Men of the world

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Men of the world
April 20, 2009
The National

A light breeze of mellifluous music wafts from behind the half-open door of a long, low, bunker-like building nestled deep in the English countryside. Inside this unassuming rehearsal space at Peter Gabriel’s Real World recording studio, the legendary rocker Robert Plant is laying down bluesy vocals over a hypnotic, circular and gently insistent groove.

Ten minutes later, Plant emerges into the watery spring sunshine flanked by his latest musical collaborators, Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara. With his crumpled features and greying golden mane, the 60-year-old singer looks more like the Lion King nowadays than the lithe young rock prince of his Led Zeppelin prime. But he seems relaxed and in a friendly mood as he swaps jokes with the bass guitarist Billy Fuller and the drummer Martyn Baker during a break from rehearsals for their performance in Abu Dhabi next weekend, a headline-grabbing late addition to the Gulf’s inaugural Womad festival.

“It’s going magnificently,” Plant says with a wry smile. “Just as long as we can remember what we’re doing. As long as we can remember our own names.”

Plant and Womad are a natural fit. The singer first became fascinated with musical forms from outside the Anglo-American rock mainstream many decades ago, long before the term “world music” was even coined. He even incorporated the rhythms and scales of India and North Africa into his songwriting with Jimmy Page in Led Zeppelin. Since then, his long and eclectic solo career has always aimed beyond the narrow horizons of western pop, with Moroccan traditional music remaining a particular source of inspiration.

“It’s a funny thing,” Plant muses. “With all the European domination of Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, I don’t hear any nightclubs in Addis Ababa or discotheques in Mumbai or markets in the High Atlas mountains playing any English folk songs. Which is funny because the chord progressions are quite similar.”

Adams and Plant are regular collaborators. The guitarist is a Womad veteran with a long track record of working at the raw, bluesy end of world music. He has produced the globally acclaimed Saharan Tuareg blues band Tinariwen, and helped set up Mali’s highly regarded Festival in the Desert in 2001. He began playing and co-writing with Plant as part of the singer’s Strange Sensation collective, which has so far spawned the 2002 album Dreamland and its 2005 sequel Mighty Rearranger.

“When I was escaping from the, er, table of the gods,” Plant says, apparently reluctant to even mention Led Zeppelin by name, “I was recommended to contact Justin, who I was told was at the forefront of developing music and style relating to North Africa and Morocco, the whole vista of the music that I liked a lot. We worked together for several years, and even when we decided to give it a rest for a while we were always in touch, cross-referencing experiences.”

Camara has had a similarly eclectic and prolific career. Born and raised in Gambia, he is a griot – a virtuoso master musician – specialising in the single-stringed ritti, a highly versatile West African instrument. He has played with multiple folk and jazz bands from Africa to Scandinavia, scored prestigious theatre shows in London, and hosted music courses around the world with the cultural exchange group ECCO.

Since relocating to Britain seven years ago, Camara has worked with Adams on various projects, including their award-winning 2007 album Soul Science. Their second joint album, Tell No Lies, is due for release next month. “It’s very accessible, groovy dance music,” Adams says, “but really raw and stripped down.”

Adams and Camara recently returned from playing Womad’s sister festivals in Australia and New Zealand, and express keen interest in next week’s Abu Dhabi line-up. “There are always amazing musicians to see at a Womad festival, an unparalleled variety,” says Adams. “I hope we get to see some artists from Abu Dhabi, or from the Gulf, because there are some fantastic rhythms and great music in that region.”

Plant, Camara and Adams are all very different in terms of age, experience and cultural background. But the common thread between them is a shared connection to the elemental blues music that travelled from Africa’s Niger delta region to America’s Mississippi delta during the slavery era.

“That explosion of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, Elvis Presley and all that, came from Mississippi,” Adams explains. “And in that music was a huge element that came from West Africa, particularly from the Muslim people of West Africa. It’s different from Cuban or Brazilian or other kinds of music. It has that blue note, that pained sound, and also that kind of trance feel. Those two elements – a repetitive rhythm that sends your head into a trance and these notes that really worry against the beat – they come from the Niger.”

“I believe the blues comes from Africa,” Camara says. “American blues is more connected with African blues. I see all music as family. It may be white or black, the language may be different, but the music is connected. When I grew up I just listened to the traditional music – Fula music, Mandinka music, Wolof music. Then I started to travel in 1993, to Norway, and started playing with Europeans. Before that I just played traditional music – I didn’t know what is blues, or jazz, or rock. So now I’m finding my music.”

Having a shared history means Plant, Camara and Adams can draw on a pool of songs from their various collaborations over the last decade. “We’ve just got songs in common in various projects,” says Adams. “With Robert there are songs we’ve written together with members of Strange Sensation, there are songs from Robert’s back catalogue, and there are songs that Juldeh and I have done together that relate to what Robert has done.”

Arranged at very short notice, the group’s Womad rehearsal appears to be a loose, spontaneous and laidback affair. “We can get into a room and we speak pretty much the same musical language,” says Adams. “Nobody writes music, it’s not about jazz, it’s not something that comes from classical music or showtunes or anything like that. It is riffs, grooves, things that really swing. There’s a voice on top, call and response, all those things. It’s the same language, that’s why it’s very natural for Juldeh, Robert and myself.”

