I like to think of myself as an old soul. It is the only way to explain my fascination with music that predates me. And how I bring that fascination to life is by spending a lot of time digging into different old songs, and then into the stories of the artistes behind the classics.
The first time I heard “Only You” by Steve Monite was sometime in 2020, during the lockdown. There was something about it: the bassline, the groove, the vocals, all moving together in a way that felt intimate and expansive. Curious about who made the song, I tried to do a deep dive, but when I looked further, I could not find much — no thanks to the poor documentation of Nigeria’s music history.
What I eventually pieced together, fragment by fragment, was an incomplete story, perhaps fitting for an artiste whose full narrative is only now coming into view, carried by the resurgence of his classic song, “Only You”. Back in the early 1980s, Steve Monite was already making music that diverged from the dominant sounds of the era. While Nigeria’s soundscape was anchored in Afrobeat and Highlife, he was pushing into Boogie, pop, funk, and disco. It was a risk that the industry was not ready to reward.
In 1984, he made one of the most distinctive Afro-Boogie records in Nigerian music history, watched it disappear without a trace, and spent the next three decades living quietly, far from the spotlight. For decades, music felt like a life he’d left behind — until a young nephew in Berkshire, England, looked at him one day and said, ‘Uncle, you’re an internet sensation.’ Monite didn’t believe him. So he went online to see for himself. “I spent three hours looking at my pictures and music all over. That’s when I realized how big ‘Only You’ had become internationally,” he said.
In this exclusive interview with The Nollywood Reporter, Steve Monite opens up about the creation of his landmark 1984 debut album, the industry failures that silenced him, and the extraordinary global revival that has reintroduced the King of Afro-Boogie to audiences worldwide.
The Birth of Afro-Boogie
Steve Monite’s journey into music did not begin with a record deal or a studio session. It began in the pews of an Anglican church on Ozah Street in Benin City, where a young boy was learning, Sunday by Sunday, to listen. “They taught us how to sing and even how to write songs,” he recalls. “Although it was mostly religious music at the time.”
The sacred and the secular would eventually separate for Monite. As he grew older, music drifted into the background, replaced by the pressing ambitions of young adulthood in late-1970s Nigeria. But ambition, as it turned out, would lead him right back. By 1979, restless and unwilling to settle for a regular nine-to-five, he began making demonstration tapes and sending them out to record companies across the country.
The rejections came. Some told him he needed to improve. Others said nothing at all. He took what he could and kept moving, eventually travelling to London, where he linked up with producers who, like him, were trying to find their footing. One of them was Herman Asafo-Agyei — Ghanaian bassist, singer, and bandleader, then balancing music with a law degree. Together, from around 1982 to 1984, they recorded a demo that Monite would carry from Nigeria to London, knocking on doors.
Eventually, one of those doors opened. Chief Tony Okoroji, working through EMI Records, heard the music and was captivated. “When Tony Okoroji first heard the music, he decided to sign me to EMI as an artiste,” Monite says. “And that was the beginning.”
The Nigeria that shaped Monite’s sound in those years was alive with contradiction. The oil boom had flooded the country with possibilities and imported culture in equal measure. Nightclubs from Genesis to Mr A in Benin City were pulsing with funk, the international kind, fed by the likes of Michael Jackson, Kool & The Gang, and Marvin Gaye. But the record companies that stocked those sounds were far more invested in the foreign acts than the local ones. Nigerian artistes were, at best, an afterthought. “You cannot stop an eagle from flying,” Monite says. “That drive pushed us.”
His influences were wide and unapologetic: James Brown, Rufus Thomas, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Rod Stewart, Prince, and many others. What he was after was not imitation but synthesis. Something that absorbed the global sounds filtering into Benin City’s nightlife and ran them through something essentially Nigerian. He would come to call it Afro-Boogie: a mix of Rock and Roll, Brass music, Jazz, African rhythms, and traces of Calypso, all filtered and “marinated,” as he puts it, before being presented to the world.
In a country where Fela’s Afrobeat and the lilt of Highlife dominated the conversation, it was a bold and lonely sonic position to take. But Monite was not interested in what was safe. He was interested in what was true to him.
A Record Lost to Time and Circumstance
The song that would eventually define Steve Monite’s legacy was not intentionally engineered. It came, as he tells it, in a single, luminous burst. “I was sitting by the window in my apartment in Festac, Lagos,” he says. “I was looking out at a bright, beautiful moon, and something just clicked. I started humming a tune and writing the song. I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time, but by the end of the day, I had created ‘Only You’.”
In the studio, signed to EMI and working with the late producer Nkono Teles, the song took shape. Monite affectionately calls Teles “Goldfinger,”a man exceptional on the keys, seasoned by years of playing in New York’s nightclubs, who had produced countless Nigerian artistes and radio commercials but was still being undervalued. Together, they recorded “Only You”, “Things Fall Apart”, “Welcome My Love”, and “I Had a Dream”, four songs that would make up Monite’s debut album.
“The bassline on ‘Only You’ alone was something special. It became a reference point,” Monite recalls. “People were trying to learn and recreate it everywhere.” His mother, hearing it early, gave him her verdict without hesitation: “As long as people hear this record, it’s a hit.” For Monite, that settled it.
