“One of the true giants of African music”
Q MAGAZINE
“Femi is one of the most dynamic and invigorating figures around”
THE TIMES
“Femi is an upgraded model of his father, Fela, leaner, enhanced for clubland, sonically stronger”
TIME OUT
The world is full of celebrity offspring, yet it is almost impossible to think of one who lives up to expectations to the same degree as Femi Kuti, son of Fela, the originator of Afrobeat and former Public Enemy No1 in Nigeria. He is that rarity, a scion whose career rests on talent and hard work rather than the family name.
Born in 1962 in London, where his father was a student, raised in Lagos and a saxophonist with Fela's bands Africa 70 and Egypt 80 from the age of 15, Femi has spent the past 11 years keeping alive his late father's dreams of a Nigeria free of corruption and an Africa able to provide for all its people. Afrobeat that is both hard driving and hard hitting is still the order of the day at the Shrine, the nightclub where Femi and his band, Positive Force, play three times a week, and which he runs with his older sister, Yeni.
His latest studio set, Day by Day, has been a long time coming. It is seven years since Fight To Win, four since the live Africa Shrine, on which you could hear early versions of three of the songs on his new album. "It's been hard work keeping The Shrine alive," he explains. "I've also been on tour, so it was hard to pin me down in a studio until we got to Paris in the summer of 2007." Being a single parent to seven children must be time consuming too. "Oh yes, I have been in Nigeria a lot because they need me, I need to be around them, and be a father for a while as well."
This sabbatical also saw him learning a lot more about being a musician. Femi has learnt to play piano properly and gone back to the trumpet, his first instrument, which he gave up in favour of the sax. The benefits are immediately apparent on Day by Day. "Listen to They Will Run and Better Ask Yourself, they are more jazz than anything I've done before. That's the effect of playing the trumpet coming out."
The addition to the armoury of jazz takes us back to the beginning of the Femi Kuti story. "That's where I got my true inspiration. When I listened to funk I didn't want to play music, I just wanted to dance. But when I listened to jazz, I wanted to play. That and listening to my father."
Steeped in Fela's music and status as de facto Leader of the Opposition in Nigeria, Femi learnt the ropes as bandleader for Egypt 80 when his father was otherwise occupied or detained. In 1985, he made his debut as bandleader at the Hollywood Bowl, while Fela was facing fraud charges. A year later he had split to make his own music with Positive Force.
His 17-piece unit released two African albums, No Cause For Alarm? and MYOB, before being signed by Motown's world-music label, Tabu. In 1995, an eponymous international debut, launched him onto the global stage. They played as fast and as furious as Fela's band but took a (slightly) less confrontational stance and infused the music with contemporary soul.
Fela's death in 1997 put the young man in the spotlight just as his music was reaching maturity. Shoki Shoki came out the following year, a blazing slab of righteous anger that kept alive the Kuti family flame in tracks such as Truth Don Die and Blackman Know Yourself. His songs became anthems, though the Nigerian government made sure he was never played on radio, arguing that the lyrics to one song, Beng Beng Beng, were so lewd he was a danger to public morality.
Never content just to walk in his father's shoes, however, Femi took his music to audiences that might never have heard of Fela. He toured America with alt-rock band Jane's Addiction, sang on Rachid Taha's Made In Medina album and reached out to the American hip-hop community, connecting with people such as Mos Def, D'Angelo, Nile Rodgers, Erykah Badu and the Roots. "It's like I say in Tension Grip Africa," he explains. "I was getting too much international exposure. People were listening to me everywhere. Not just Africans and black Americans, Europeans and white people were listening to me, and the governments here don't white people getting hooked, because they won't turn their backs on me."
He raised the stakes even higher with his next album, Fight To Win, an album that dug deep into Nigerian traditions yet used soul, funk and hip hop. The title track spoke directly to his constituency, the people; Traitors of Africa challenged the most corrupt of all Nigerian governments; and Stop Aids put him at the forefront of the campaign to start educating Africans about the great scourge that had swept through the continent in the 1990s. Enthusiastically received at home and abroad, it nevertheless left him open to attack.
"I had people criticising everything I was doing," he says with a smile. "But I don't pay attention to them, so I don't have them in my thoughts." However, critics weren't the biggest problem. "My recording company dropped me, they said I was getting too political instead of promoting Fight To Win. America was preparing to go into Iraq and I thought it was no good."
And so Femi returned to Lagos and spent his time running a nightclub, raising his family and improving his musicianship. How successful he was at the latter two tasks can be judged by the contribution to the album of his son Made, who plays on all the tracks on Day by Day. Tours of Zambia, Kenya and South Africa were followed by an extended visit to Paris for recording.
"My producer (Sodi) is in Paris, it is easier to organise things and we don't have a studio in Lagos that can record the way we recorded. Now everybody is back in training, we have to re-establish my music. We have to come out and play it live now, because the record industry is in such a bad shape, we are all suffering."
He laughs. "Luckily, the African man is used to suffering."
