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Tony Allen: “Fela was Right – but I Detest Singing Militant”

Editorial Note: Following the Afrobeat legend’s passing, we have dug through the archives to bring back an interview he sat for with the Guardian. Originally published in 2016, it features him discussing Fela Kuti, protest music and his own career trajectory.

Tony Allen is considering the much-recounted tale that when he left Fela Kuti’s Africa 70 at the peak of their powers, it took several drummers to replace him. I don’t doubt there’s truth in the tale – you only need hear Allen play to realise that his is a talent beyond the reach of other mortals, while Fela himself said: “Without Tony Allen there would be no afrobeat.” It’s more that I have heard so many variations on it – was it two drummers? Three? Four? Even his biography is sketchy on the subject – that I want to hear the truth from the man himself. This proves to be no more definitive.

“It depends on my mood,” Allen says. “When I’m in a happy mood playing, you can hear me like six drummers. On some days it could be 100!”

I have come to meet Allen in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, the city he has lived in since the mid-80s. As part of a week of content themed around Allen and Nigerian music produced by Boiler Room and the Guardian – including a livestream of his performance at Amsterdam’s Dekmantel festival – Allen has agreed to talk about the nature of collaboration and the art of drumming, as well as taking a nostalgia trip through the wild, often chaotic yet hugely influential period he spent building the foundations of modern African music with Fela. It’s a remarkable life story that initially he seems weary about retelling – “The Guardian knows I have a book and they have read it,” he mutters through a faint grin – but he soon gets into the flow of things. In fact, listening to him talk can be rather like listening to him drum. He builds up to things patiently and without bluster, often branching out without warning to unexpected areas (the trials of securing a French visa, for example, or his inability to handle magic mushrooms). Yet once he is in full flow he is hard to stop and never less than riveting – especially on the subject of Fela.

Tony Allen is considering the much-recounted tale that when he left Fela Kuti’s Africa 70 at the peak of their powers, it took several drummers to replace him. I don’t doubt there’s truth in the tale – you only need hear Allen play to realise that his is a talent beyond the reach of other mortals, while Fela himself said: “Without Tony Allen there would be no afrobeat.” It’s more that I have heard so many variations on it – was it two drummers? Three? Four? Even his biography is sketchy on the subject – that I want to hear the truth from the man himself. This proves to be no more definitive.

“It depends on my mood,” Allen says. “When I’m in a happy mood playing, you can hear me like six drummers. On some days it could be 100!”

I have come to meet Allen in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, the city he has lived in since the mid-80s. As part of a week of content themed around Allen and Nigerian music produced by Boiler Room and the Guardian – including a livestream of his performance at Amsterdam’s Dekmantel festival – Allen has agreed to talk about the nature of collaboration and the art of drumming, as well as taking a nostalgia trip through the wild, often chaotic yet hugely influential period he spent building the foundations of modern African music with Fela. It’s a remarkable life story that initially he seems weary about retelling – “The Guardian knows I have a book and they have read it,” he mutters through a faint grin – but he soon gets into the flow of things. In fact, listening to him talk can be rather like listening to him drum. He builds up to things patiently and without bluster, often branching out without warning to unexpected areas (the trials of securing a French visa, for example, or his inability to handle magic mushrooms). Yet once he is in full flow he is hard to stop and never less than riveting – especially on the subject of Fela.

“If you check most of his lyrics that he sang in the 70s and 80s, that is what is happening right now,” he says. “War everywhere. And because of what? Power. And power that is lopsided. There is no leader in Africa, only president, there for himself. Not for the people. That is what [Fela] sang that and that is still the case. Europe has their own style of manipulating the people but it’s not like [in Africa]. We have the junglish way of manipulating. Very junglish, you know? Like in a jungle. That’s what we have.”

The music Allen made with Fela was like nothing that had gone before – a sizzling concoction of jazz and funk with Ghanaian and Nigerian highlife that aligned Allen’s polyrhythmic grooves with strident horns and politicised chants. It was, Allen admits, “strange for people to take in”. It was also difficult for the people making it. Disputes over credits and royalties plagued the band – Allen has previously labelled Fela “greedy” – while Fela’s insistence on taking on Nigeria’s corrupt politicians was met with increasingly harsh treatment by the authorities. In 1970, Fela declared independence from Nigeria for the communal compound, Kalakuta Republic, in which he housed his family and fellow musicians. Seven years later, following the release of Fela’s military-baiting album Zombie, the army attacked the compound, burning it to the ground and leaving Fela’s mother with what would prove to be fatal injuries. Such drama and conflict was not really what Allen had been seeking when he took up the drums.

“I detest singing militant. It’s not my thing,” he says. “What [Fela] was challenging, he was right. But it was too direct and that’s why he got all this shit. There were too many arrests, too many bombardments. You’re a musician – why do you leave yourself to be beaten up all the time like that?”

He sighs. “But I couldn’t stop him. Never! It’s his own body receiving the beatings.”

For all their squabbles, Allen says he always saw Fela as a friend and a brother. “There are many things I know about Fela that nobody knows,” he says. “A lot of discussions we had, that we never discussed with nobody. So of course I pity him when he is passing through all these rigours of being beaten up. Many limbs, broken legs, everything. I used to pity him – why do you want to do this? At a point I just said: ‘This guy is going to be an icon, and they will kill him one day.’ Because nobody ever tried that in [Nigeria]. To sing against the government? Most of the bands I knew were praising them, they would do flattery in order to become rich. Fela was against flattery, and so was I. I don’t want to play the music of flattery.”

All this was a far cry from Allen’s beginnings, when he struggled to make a living playing in various bands around Lagos in the early 60s, despite his versatility: “Latin American, African horns, jazz, highlife … you had to be able to play it all because in the club they asked for it.”

