tony allen - 'film of life' - selected media coverage

Tony Allen Film of Life

Selected Media Coverage

Radio Print Online


RadiO

BBC Radio 6music 27th October 2014

BBC Radio 6music 4th July 2014

BBC Radio 6music 12th September 2014

BBC Radio 6music 2nd November 2014

BBC Radio 6music 8th November 2014

BBC Radio 6music 23rd November 2014

BBC Radio 4 9th October 2014

BBC Radio 2 4th November 2014

BBC Radio 2 30th September 2014

BBC Radio 2 16th November 2014

BBC Radio 3 17th October 2014

BBC Radio 3 2nd September 2014

“The best he’s made so far this century” - Max Reinhardt, BBC Radio 3 Late Junction

BBC Radio 3 15th August 2014

Jazz FM 10th October 2014

INTERVIEW WITH TONY ALLEN Tracks Played:

‘Moving On’ ‘Go Back’

BBC Radio Scotland 8th September 2014


PRINT

Songlines November 2014


G I A N T S O F A F R O B E A T

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Fela Kuti is synonymous with Afrobeat, but there are two other underappreciated pioneers of the genre. Nigel Williamson speaks to Tony Allen and Orlando Julius, both celebrating 50-year careers this autumn with new albums

Every time I sit down at my drums I’m looking for something new, something I haven’t played before,” says Tony Allen. “Above all I’m

trying not to repeat what I’ve done before. I need to challenge myself. That’s always been my approach to the music business.”

It’s a remarkable attitude that has sustained the Nigerian drummer for over half a century – 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of his first meeting with Fela Kuti. He worked with the great Afrobeat trailblazer from 1964 until 1979, as his drummer and the musical director of his band Africa 70, his contribution neatly summed up in Fela’s famous comment that “without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat.”

On his new album, Film of Life, he curates a thrilling mélange of tribal grooves, jazz and funk that pays homage to his rich musical past but at the same time expands Afrobeat far beyond the parameters he defined with Fela Kuti all those years ago. “It’s good to look back at everything I’ve done,” says Allen, who last year published his life story in Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat (reviewed in #95). “I will never forget my past, I’m proud of it, and the book was a good way of remembering what I’ve done. But musically I’m still

moving forward. I cannot repeat the same things every time. That’s why it takes so long for me to make an album. The last one was five years ago. I take my time to look for something different to do.”

But however expansive and experimental his music has become over the years, the simmering rhythms of Afrobeat remain at the core. “Afrobeat is still what I’m doing,” Allen says. “But now everybody is doing Afrobeat and talking about Fela, I want to let people know I’ve not grown stagnant and I’m giving it a new twist. I’m enjoying what I’m doing and I wouldn’t enjoy it if I didn’t always look for a new challenge.”

A key collaborator in Allen’s search to break fresh ground and not become merely a nostalgic warm-up act for the burgeoning Fela Kuti industry with its Broadway musical and now Alex Gibney’s Finding Fela biopic, has been Damon Albarn. Back in 2000 on Blur’s top ten single ‘Music is My Radar’ Albarn sung the line ‘Tony Allen… he really got me dancing.’ It was an expression of his growing interest in African music and after the pair met by chance in London two years later, Albarn sang on ‘Every Season’, a track on Allen’s 2002 solo album Home Cooking, adding a characteristically catchy-but-leftfield hook to the drummer’s loose, spacious groove.

GIANTS OF

Tony Allen photos by Bernard Benant; Orlando Julius photos by Alexis Maryon

Two legends of Nigerian music: drummer Tony Allen (above) and saxophonist Orlando Julius



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Albarn is another who shares Allen’s determination not to repeat himself, calling time on Blur at the height of their success and embarking on a range of audacious projects from a Chinese opera to the cartoon band Gorillaz and his Mali Music album. Allen has become one of his most trusted collaborators, drumming with Albarn’s post-Blur bands The Good, The Bad & The Queen and Rocket Juice & The Moon and joining him on his Africa Express adventures. On Film of Life, Albarn contributes to two of the most arresting tracks, ‘Tiger Skip’, a clattering instrumental collision of melodica, dubby effects and complex, supple rhythmic patterns, and ‘Go Back’, a characteristically plaintive Albarn-sung ballad about exile, which Allen drives with jazzy precision.

