Damon Albarn stares at his last cigarette, broken in half as he pulled it out
of the box. “Now, that has totally ruined my day,” he says. In a few
moments, though, the day is back on course. A stray rolling paper is used to
conduct emergency surgery on the cigarette, its owner lights up and confides
a misgiving concerning Africa Express, the ever-expanding coalition of
African and Western musicians he helped to originate. “Do you think Africa
Express is a rubbish name? I dunno ... I've struggled with it. But then, I
struggle with names in general.”
The fact that things need to be called something has been a recurrent source
of unease in Albarn's life. Blur got their deal on the condition that they
changed their name from the preferred Seymour. Last year's The Good, The Bad &
the Queen album was, he insisted, merely the title of the record. The group,
featuring the afrobeat icon Tony Allen and the Clash's Paul Simonon, didn't
have a name. And Africa Express? Well, what's not to like? It does the job,
doesn't it? “All right,” says Albarn. “I guess it does emote a certain sense
of movement.”
Four weeks before he turns 40, what does and doesn't bother Damon Albarn bears
interesting comparison. He'll sweat the tiniest details with a control
freakery that you suspect has magnified in the post-Blur years. Yet your
attention turns to the bands booked to take part in next month's Africa
Express gettogether at the Olympia Theatre in Liverpool, and he responds
with a shrug. “Well, I know I'll be there,” he says. “We've had assurances
from various parties. Apparently Baaba Maal and Franz Ferdinand are doing
something. It'll be fine.”
Seven years after his old bassist Alex James drily referred to him as “the
blackest man in West London”, the incongruity that made the joke funny has
slowly evaporated. Africa Express - as many of Albarn's associates point out
on his behalf - isn't about one person. But it's hard not to see his drive
in its growth from a series of conversations in 2005 between some
like-minded Londoners to the five-hour Glastonbury superjam last year.
If Albarn isn't particularly worried about the finer details of the Olympia
show, it's probably because at the beginning of the Glastonbury get-together
he - along with Ian Ashbridge, co-organiser of Africa Express and head of
Wrasse Records - were pondering the prospect of a five-hour spectacular with
only one artist in attendance. “For the first half-hour only Amadou &
Mariam had turned up,” Ashbridge recalls.
“What you have to remember,” Albarn adds, “is that musicians are night people.
They only get going when the sun goes down.”
An hour later, with the sun still very much up, the scale of the event started
to become apparent. If you were unlucky enough not to be there, the list of
performers tells its own story: assorted members of Tinariwen assisting
Terry Hall as he sang Message to You Rudy alongside other Specials for the
first time in 25 years; the Algerian raï king Rachid Taha and Albarn sharing
the mike on Rock the Casbah; Fatboy Slim phasing and fiddling around a
version of Fela Kuti's Zombie while Tony Allen unleashed his original rhythm
over it. “The problem was giving everyone a turn,” Ashbridge says. “It was
surreal having to tell Damian Marley that there was no time for him to do a
song.”
“There was definitely a sense that something special was happening,” says
Taha. “By Rock the Casbah there were 25 musicians on stage. I didn't know
who half of them were, but it didn't matter. It was the greatest show I've
seen or been part of.”
Even so, there will be no return to Glastonbury. “The idea behind Africa
Express,” Ashbridge says, “is that it will pop up where you least expect it
to.”
Sandwiched between two huge housing estates in the deprived Everton locale
(unemployment: 47.6 per cent), the Olympia fits the bill. A hundred years
ago it was a circus venue with elephants and lions living in the basement.
Recent spectacles beneath the venue's Edwardian proscenium range from cage
fighting to Chico & the Cheeky Girls. “That makes it a perfect venue for
Africa Express,” says Ashbridge, who adds that - at £10 a ticket - the show
ought to attract a sizeable local audience.
Inclusivity and affordability are key to the Africa Express ethos. At the same
time, it can't be cheap to freight rumoured attendees such as Amadou &
Mariam, Hard-Fi, Souad Massi and Baaba Maal to the same place. It's a
beautiful idea, but it's hardly going to pay for itself, surely? “Well, a
lot of beautiful things don't pay for themselves,” says Albarn. “But that
doesn't mean they should not happen, does it? If bands can afford it, we ask
them to pay for their travel. What I don't want is for people to think of
this as a charity. Because there are enough people who see Africa itself as
a charity.”
