It is the most unusual place to find people in their 30s.
The hotel’s peeling facade is a testimony to its decay and if I was not with trusted friends, being in this space that late at night would have sparked off my paranoia.
We paid a modest fee to get into Papingo Niteclub. The club descends into a foyer with metallic tables and chairs neatly arranged. At one corner is an arc of chairs occupied by musicians tuning their instruments, the arc was defined by huge and old loud speakers prepared to ferry their sounds into the night.
It is midnight on a Saturday at Stadium Hotel Surulere. This hotel was popular in the 70s when it was built by Victor Olaiya, a Highlife bandleader and trumpeter of the Golden Era of the 50s and 60s, who is now in his 80s.
Most great legends of Highlife music including Olaiya have performed in this place called Papingo Niteclub. In the 80s, even Ghanainan ET Mensah jammed in this room.
Stadium Hotel alongside Kakadu Hotel, Gondola Bar, Empire Hotel used to be hotspots of Lagos Nightlife in the 60s and 70s. Today, only Gondola Bar and Stadium Hotel are standing.
Gondola Bar is currently being renovated into a Best Western styled Hotel while Stadium Hotel, with its peeling façade, iron tables and chairs as well as aging musicians only comes alive on Saturday Nights.
Soon enough, a band of hornsmen took to the microphones and began to blow songs into the night. The music went through phases of tunes of melancholia to the joyous tunes of nostalgia. In the wee hours of the morning, the band was doing popular highlife numbers and a frail middle-aged man was going around urging people to get up and dance.
The music was decent but lacked discipline and a dutiful vocalist. And as if fate was listening, a tall slim man in t-shirt, jeans and sneakers suddenly came on stage and the attitude of the music changed. It would seem he was an unlikely member of the ensemble judging from his anachronistic dressing but he was a Highlife vocalist who could also take applause-worthy trumpet solos.
Now, no one needed to be nudged to the dance. The women in the audience, middle-aged, cigarettes and beers in hand, pulled all the men in the house to the floor. Inadvertently my dance partner was a plump and fair-by-choice woman holding a bottle of Heineken. Anytime the band played her favourite tune, she would praise the vocalist, insisting that he was the true son of his father.
The vocalist who stole the night is Bayowa Olaiya, son of Victor Olaiya, a family man who works in a bank during the day and keeps his band alive every Saturday nights. It was quite interesting how temperamental he was, his body gestures affected the countenance of band members when the sound was not to his standard.
All the musicians, save the hornsmen, were much older than him but everyone was on their feet, even the geriatric guitarists who had been sitting.
Highlife music remains that dance music popular in West Africa even if it has been altered unrecognisably to what currently streams on the internet.
And if you care to listen to that unadulterated form, your best bet is Stadium Hotel, every Saturday at midnight.
