![]() This must have been sadly familiar ground for the musician. And they have a crazy head of state, who don’t know nothing.” It’s an eyesore, but you just have the earthquake so, one cannot, I cannot, imagine what it used to be before. ![]() “What I saw at that time was poverty,” he recalls. Ultimately though, it was a sobering experience. A brilliant album under the name Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra emerged from “raggedy” rehearsals with ten percussionists trained in the Haitian Vodou drumming tradition, linking squarely with the African styles that Allen grew up with. Tony has recently returned from Port-au-Prince, where he was invited by the director of the French Institute as a kind of creative envoy to play a concert and strengthen the pulse of a country enfeebled by natural disaster. “I have four limbs, and four limbs have to do their separate things,” he recounts with pride. Allenko, as Fela called him, was the only one allowed to write his own parts. It put African music on the map like never before, and blew James Brown’s mind in the process. ![]() First playing jazz and highlife as Koola Lobitos, whose amazing recordings were reissued this year, Fela reincarnated the band as Afrika ‘70, mixing it all up to create the sound of afrobeat. When Allen became friends with the unpredictable, visionary bandleader Fela Kuti in the early sixties, the partnership lasted for 15 crazy years. His career has been constantly fired by sparking inspiration in a diverse series of collaborators including von Oswald, Damon Albarn, Ginger Baker, Doctor L, Theo Parrish, and, of course, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. I’m speaking to him between a show at Jazz Café as part of the dub techno collective Moritz von Oswald Trio and an afro-beat-meets-acid-jazz session at the world famous Ronnie Scott’s jazz bar with his friend Bukky Leo. ‘No guests’ is a policy Allen himself couldn’t be more opposed to. While his life has been devoted to music – Brian Eno called him “the greatest living drummer” – chaos and desperation have often cast their shadows, from thieving managers and creative disagreements, to military repression and a period of heroin addiction. Still, he seems like a sombre man, with weight on his mind. He soon loosens up, and sparks up a mild, pre-rolled joint in the café garden. Allen shakes his head sternly and covers his mug with a firm hand as the barista tries to offer him sugar. He’s monosyllabic – a little tetchy perhaps, having flown back and forth between the city and his home in Paris twice in the past couple of days. Taut and sinewy, I wouldn’t have put him a year over sixty. The small-framed 75-year-old Nigerian emerges dressed in crisp sportswear and we walk to a café in between Algerian grocers and Ethiopian cafés in London’s Finsbury Park. The receptionist refuses to let me into Tony Allen’s hotel room as a matter of policy: no guests.
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