-equipped groups to play in neighbourhood gigs. He was running the risk that his mother would come up behind him, grab hold of him and administer a public scolding, bringing the concert to a swift end! "I always went to school, but I got a taste for the night life and the atmosphere that goes with it", he remembers.  

When national stars like Papa Wemba started to ask for him, he was one step nearer. Vicky Longomba could see it, and waited until his son had come back from his first Euro-Asian tour with Viva la Musica to reconcile and wish him good luck.

Confined to a drummer’s role by the groups he worked for, Awilo rarely had a chance to pick up the microphone and sing. Although in the studio he was often asked to intervene with his typical Congolese ambience-maker style, capable of jazzing-up a track with a few well-chosen words or expressions in just the right place. "When I did my first album, that was my strong point. I had my first success with my animations, but not really my singing", he admits.

The track Moyen Te, a hymn to dancing released on Moto Pamba in 1995, was an unexpected hit, because of both its scope and its location. In Zambia, the promoters of a Tshala Muana concert, a compatriot he sometimes accompanied, were quick to put his photo in the poster so that people would think he was going to be part of the concert. The result was a furious audience.

During this period, Awilo was working as a drummer on the tour of the Afro-Zouk singer, Olvier N’Goma, and he realised that something was going on. First in Mozambique, where he kept being asked if he was a singer. Then in Uganda, where he was advised to wear a cagoule and glasses and keep his identity a secret. The leader of the group, obviously irritated, decided to reveal the secret when he presented the musicians. The effect was immediate. "You’ve taken the limelight, I won’t invite you any more", he said to his musician and left the stage.

One week later, he was asked to go and play in Zambia under his own name. Two shows were scheduled. He did nine! The neighbouring countries followed, like Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Malawi. The singer-drummer’s techno-soukous had found its audience. "With the experience I had, I knew that that type of music could take off first in the region", Awilo reminisces.

Led by the success of the song Coupé Bibamba, a duet with Jocelyne Béroard, the album of the same name that came out in 1998 fit even better into the Francophone and Anglophone African musical landscape that stretches from Senegal to the shores of Madagascar. He was even in Libya in 2001 for the creation of the African Union. That year, he received an award for the third time at the Kora Awards for his album Kafou Kafou.

The man likes to call himself "master of all the issues", adopting the very Congolese tradition of alembic nicknames, transformed himself into Super Man ("in two words"), the title of his latest CD. In his eyes, there should be humour in music. "It’s all part of the show", he states.

But beyond the personality hiding behind this image, the man admits a penchant for "anything melancholic". He says he is "very nostalgic" and listens more readily to his father’s old rumbas and the artists of his generation than to new records, wherever they come from. So why not do something with this little-known side of himself? He is thinking about it, with a plan to do some acoustic covers of songs written by Vicky Longomba. And then lets drop, lowering his voice as if revealing a secret: "It’s in the pipeline".