Then there was “Things Fall Apart,” a title that, while inevitably drawing comparison to Chinua Achebe’s towering 1958 novel, came from somewhere closer and more immediate. Nigeria in the early 1980s, under Buhari’s military regime, was a country straining under its own weight. Food was scarce. Markets were erratic. Workers went unpaid. “Things were truly falling apart,” Monite says plainly. “People were working but not getting paid. You could be employed today and suddenly be told, ‘I can’t pay you anymore.’ And yet, many would still say, ‘Don’t worry, boss, we’ll keep working until you have money.’”
It was into this environment that the album arrived in 1984, and quietly disappeared. The country was too consumed with survival to pay sustained attention to new music. The record industry was too preoccupied with its international roster. Local artistes, especially those working in sounds as unfamiliar as Monite’s Afro-Boogie, were largely on their own. Live performance bookings required connections he did not yet have. Radio play was not guaranteed. Promotion was, in effect, the artiste’s problem.
So Monite returned to England and did what millions of Nigerians across generations have had to do: he adapted. He found work. He built a life. Music became something that existed in the past tense, a chapter that had been written and closed. “You have to survive,” he says, without apology. “You have to put food on the table.” He watched, from a distance, as artistes who came up around the same time — Boy George, George Michael — built careers and legacies. He did not dwell on what might have been. He simply kept going.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the global archive of forgotten records, “Only You” was waiting to be found.
The Triumphant Revival of Steve Monite and ‘Only You’
The revival of Steve Monite’s music came in an unexpected way. It crept in through the back channels of the internet, through crate-diggers, music bloggers, streaming playlists, and Discogs listings.
Interestingly, while the internet stumbled upon him, the UK label Soundway Records, specialists in resurrecting overlooked African music for global ears, had been trying to track Monite down for four or five years. Even Tony Okoroji, the man who had first signed him, did not know where he was. Monite was not on social media. He was simply living his life, reading the news, moving forward, entirely unaware that the record he had made three decades ago was gathering a second life.
The moment of revelation, when it came, was almost absurdly ordinary. He was visiting his brother in Reading, England, when his young nephew, less than ten years old, looked up at him and said, “Uncle, you’re an internet sensation.” Monite laughed it off. The boy insisted. So Monite went online. What he found made him sit in front of the screen for three hours, scrolling through his own name, his own face, his own voice, echoing back at him from corners of the world he had never imagined. Forums in Germany. Playlists in Japan. Discussions in the United States. “That’s when I realized how big ‘Only You’ had become internationally,” he says.
Then came Frank Ocean. In 2017, at FYF Fest in Los Angeles, Ocean performed a rendition of “Only You”, reinterpreting it for a new generation in front of a crowd that included major Hollywood figures. It was a significant cultural moment: a song made in Lagos in 1984, resurrected by one of the most influential voices in contemporary American music, heard by thousands who had never known Monite’s name. “I was in tears,” Monite says. “I couldn’t believe it. At this stage of my life, seeing young people connect with my music like that. It was overwhelming.”
The song began appearing everywhere at once. On American television. On Cartoon Network. Across European advertising campaigns for brands like Apple and American Express. Original vinyl copies of the 1984 pressing, once unsold and unappreciated, were now changing hands at auction for extraordinary sums, $1,500 in some cases, €3,000 in others.
A call eventually came from Soundway Records. He was hesitant at first because his early experience in the industry had left its mark. Eventually, the evidence was undeniable, and the people at Soundway — Paula Juana, Miles Cleret — were, by his account, different. “They’ve been great to work with,” he says. “Now, we’re working together, and life is good.”
Legacy, Influence, and a New Generation
When asked about the new generation of artistes and where Nigerian music stands today on the global stage, he does not hesitate. He names Wizkid, Burna Boy, Davido, P-Square, and 2Baba with genuine admiration. “This generation is fortunate,” he says. “The internet has opened up the world in a way we never had.”
He recalls seeing Wizkid at an early performance in England, a young man who, according to him, looked slightly out of his element but surrounded by an army of believers. “Today, look at where he is.” Burna Boy, he notes, is a particular favourite of his son. What strikes him most about this generation is their refusal to stop. “They didn’t step away; they kept pushing, breaking barriers, and now they’re at the top.” It is said without resentment, but the implication hangs in the air. In his era, the industry offered no such runway. You either broke through quickly or you were left behind.
The revival has also reignited his desire to create. His most recent album, Traveller, is available online and marks a deliberate turn toward purpose-driven music. The project centres on Nigerians and Africans who attempt to migrate without documentation, crossing deserts and seas, many of whom do not survive the journey. It is a subject that sits at the intersection of African ambition and African grief, and Monite approaches it with the same directness he brings to everything else. “Through this music, I’m trying to create awareness,” he says. “I want people to understand that it’s not worth risking your life that way.”
He also wants Nigerian audiences to find him again. For all its global reach, the revival of “Only You” has played out largely outside Nigeria, in European clubs, American television, and Japanese playlists. That, he says, is something he intends to change. “I want Nigerian audiences to connect with the music as well.”
When asked what he wants his legacy to be, Monite reaches for something simpler than you might expect from a man whose music has crossed continents without him. “Never give up,” he says. “Even when you’re down, stand up and keep going. Even if nobody tells you that you’re great, tell yourself that you are.”
Three decades after circumstance pulled him away from the music, Steve Monite is back. And if the long wait has taught him anything, it is that the music always knew what it was. The world just needed time to catch up.