Fela Kuti

Fire, earth and air take three of his ten planets each, which leaves a single one in water, and four of the ten are cardinal. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record says Kuti created Afrobeat and used it against successive Nigerian governments, who beat him, burned his compound and threw his mother from a window.

Neptune is in three of the six closest contacts and it is the centre of this chart. Jupiter stands at an awkward angle to it at four tenths of a degree, faith without evidence; the Sun sits in quiet contact with it at under three fifths, imagination available at no cost; and the Moon sits a fifth of a turn from it at nine tenths, with the Moon's sign certain. For a musician who built a genre and then aimed it at a state, the planet of image wired to scale, to identity and to feeling is the structure to start from.

That is where the chart stops and the record carries on. What the record's second half describes was done to him and to his mother by people with power, and there is nothing in a birth chart that contains an assault or accounts for one. Venus sits in easy contact with Pluto at under three fifths of a degree, depth in relating, and the Sun in easy contact with Jupiter at just under a degree, growth without much friction. The Sun sits at twenty two degrees of Libra with Mercury at twenty five, the sign worked out in relation to other people, and Mars sits at twenty four degrees of Virgo beside that Neptune. The Moon answers from Cancer at nine, where feeling is at full strength and entirely unfiltered. Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus were the three retrograde planets.

He died at Lagos on 2 August 1997, at fifty eight. Mars stood in easy contact with his natal Jupiter at under half a degree that day. The Moon was balsamic and one per cent lit, a phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.