Ska Cubano is a visual feast of loud suits, hats and bandanas, as well as the odd cane thrown in on top of the flowing dresses of Japanese saxophonist and ex-wife of Natty, “Miss Megumi”.

“You want to give to an audience. If you’ve got an audience who have come to see you and they’re very excited about it, they’re giving you something, so you give them something back. Sometimes we exceed ourselves!”

They don’t sound half bad either. World tours, Glastonbury and La Linea have all been graced by the sounds of a group that blends original, pioneering ska with classic Cuban son and rumba to create an incessantly upbeat, forward driving sound that makes you want to get up, shake that booty and forget you really can’t dance.

Above all Ska Cubano seem to be about having fun — a lot of it. For Natty the live show is “the most important thing”. He adds: “We take no prisoners. We go out and have really good fun and we don’t just stay static on the stage — we’ve got all different routines for different songs. We try to change them now and then so they don’t become expected and so there’s more surprise.”

“Beny walked into a café in Santiago [Cuba], put down his can of beer and started singing and strumming his tres and I went ‘that’s Beny Moré’.”

The Ska Cubano concept was dreamed up by Peter Scott, who had spent many a sun-soaked day in Cuba and the Caribbean. He approached ska “aficionado” Natty who was playing with his outfit, The Top Cats. The idea was to bridge a gap between Latin Cuba and English-speaking Jamaica, a process halted by the 1959 revolution. Natty didn’t realise there hadn’t been any ska in Cuba but was extremely keen about the project due to his love of the music.

He originally recorded with three bands, including a cumbia group, but financial constraints meant that they had to focus on just one. The problem was finding a decent Spanish-speaking singer with an Afro-Cuban folkloric touch. Discovering lead vocalist Beny Billy, who sounded like the legendary king of son and guajiro, Beny Moré, was a complete coincidence: “Beny walked into a café in Santiago [Cuba], put down his can of beer and started singing and strumming his tres and I went ‘that’s Beny Moré’.” While the other members of the group were professional musicians, Beny had busked and boxed his way to survival in the run-down calles of Santiago.

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Finding him was one thing, convincing him to come down to the studio and record was another. Beny was a ‘solo guy’, whose hard life fraught with alcohol problems had given him a natural distrust of people approaching him with grand plans. Natty expands: “People come and go to Cuba, they use musicians and then they go away. There’s the feeling that there’s no security about anything.”

Beny lends Ska Cubano an utterly compelling and novel dimension. His paradoxical voice, gruff yet possessing velvety Latin undertones, gives the music a classic edge. Described by Natty as “big hearted, very crazy and sometimes really hard work in the studio,” Beny believes he has the spirit of Beny Moré inside him. The next task is getting him to move out of the shadow of probably the most famous singer in Cuba and establish his own identity. Natty says: “I really hope that he will move away from being Beny Moré and start making music himself.”

Based in London but with its spiritual home firmly fixed in Cuba’s music capital, Santiago, Ska Cubano is going from strength to strength. If their 2004 self-titled first release set the ball in motion for a fiendishly catchy musical style, their second release, ¡Ay Caramba!, managed to get the mainstream musical press to sit up and listen. Natty explains that part of the evolution was down to the musicians gelling: “Telepathy — that’s the main ingredient when musicians have been playing together for a while. Now the musicians know that they’re not session musicians. They’re a band. We’ve been working together and on tours. It’s stronger like that.”

Listen to both albums and the second sounds a lot more fun, a little raunchier and generally more confident. Ironically, much of the material for ¡Ay Caramba! was recorded before and at the same time as the debut album. The secret, I am told, lies in the increased time spent at the mixing desk.

Nevertheless, Natty confidently informs me, the best is yet to come: “The next stuff is going to be even better. We’re learning more and more about which sound we want to put out.” Strangely, not having enough money to explore lots of different projects has helped the musicians incorporate distinct Caribbean and South American melodies and rhythms, like Colombian cumbia, into the band’s music. For Natty it is all about “focusing on the roots” of ska and Cuban music, a logical progression as the band look to develop and diversify its style. He adds: “The music can borrow from places as long as it still has the identity of what Ska Cubano is all about.” Natty plans to experiment with mento, party music which draws heavily on Jamaican folklore and a natural ska forerunner. Calypso, with its strong Latin influences, is also another music style that we could see blended with the Ska Cubano sound in the future.

For now, it’s all about concentrating on delivering a rip-roaring performance at La Linea, London’s celebration of Latin music, which Ska Cubano has been asked to open. For Natty this “fantastic” opportunity is of particular importance because the venue, The Coronet in Elephant & Castle is “in my hometown right round the corner from where I live”. Their hectic schedule looks set to continue with tours in Japan, Mexico and America, where the band has never played. Natty admits to being “quite excited about that”. Can they crack it? Of course they can.

Sat 1 Apr - The London Latin Music Festival: Amparanoia + Ska Cubano, Coronet London SE1

Link: www.skacubano.com