“I heard that song where he mentioned me and I didn’t know who he was but I was flattered,” says Allen. “He’s become my friend, not just someone I work with. He calls me up and asks me to do things with him. This time around I asked him to do a track with me and he said, why not? He came to Paris and I was very happy he did it. It’s not always easy to work with people but with Damon it seems like we’ve been working together forever.” Allen once said that his relationship with Fela Kuti was “telepathic.” Does the same about his relationship with Albarn? “Yes, musically we do have that. Fela was a one-off. But everything you did with him was always a challenge and Damon has that attitude too. Fela was a really good composer. And Damon is, too. So there is

a similarity, and they’re both the kind of people I like to team up with. It broadens my own knowledge to work with people like that. I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking up the challenge.”

At the age of 74, Allen speaks in a deep, sonorous voice that would make him a natural for TV voiceovers and sings with a similar bass-heavy profundity, somewhere between John Lee Hooker and Leonard Cohen. But he’s a reluctant singer. “I didn’t want to sing on this record. I was forced to do it,” he complains. “I wanted it to be an instrumental album. But they said no, I had to sing. Everybody tells me they love my singing voice, but drumming and singing together isn’t easy. I’ve practised and I can do it; but I don’t want to. I just want to be with my drums.”

“Fela was a one-off. Everything you

did with him was a challenge – Damon

Albarn has that attitude too... they’re the kind of people I

like to team up with”

His record company’s publicity for Film of Life calls him ‘the metronome of Afrobeat’ but he gives the description short shrift. “Any drummer can play that straight beat like putting a metronome in there,” he scoffs. “But the drums were made for four limbs. A few jazz drummers use their four limbs, but most drummers don’t. I want all my four limbs to be working. That’s why Fela said I sounded like four drummers.” He pauses, searching for a suitable metaphor. “You don’t ride a bicycle with one leg,” he adds. “You’ve got to put both legs on the pedals and steer with your arms if you want to get where you’re going.”

He warms to the theme that the drums are not merely there to provide the backbeat. “I don’t want to be bored when I’m drumming,” he insists. “I like to have a conversation between the drums and other instruments. You ask a question with the drums and the guitar or saxophone answers. I’m not saying everybody should be like that; but that’s me. It’s the only way I can work.”

With felicitous synchronicity, another pioneer of Afrobeat with a musical history stretching back half a century also makes a welcome and energetic return this autumn. Saxophonist Orlando ‘OJ’ Julius was fusing highlife with international influences drawn from rock, pop, soul and jazz well before Fela Kuti when he formed his band the Modern Aces in 1964. Julius was 21 at the time but was already a veteran of numerous bands and had even played with Louis Armstrong on his visit to Nigeria in 1960.

Julius and his Modern Aces took up a long-running residency at the Independence Hotel in Ibadan, Nigeria’s third largest city, and were soon the hottest band on the scene. A regular visitor to their Friday night sessions was the young Fela Ransome-Kuti, at the time a producer at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation and recently returned from his studies in London. “Ibadan was the mecca of Nigerian music at that time with many different clubs and bands playing juju, highlife and other styles,” Julius recalls. “Fela came to my club every week to check out what we were doing. He sat in with us; he was still playing the trumpet in those days and hadn’t taken up the saxophone. Then when he was ready to form his own band, I gave him some of my musicians – Eddie Fayehun, Isiaka Adio and Ojo Ekeji – to get him started.”

By 1965 Fela’s group which featured Tony Allen on drums had adopted the name Koola Lobitos. “But what Fela launched back then wasn’t Afrobeat; it was jazz-highlife,” Julius says. “He only started playing Afrobeat after he went to America at the end of the 60s. But I’m

glad Fela was successful. His father came from my area, Osun. So we had the same roots.”

So would Julius claim that the Modern Aces were playing Afrobeat before Fela? “We started out playing highlife, but I was listening to American soul music like Sam & Dave and Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, and I was the first to modernise Nigerian music with rock, jazz and soul and R&B,” he says.

“A lot of students from overseas and American ex-pats came to my shows so we catered for them. I wanted to play music for everyone. That meant highlife but with international elements. I liked to play like Ray Charles or Jimmy Smith. I was composing and putting different styles into my music. It was my own invention and idea to develop highlife. It was like Afrobeat but my record company, Phillips, named it Afro-soul. I didn’t worry as long as it had Afro in the name. That was what was important to me.”

Tony Allen concedes that Julius was a key mover in the early development of the Afrobeat sound. “What Orlando was doing was a bit different from everyone else,” he says. “When we started doing Afrobeat, everybody said they were doing it first.