Before Allen had a drum kit he would practise tapping out rhythms on school chairs. Later, while on his first US tour in 1969 with Fela as part of Koola Lobitos (the band who became Africa 70), a meeting with west coast jazz drummer Frank Butler inspired him to practise every morning on pillows, making his sticks bounce off them while he was rolling.

“It adds flexibility,” he says. “Very effective. Effortless – that’s what I tried to catch from [Butler].”

 

Effortless is certainly the word with Allen – at least that’s how he makes his drumming look, conjuring complex, ever-evolving rhythms while barely looking as if he’s playing at all. It’s thrilling yet unnerving – you don’t often see drummers play so casually, never mind such highly technical stuff.

“Some drummers don’t know what it means to play soft, it’s not in their book,” he says. “I know I can make my drums bring the house down if I have to. But I know how to make it subtle. You listen to it flowing like a river.”

I can’t help but contrast this philosophy with that of Mick Fleetwood, who at 69 years of age still bashes away at his drums to such an extent that he has to wear a special ice-packed suit after every gig to soothe his aching muscles.

“You can’t do that,” says Allen, shaking his head in disbelief. “Sometimes I watch drummers backstage, and the energy from the first song!” Another shake of the head. “And this guy is going to take the whole concert with the same energy? When he finishes it’s going to be like he’s been beaten up! Physically he will feel something, like he’s been weightlifting.”

Allen knows about physicality. There was a time when he used to drum for up to six hours with no breaks. He says the vibe in the crowd was such that he wouldn’t even notice. “But it’s finished now. I’m playing in Europe now and in Europe it’s zero. They don’t make me play! Sometimes I travel all the way from here to a fucking country far away by flight just to play for 45 minutes! It’s frustrating, you know? They say: ‘You are paid!’ Fuck the money! It’s not the money side. It’s like torture, doing all that journey and stress just to play for 45 minutes. After 45 minutes, I’m just warming up!”

Allen thinks his drumming is now better than it has ever been. He listens to the old records he made with Fela and says he feels as if he should re-record them. “To redo them. Make them better, for sure.”

Keeping himself mentally clear is another reason why Allen feels he is reaching a peak right now. Nowadays his manager looks after the money side of things, which had been a running dispute throughout his time playing in Nigeria, and not just with Fela. He no longer uses hard drugs either, following four dark years after he moved to France when he was sucked into a reliance on heroin.

“The only thing is my weed and my drink,” he says. “That’s all. To go play, I don’t touch any hard drugs. Coke, heroin, mushrooms, whatever, I never use it for my work.”

Allen talks about recovering from heroin addiction strictly in terms of will power. He didn’t go to rehab, instead preferring to concentrate on overcoming the first few days when the effects were physical. “I knew I had to fight it myself. The cold turkey business, I won’t have it every day. It’s one full day of that you suffer. The first day is horrible, horrible, but the question is don’t try to look for a remedy. There are tablets like methadone, no! You remain in the same shit. So the best thing is to … first day horrible, the second day, I am trying to eat in the kitchen, you don’t feel like eating but I force myself to eat and smoke my weed, which helps me to even feel like eating. Just don’t think about the stuff. On the third night when you wake up in the morning, you see yourself and the sky looks brighter – so bright! And when you are inside the heroin thing, the sky is always grey.”

He starts laughing: “Even if it’s not grey it’s grey in your mind, nothing is bright. So when you come out, you see the day – and you see the feeling of your body, and all of a sudden you see brightness that you never saw. Once you see that, you don’t want to go back to darkness. In one week, you are as clear as anything, you know? That’s how I did mine.”

Even the grey skies didn’t stop him from drumming – he says his reputation may have suffered but his playing remained at a high level. Allen has spent the last couple of decades not just watching this reputation be restored, but building on it with a series of unique collaborative projects that have been embraced by a wide audience. This process may have begun with Black Voices, a project with Doctor L (currently playing with Mbongwana Star) that mixed the afrobeat sound with electronic production and helped bring it to a new audience. Since then he’s worked with the likes of Flea, Charlotte Gainsbourg and – of course – Damon Albarn, who has worked with him on various projects including Africa Express and the Good, the Bad and the Queen. I ask Allen what the secret is to a great collaboration: is it comradeship? Or does it come down to musical ability? He thinks it’s mainly the latter.

“You cannot go and collaborate with people and just give them what you know,” he reasons. “All those guys I collaborate with – I always respect what they put in front of me, why they invited me, you know? I just have to work it out – what can this one take?”

Allen says the problem he often encounters is that, thanks to his unique way of playing, western musicians often struggle to hear where his one – the first beat in a bar – comes.

“They can be confused. I always say: ‘It’s there!’ It’s just a question of it could be on my kick or it could be on my snare. That can be considered a problem with most of the musicians.”

As for the influence of afrobeat on western indie bands such as Vampire Weekend, Allen is rather dismissive, especially of those artists’ rhythmic nous.

“This afrobeat everyone tries to do, they write the basslines and the horns … but what about the drums? The drummer comes and doesn’t know what to play, because that is the bit with the discipline. He will play what he knows, which doesn’t fit the music.”

To play afrobeat properly, Allen believes a drummer needs to pass through the school of afrobeat drumming. That isn’t particularly convenient, given that the only person Allen says is qualified to teach such a class is, er, Tony Allen. But then he has more than earned the right to assert his status as a true master.

“I do my masterclasses with drummers and they are still fighting it,” he concludes. “What I see in many drummers is that they are riding a bicycle with one leg.”

He smiles as he delivers this metaphor with the contentment of a man who knows he’s still riding his bicycle with two legs. Or maybe three. Or maybe one hundred.

 

Culled from Guardian

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