If the Senegalese superstar Baaba Maal didn't agree, he wouldn't have been
among the first singers to fly over and seek a personal audience with
Albarn. “Music is a kind of education,” Maal says. “It is impossible to have
any understanding of African life by watching stories about poverty on the
news. If this is all you see, then people think Africa is just a crisis that
needs [people] to make [it] better.”
Albarn is reticent to criticise the good intentions of Live Aid and Live 8,
but he lambasted Live 8 for herding African musicians off to a separate show
at the Eden Project. His remarks didn't go unnoticed. “I was approached to
do a sort of event in Hyde Park the year after Live 8 and I said no way -
that would have been like doing the same thing all over again but putting a
better flavour to it. People might have a nice day and get on well, but it's
no way near enough to form a meaningful relationship with a continent.”
It's a job, he argues, to be undertaken in smaller but longer-term increments.
When he, Ashbridge and a band of like-minded souls got together in the wake
of Live 8, they knew that much, but beyond that Africa Express amounted to
little more than good intentions. “Some of us - myself, Jamie T, Scratch
[from the Roots] and Martha Wainwright were roped into a trip to Mali,” says
Fatboy Slim, aka Norman Cook. “I would describe it as a sort of travelling
think tank. We met with Amadou & Mariam, went to Salif Keita's club,
watched a band rehearsing in their front room.”
Did anyone know what they were there for? “We did and we didn't,” laughs Cook.
“Damon's essentially a bully, but a charismatic one. He's the kind of person
you follow off the edge of a cliff because it would be a laugh on the way
down.”
In a second trip after Glastonbury 2007 Albarn led more musicians to the
sprawling Congolese capital of Kinshasa. Massive Attack's Robert del Naja
remembers the “energy and beauty of the people” which blew away all the
“clichés of poverty and disease” mediated by television. John MacLean of the
Aliens found the trip more hard-going. “In Africa nothing is scheduled.
You're told you're about to do something - eat or leave or whatever - and
nothing will happen for two more hours. ‘Africa time', they call it. But
while you wait, you see amazing things.”
As the man with the tape recorder, waiting accounts for much of what Albarn
does on these trips. “Once in a while there's a moment of pure magic - being
on an open-air stage in a little yard on a Saturday afternoon, with two
Soviet-looking concrete buildings behind us that had bulletholes all over
them. We're all playing, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, De La Soul start
doing (A Roller Skating Jam Called) Saturday over the rhythm of all these
musicians.”
Just as important as knowing what you want, says Albarn, is what you don't
want. Not for Africa Express the Peter Gabriel/Real World-sanctioned notion
of African music as something subject to the pristine production and
presentation of, well, a Peter Gabriel record. Collaborating with Toumani
Diabate and Afel Bocum in 2002, Albarn's feeling that “African records sound
best when they're recorded in Africa, with the smell and the heat and the
people” was borne out by the resulting Mali Music album.
While Ashbridge talks of Africa Express doing the work that John Peel once did
- “breaking down the barriers between genres, so that people are open to all
sorts of good music” - Albarn's love of African music seems to have
radicalised him. “For the past 150 years the West has been screwing
equilibrium wherever it can. We've got to get out of this ‘saving Africans'
mindset because” - he emits a mildly delirious chuckle - “we're the ones
that need to be saved!”
If any of this rhetoric fails to manifest itself at the Liverpool Olympia,
that's as it should be. “People won't care about a continent and the
problems it faces if they have no sense of orientation around its culture,”
says Albarn. “But music can give them that. It gave me that.”
If he speaks with the zeal of an idealist, that's probably because he has
become one. It's the opposite of the career-long transition that most pop
stars undergo, in which wide-eyed idealism gives way to hardbitten
pragmatism. At this point, though, idealism - or at least the ideal of
bringing together Africa and the West through music - is yielding remarkable
results.
At his West London HQ, Albarn plays a 30-minute sound-collage, assembled for
possible release, that resulted from the trips to Mali and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. The hubbub of crowd noise is the only constant as the
smoggy syncopations of Kinshasa's musicians - and, on this occasion, De La
Soul - mutate into moments of synergy. Pedals slam down on makeshift FX
boards that make the guitars attached to them sound utterly otherworldly.
Genres instantly invent themselves according to the noise being made.
“It sounds like the future doesn't it?” Albarn says. “That's what we need to
get our heads around. They have nothing to learn from us. We have everything
to learn from them.”
Africa Express is at the Olympia, Liverpool (0871 2200260; www.africaexpress.co.uk),
on March 6 (7.30pm)