Fela Kuti was a regular visitor to Orlando Julius’ sessions in Ibadan


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Middle’. “The record goes back to my roots because people want to hear my old songs,” Julius explains. “But we’ve refreshed them and made them sound new and different. I’m just glad to be doing this because people didn’t even know I was still alive.”

+ ALBUM Tony Allen’s Film of Life is a Top of the World this issue, track 3 on the CD

+ DATES Tony Allen plays at the Village Underground as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival on November 20 and Orlando Julius will tour the UK in January

+ ONLINE See videos from both Orlando Julius and Tony Allen on our YouTube channel

+ MORE Check out our Songlines Essential 10 Afrobeat albums on p104

“Bootsy Collins said ‘Orlando, you’re super-

bad.’ I laughed when I realised

he meant we were good”

M O R K A R B A S I

But he’s right that what we did was a highlife/jazz fusion. That’s what everybody was trying to copy and Afrobeat came out of that.”

By the time Julius’ 1966 debut album Super Afro Soul was released, he’d already became a star with local hits such as 1964’s ‘Ijo Soul’, a song that bears a striking similarity to James Brown’s 1965 hit ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’. He doesn’t claim that Brown plagiarised him, but Julius believes they influenced each other. He gave Brown a copy of Super Afro Soul when he visited Nigeria with his band the JBs in 1970.

“I couldn’t go to see him at the Liberty Stadium as I was playing that night,” Julius recalls. “But somebody brought Bootsy Collins and the rest of his band to my club. Bootsy came onstage to play with us. He said, ‘Orlando, you’re bad.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said ‘You’re super-bad.’ I laughed when I realised he meant we were good. The club was closing, it was late, way past time. But we stayed open for another two hours because James Brown’s boys were in the house.”

The following day, a member of Brown’s entourage called at Julius’ house and told him he had been sent to escort him to the Premier Hotel. “They said James Brown wanted to meet this guy Orlando Julius. To be able to give him my LP as a present was great. There is a picture of him holding my LP. We liked each other. We copied each other. I don’t want to sue anybody for that. American music was influencing African musicians and I was proud that then African music was influencing American musicians.”

He wrote and recorded the funk-fuelled ‘James Brown Ride On’ to commemorate their meeting, but by 1974, Julius had disappeared from the Nigerian musical scene and relocated to the US, where he recorded with Hugh Masekela, Lamont Dozier and The Crusaders, among others. He eventually returned to Nigeria in 1998 and watched with astonishment as reissues of his 60s recordings – which had never been released outside West Africa – found a new cult following on specialist crate-digging labels such as Soundway and Vampisoul. “That surprised me,” Julius says. “It surprised me a lot. But I’m so glad for the internet and YouTube and that people all over the world can now find my music there.”

His new and first internationally released studio album, Jaiyede Afro (a Top of the World review in #103) was recorded with the London-based jazz collective The Heliocentrics. It mixes Afrobeat jams, Yoruba chants, new material and contemporary versions of old compositions and favourites including a cover of James Brown’s ‘In the


The Guardian 10th October 2014

Jocks & Nerds Autumn 2014

London in Stereo November 2014

LiS 05

londoninstereo.com @LondonInStereo /londoninstereo /london-in-stereo londoninstereo

“Damon is family. I cherish him because he made me enjoy playing music again.” - Tony Allen

LONDON IN STEREO IS:Editor: Jess [email protected]

Deputy Editor: Dave [email protected]

Sub-Editor/Sales: Loki [email protected]

Staff Writers:Danny WrightGemma SamwaysJack Urwin

Photography:iamamiwhoami: John StrandhTony Allen: Bernard Benant

Penny For Your Thoughts:Karen Piper

Contributors:Rob Leedham, Thomas Hannan,Lauren Down, Henry Wilkinson,Amy Gravelle, Francesca Baker,George O’Brien, Lee Wakefield.

06. ON THE STEREO

11. NEW SOUNDS

13. TALES FROM THE CITY

14. TONY ALLEN

18. ALBUM REVIEWS

24. IAMAMIWHOAMI

30. EVENTS

35. GIGS OF THE MONTH

41. LIVE LISTINGS

59. LIVE REVIEWS

61. PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

CONTENTS


TONY ALLEN WORDS: THOMAS HANNANPHOTOS: BERNARD BENANT


LiS 15

“All day I’ve just been yap, yap, yap,” exhales 74-year-old Tony Allen after our interview. He’s pleasant company, but doesn’t like talking to journalists. Or writing lyrics. Or singing. Allen – who along with Fela Kuti in Africa 70 pretty much invented the entire genre of Afrobeat – would rather be playing drums.

