GuilFest 2005. The Guildford Music Festival on 15th, 16th and 17th July 2005

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Artist: Femi Kuti
Genre: World Music
Performing: 18th July 2004 / The BBC Radio 2 Main Stage
Website Address:

"Sometimes I'd like to sing sugary, harmless songs, in the 'Oh darling, I love you' style. But how can you do anything except serious songs when you live in Nigeria? Around me, I only see the people who suffer. My music reflects that environment."

Femi Kuti, the eldest son of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, hasn't chosen the easy way. In the manner of Nigerian football internationals like Okocha who opt for a well-paid career overseas, Femi could easily have led his life as a musician in New York or London, among the diaspora of the most heavily populated country in Africa. In four international albums, this 39-year-old Yoruba Gemini has built an international reputation that would have allowed him the comfortable life of an expatriate musician. But, the son of a tiger remains a tiger, relates a Yoruba proverb, and when you're a son of the late Black President, the spiritual and musical inheritor of one of the three heroes of the black world in the seventies (with Bob Marley and Bruce Lee), the struggle, even if it's dangerous, can only be undertaken at home. In Lagos, the Nigerian pressure cooker, the largest megalopolis in Africa. The fifth biggest city in the world.

When he was born in June 1962 in London, his father was a 22-year-old student, the descendent of a noble Abeokuta bloodline. His mother, Remi Taylor, had just turned eighteen. Nigeria had only been independent for two years, and nobody suspected yet that the life of the Kuti family would be so intimately linked to the highs and lows of the Federation of 120 million inhabitants. Although, to a lesser degree than the head of the family, Fela, he who would later name himself the man who carries death in his pouch, and who would marry, several years later, in a single Ghanaian ceremony, twenty-seven wives. Living between London and Lagos, the Kutis were an incarnation of the new African modernity. The future of Africa appeared radiant. But after the catastrophe of the Biafran war in 1967, the dream began to fly apart. And when Fela, returning from his initiation tour with the Black Panthers in the USA, began his musical mutation, which had him go from highlife Koola Lobitos playboy to the status of Afrobeat prophet of Africa 70, Femi started to open his eyes and ears.

During the 1970s, the young man lived the history of Nigeria directly, via the increasingly revolutionary, blistering blasts of his father. When, in 1977, a Nigerian army rabble violently attacked the Republic of Kalakuta, the self-titled Ikeja commune where the Kuti clan lived, the teenager shelved his dreamy nonchalance to begin his own ideological and creative combat. It's not easy to make your own way when you live in the shadow of such an individual. All the more as Fela, no doubt, didn't make life as easy for his son as for his musicians. Femi hung in, starting a career as a self-taught saxophonist, and involving himself, -- less and less shy, more and more convinced of his destiny -- in the long nights of the Afrika Shrine, where his dad held sway. At the start of the eighties, a terrible period which saw Fela even more frequently in prison and the country even more of a military dictatorship, Femi increasingly asserted his own personality. As the new head of the clan. And as a musician. To end up becoming the N° 2 saxophonist of Egypt 80. In Nigeria, living sleepless nights and sunless days, against a background of successive changes of regime, Femi found his true self, finally forming his own group, in I986, Positive Force. He organized his own shows at the Afrika Shrine, named Sunday Jump. Before one of the most demanding audiences in the world, Femi established his reputation as a performer. The Nigeria that despaired of ever again seeing stability adopted this new spokesman, who began appearing throughout the country.

1991: Femi Kuti played in France for the first time, at the New Morning club in Paris. The World Music planet discovered an end-of-century African. A man at home in the cultures of both North and South, less given to the anti-Western diatribes favoured by his father, but equally Pan-African. And more than ever committed against the evils contaminating the continent: corruption, inter-ethnic rivalry, greed and bigotry. America, thanks to the Tabu label, a subdivision of Motown, signed Femi. In 1995, when Wonder Wonder was released, a disc produced by Timmy Regisford and the first sign of the Afrobeat revival about to invade dance floors worldwide, the new Kuti clan had finally found its stride. With the singer were three dancers: his wife Funke and his sisters Yeni and Sola. August 2, 1997. Fela died of AIDS. All along the highway linking insular Lagos to the populous suburbs, over a million people watched the funeral procession of the Black President. In that same terrible year, Femi lost Sola and his cousin Frances. Was it fate? That summer there also occurred, in mysterious circumstances, the deaths of two of Fela's whipping boys, the dictator Sani Abacha and his principal opponent, the Yoruba millionaire Moshood Abiola. It was the end of an era.