The way Plant describes it, the songs are almost being rewritten on the hoof as the music rediscovers its African blues roots. “It’s all opening up,” Plant says, “because Juldeh will play in a certain way and we’ll go: ‘Yeah! That’s it! Scrap everything else, that’s the way…’ We are improvising, but on a theme. It’s almost like a signature and then the handwriting changes. If I start singing a certain phrasing, Juldeh’s eyes lift up. So the whole thing is exactly what it’s always been, except that there’s no fire in there to sit around.”

There is a sweet historical symmetry to this view. Plant and Adams both see the 20th-century explosion of blues-based music as a kind of righteous payback from ancient times, a pendulum swinging back after centuries of Eurocentric cultural imperialism.

“The western world was listening to Mozart, trying to push reason and logic,” says Adams. “But suddenly along came the electric guitar and the radio. I see that as the victory of our ancestors, or Juldeh’s ancestors, sitting in the desert playing their string instruments. They figured out scales and rhythms that made people shake their hips and feel amazing. That goes back thousands of years.”

The Womad show in Abu Dhabi will not be the first time Plant, Adams and Camara have shared a stage. They performed together just once before, in October 2007, at the newly refurbished Birmingham Town Hall close to Plant’s hometown of Wolverhampton.

“They did a 30 million pound refit and just invited us along,” Plant recalls. “Whereas everybody else was crashing along in the same old hackneyed rock and roll way, we were just able to step up there and intertwine. There was no great predominating moment from anybody. It was just a great melange. A great mix.”

This collective, collaborative ethos is clearly important to Plant’s current working process, perhaps because he has witnessed first-hand the Olympian heights of stadium-rock with all its excess and ego. Of course, the singer can afford to feel relaxed with his place in the musical cosmos nowadays. He is currently enjoying an Indian summer in his career after winning five Grammy awards for Raising Sand, his highly praised 2007 collaboration with the young country singer Alison Krauss.

No wonder Plant continues to resist hugely lucrative offers to front a Led Zeppelin reunion tour, despite massive global demand following the band’s triumphant one-off London show two years ago. The singer has even issued statements on his website warning fans against buying bogus tickets for non-existent shows. In an interview last year, he made it emphatically clear he does not want to “tour like a bunch of bored old men following the Rolling Stones around”.

Plant does most of the talking during our interview, and appears to assume the boss-man role when rehearsal time looms again. But he wears his superstar reputation lightly, undercut with a dash of self-mocking irony. Adams insists their musical partnership is one of equals, not rock legend and star-struck fan.

“All of that tends to wear off when you get down to the music,” says Adams. “In your teenage years you have real music idols, and fortunately Robert didn’t happen to be one of mine. It’s all to do with what record collection your older brother has.”

Plant grins in agreement. “That’s what Alison always says!” he says, laughing. “She didn’t grow up listening to Zeppelin, she just liked my solo stuff. I can’t believe it. Finally, somebody who liked it! Ha!”

It is hard to imagine now, in the light of his current renaissance, but Plant’s reputation has been through serious critical lulls during the last three decades. Even at Led Zeppelin’s peak, he recalls, the rock press were writing his obituary.

“I was 29 when I was written off,” he says. “It’s all about the media and how they play it. In the beginning, when I first went to America, Rolling Stone tried to bury us. The same people who contact me now and ask if I will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award are the people who tried to eliminate us from all music scenes in America back then. And the same in the UK, because we just took no prisoners and didn’t play the game.”

With the advent of punk rock in the late 1970s, Plant and his peers were widely derided as dinosaurs, even though many of the new scene’s figureheads were closet Zeppelin fans. “I remember in 1977,” Plant says, “John Lydon was lying before me in the Roxy Club in Covent Garden, dribbling, feigning adoration because I was about to kick him in the face. It was only six years later when he contacted me and asked for the lyrics to Kashmir so he could play it in Public Image Ltd. But anyway, it’s all a game. It doesn’t matter, so long as we have a good time.”

After their Womad show in Abu Dhabi, the trio will go their separate ways. Adams and Camara have their new record to promote while Plant is scheduled to begin work on another album with Krauss. “It’s called The Difficult Second Record,” he quips.

Future collaborations between Plant, Adams and Camara are an option, but they have no firm plans right now. “There are no secrets,” Plant says. “This is not George Michael’s comeback. If there’s a gig coming up and they want me to come and do it, or if I’ve got a gig and they’re free – it’s not a big deal, it’s just great to do it. Because we haven’t got the stresses. It’s not a combined career move.”

He may have disappointed millions of Led Zeppelin fans by turning down a comeback tour, but there is something admirable about Plant’s preference for putting passion before profit. He continues to take the road less travelled, soaking up sounds from all over the globe, treating music as a voyage of discovery and shared cultural adventure. Womad is just another step in this never-ending journey.

“This is so straightforward,” Plant says, “without any big production deals or anything like that. It’s where music came from. And as time goes on, the less the hassle and the more the adventure, the more stimulating it is for me. This is just another one of those moments along the way.”