“I didn’t want to sing on this album,” he tells me. “I wanted to make it instrumental; it would have the same strength. Playing and singing together, it’s complicated. My drumming is already complicated. I don’t want to do the job of two people.”Allen’s drumming isn’t just complicated, it’s bewildering. But luckily the man Brian Eno once described as “the greatest drummer ever” isn’t short of folks to lighten his load. Guests appear throughout his excellent Film Of Life album, with sonic compadre Damon Albarn receiving particularly lofty praise. “Damon is family. I cherish him because he made me enjoy playing music again. He’s the one guy, apart from Fela Kuti, I’ve worked with for fifteen years. He has it – he has what I’m after, what will make me be on. I like to play with others - I bore myself. I don’t want to eat all the cake. I want to share my cake.”It isn’t just collaborating that keeps Allen’s music fresh. One of his greatest influences seems to be himself, in that he doesn’t want to replicate anything he’s done before.“It’s five years since my last album. I can’t afford to rush; they start to look like each other, every time the same. I challenge myself to make patterns that don’t look like other drumming. I want to cut the monotony of thinking Afrobeat should bea certain way. I’m trying to make musicthat stretches, without an end. It’s a spiritual business.”If Tony Allen were a slightly worse drummer than he is, he’d remain one of the greatest. I wonder what motivated him to ascend from merely being a good drummer to being a brilliant one. “All of the ‘good’ drummers who were playing, I passed through those styles, and

they never did,” he replies in a voicemore humble than that makes out. “Everyone copies Western drumming when they start. How long are we going to do that? I wanted to put my own thing down for people to follow.”While never struggling for rhythmic inspiration, lyrical muses are something Allen finds harder to come by. When they hit however, they hit hard. Describing the story behind Boat Journey, which details the plight of refugees, he imparts: “I was watching the news and saw human beings dying. Who wouldn’t feel this? The situation at their place is so bad that what they’re trying is the only solution. Boats capsize, hundreds lose their lives, and the ones who arrive get caught. Is jail preferable to being at home? There’s a reality there, and I feel for them. I said, ‘let me sing about that, otherwise, I don’t want to sing.’ I came from there too; the situation was bad when I left Nigeria. Music was dead because of the Army. When you go out in London, you see people going to clubs – it’s rocking. That’s how Lagos was before, until ’77. Then it started diminishing, and soon it was finished. Before it was running fine, and there wasn’t even any oil – it was running on agriculture. There was light, water, roads, and when they wanted to make a slum clearance in Lagos they would provide a brand new town all ready for everybody from the slum. Today they clear you out to build a road, and you find yourself under a bridge. There’s a lot of money now, because of oil, and the more they have the worse the country becomes. That’s why I sang N.E.P.A in ’84 - ‘Never Expect Power Always’. It’s still true.”

Film Of Life is out now on Jazz Village.Tony Allen plays Village Underground November 20th

Rhythm November 2014

London in Stereo October 2014

The Guardian (191k) 17th October 2014

Songlines Blog 20th October 2014

Time Out (305k) 15th July 2014

Mojo (74k) August 2014

The Independent (64k) 21st November 2014


ONLINE

The Guardian 10th September 2014

The Line of Best Fit 6th October 2014

Curious Animal 21st October 2014

Ransom Note 4th October 2014

The Line of Best Fit 13th October 2014

The Quietus 2nd December 2014

God Is In The TV 27th November 2014

The Line of Best Fit 25th November 2014

TheGuardian.com 14th July 2014

Clash 3rd July 2014

Uncut 3rd July 2014

Uncut 29th August 2014

DIY Magazine 3rd July 2014

NME 3rd July 2014

The Line Of Best Fit 3rd July 2014

Ransom Note 9th September 2014

Potholes In My Blog 12th September 2014

UK Vibe 2nd November 2014

Marlbank 20th October 2014

Nialler9 2nd August 2014

We All Want Someone To Shout For 22nd August 2014

The Plus 16th September 2014

iDrum Magazine 27th August 2014

Something You Said 17th October 2014

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tony allen - 'film of life' - selected media coverage

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