Another opened with the release of Shoki Shoki, a year later in 1998. Femi, now signed by Barclay, was making a name for himself. And establishing a style. If he stayed with Afrobeat, he was now performing it, totally, in his own way. Success came with Truth Don Die, and the Pan-African hit Beng Beng Beng. Music knows no borders, be it dub or house, as shown in an album of dance floor remixes by stars of the Afro revival that electrify Western clubs: Joe Claussell, Kerry Chandler, and Masters at Work. Femi, on stage, lit up European festivals. In Lagos, he exorcised the terrible year, 1997, by organizing a festival to mark the first anniversary of his father's death. Femi was now more than a singer. He was the ambassador of a new Nigeria. Spokesman of the new civil society getting ready to vote freely for the first time in 20 years, Femi set up his own association, MASS, with the aim of helping to awaken the African population, so it might find solutions to its problems. The organization took up the bases of the struggle initiated several years earlier by the MOP (Movement of the People), set up by Fela: "With our culture dating back millions of years, we must now reflect. Africa must at last believe in itself, in its own technology, medicine, culture, in order to improve society."

January 31, 1999: After a final Sunday Jump, the Afrika Shrine definitively closed its doors. Olusegun Obasanjo, who had supervised the 1977 attack on Kalakuta, was invested as President of the Nigerian Federation. While the country rediscovered freedom of expression, against a background of the often violent rise of regional protest, Femi set out on a long tour that led him to strengthen his links with the Afro-American community. The world of hip-hop, that was discovering his father's music, was entranced by the young musician. Femi participated in the recording of a rap album by Common (Like Water and Chocolate), before adding his sax and voice to the disc of Algeria's Rachid Taha (Made in Medina). On October 13, 2000, between two sessions for his new album recorded at the Zarma Studios in Paris, Femi unveiled to the Western press in Lagos a new facet of his capabilities: that of an risk-taking financial entrepreneur. A new Afrika Shrine was inaugurated that night, under a full moon. Femi played several of his new songs and above all welcomed -- as head of a generation that had taken up his father's motto, "Music is the weapon of the future" -- the Lagos music new wave: Daddy Showkey's galala, Afro hip-hop of the Remedies. The new Afrika Shrine became the key centre for all who struggle to promote the new Nigerian democracy. It was the start of a club that Femi hopes to see, one day, succeed like the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. While the country plunged into a new ethnic crisis, stirred up by the installation of Islamic sharia law in the north. Femi flew off to Rio, to take part in a festival alongside D'Angelo. The end of the century saw him in Lagos, before going to France to complete the recording of his new disc.

October 2001. A man for all latitudes, but of just one attitude, Femi hit the third millennium on every front: humanitarian, political, creative. While London inaugurated shows called simply Shrine, Femi was to be found in the Paris club Queen performing with the DJ Derrick Carter. He appeared at a fnac store in Paris, as part of the opening of a touring exhibition honouring his father, then at the St. Denis Festival des Banlieue Bleues. In June, he was in Lagos for a brief hometown stopover. July found him in the USA for a new concert tour. Then he appeared alongside Macy Gray and Roots during the recording of an album of Fela songs, initiated by the Red Hot Association, which is involved in the fight against AIDS. He went on to Cuba, where he recorded the clip of his new single, produced by photographer Thierry Le Goues. And he was caught - something new - pulling discordant notes out of an organ and supervising his son's trumpet lessons. He is now recognized, and more than ever, as the new head of the Kuti clan.

"The death of a man is the birth of an ancestor" is a Yoruba proverb. And the birth of an inheritor could be included. A favoured interlocutor of the African press whenever it's a question of commenting on the latest news from Nigeria, Femi doesn't hesitate to reply forcefully to the Lagos press which considers -- often saying so in attention-grabbing headlines -- that Femi doesn't devote enough time to his country. Fight to Win, his new album, once again produced in France by Sodi, is the best answer to such criticism that this product of African independence could give to all those who despaired at the thought of him abandoning the fight for Africa. While the OAU (Organisation for African Unity) undertakes a mutation towards an African Union, Fight to Win is redrawing the map of Afro-beat by weaving connexions with the American hip-hop scene, but also by going electronic. Femi's new 16-member Positive Force, reorganized and reformed after the rhythm section abandoned ship in Atlanta, has never been so close to its leader. The fight can go on: "It will no doubt take all of my life to see the dream finally come true: the birth of the New Africa. And if it's not me, I will transmit the mission to my son. And if it's not him, it will be his child. The years ahead look hard for Africa. But what do you want me to do? It's my country. My continent. And it's only from this point that we can begin to change it."