Joe Boyd on world music and related topics (mid-1980s)

There are two reasons for the current popularity of world music. One is to do with the relative poverty of the current popular-music scene.

British pop in particular used to be a very broad church in which people of all sorts of eccentric temperaments could find something to reflect their tastes and emotional needs – this is one of the reasons why Britain for so long had a very small jazz community, because the typical jazz personality who would, in the USA or France, lean at age seventeen towards being a jazz fan – don the turtleneck sweater or whatever – could fine plenty of eccentric things within pop to satisfy that need to be different, because pop was a very inventive, imaginative field here.

People who flocked to two-tone in the early 1980s or that kind of personality these days don't find that kind of thing in pop, and so they have to look farther afield.

And then one of the reasons for pop being imaginatively at a low ebb is that pop has always plundered working-class and Third World music, and now, to a certain degree, it's run out of easily accessible types of things to plunder, since it's gone through R&B, country and western, rockabilly, music hall – and it's got all it's going to get out of reggae – so there's a problem: it's stumped for what to plunder next.

Now, African, South American, Bulgarian, Japanese music, whatever, is not so easy to ingest and turn into something recognisable in Western pop. So, because it's hard to swallow, it's just sort of sitting there in one undigested lump, and therefore maintains itself in its original form longer – though we're certainly going to hear more influences from now on: Talking Heads will point the way towards how to use soukous or zouk; imaginative people like David Byrne and Joni Mitchell will point the way towards using this music in a way which is recognisably Western pop.

And then there's the fact that the world is a smaller place now. Communications are a lot faster; what was an isolated, obscure culture fifteen years ago, which no one could possibly think of going to – Bulgaria or Zimbabwe are examples – I mean, the whole idea of the Bhundu Boys getting on a plane and coming to live in a suburb of Glasgow and getting in a van and just going round the pubs trying to make it like any normal group used to do in Britain is something that would have been hard to imagine fifteen years ago.

What do you think about this 'purity' thing? For example, many people think that Salif Keïta's Soro is unacceptable; they prefer the original Ambassadeurs-type things.
I tend to be one of those people, but the question of what effect the interest has on the music itself is a very complex one, not susceptible to simple answers. It's condescending to say that any aspect of a culture should remain frozen in aspic for the tourists to enjoy.

You don't want that. It's certainly true, for example, that the greatness of the early traditional blues – Bukka White, Robert Johnson – lost any chance of developing with the rural electrification projects in Mississippi in the late 1920s, early 1930s, under Roosevelt, yet nobody would ever suggest that those things should never have taken place.

That's an extreme example, but you get shades of that. So that same principle can be applied in a lot of areas, but at the same time it can be said, taking a non-musical example, that we can't put economic freezes on countries because of some decadent middle-class idea of what a pristine beach looks like, or what an undeveloped valley looks like to accommodate our holiday villas.

Clearly, for the economic development of the area, things have to change. At the same time, I think it's also possible for developing economies to avoid the mistakes of elsewhere by having them reported to them, so that if the head of development in an African country says: 'Let's build the biggest dam in the world, because that's progress', someone from the development agency might well be justified in pointing out that it might be better to build a lot of small dams, that bigger's not necessarily better, that a lot of modern technology's a mixed blessing, etc.

The same applies to music; there is an eagerness among people from outside the mainstream of Western advanced consumer economies to buy up every DX7 that's not nailed down and transform their music. They're more eager in this than record producers from London are to transform their cultures and their music into something more 'modern'.

I certainly feel that I can play the role of someone who can caution them against leaping into the arms of change and modern technology in the way they play their music. I mean, you can see from looking at UK pop what's happened if you rely too much on electronics. So there are the ironies.

The Bhundu Boys are very interesting examples of this: there's general agreement among the community that built them up to what they became in the UK that their Warner Brothers record wasn't successful – it would have to be called a failure in terms of what it set out to do: leap them forward to the next stage of their popularity in the UK.

However, Andy Kershaw tells me, from his recent visit to Zimbabwe, that it's on Radio Zimbabwe twenty-four hours a day, that every group in Zimbabwe thinks it's the greatest thing that's ever happened, and they all want a record like it. And the Bhundu Boys themselves are delighted with the record for that reason.

They left Zimbabwe as a junior band, and now they've come back with a hi-tech record, and they're kings of the walk. And this is a very worrying thing: I mean, you can say to the Four Brothers, or to the Marxist Brothers or whatever, 'Slow down; it's not necessarily the answer to make a record like that, to turn your back on the way you've been working up till now.' Every culture has examples like that.

Take Bulgaria: the country's been very lucky, partly because of the musical talent they have there, but the ensembles you hear on the 4AD record are based on the kinds of ensembles you could hear as popular groups in socialist countries in the 1940s – the bigger the better – you took the traditional music of the villages and you multiplied it by ten, so that instead of groups of two or three women, or five or six women, you got thirty to forty women and you wrote arrangements of traditional dance tunes for orchestra.

In most cases, you would have to say that this development was disastrous for the music, and it was just that Bulgaria was fortunate in having a rich tradition and great harmonic ideas which were so unique, and in having very talented arrangers for these large ensembles. So you didn't get the Soviet Union thing of massed balalaikas and boring choral arrangements.

So the disenchantment you see among a lot of the young in Bulgaria about traditional music is due to the boring nature of these large ensembles, which are deadly and not exciting and don't reflect the intensity of the music. So many people there are groping towards ways of using the traditional music in more modern musical form.

Is the fact that these small traditional groups are now so popular here affecting their reception in Bulgaria itself, à la the Bhundu Boys?
Yes, but slightly differently. When I first went out there, there was a feeling that I was maybe a bit eccentric. The record had been out for ten years or so in France and Switzerland and had attracted the attention of a small group there, and now it was out in England, and another small group of people liked it, but nobody really knew how keen they were and when I went to the Bulgarian cultural attaché before my first trip to find out about the festival I wanted to attend, he didn't even know the 4AD record was out.

In the two years since then, things have changed a lot due to their finding out about the true level of interest here. For instance, when the musicians came here last year on tour last summer, they were happy to come to England, but then they'd been to places before – Amsterdam, Copenhagen – but they'd been either to Balkan tourist promotions, where you get a bunch of drunken travel agents watching Balkan folklore in a hotel in Amsterdam, or they'd been to highly specialised folk festivals, where they have national ensembles from all over eastern Europe, and they'd won prizes and so on, but that atmosphere was very different from anything they encountered on this trip, where they went to the Purcell Room, the WOMAD Festival, the Edinburgh Festival and ultimately the Hackney Empire.

They'd never really experienced anything like that before in terms of the sort of relationship that was established with the audience, the youth of the audience, the emphatic enthusiasm, the dead silence during the singing – I could be wrong, but I think it was a new experience for them.

When they went back and reported on the trip, and I was sending out the press that followed, people finally said, 'Well, this really is something.' When I went back to Bulgaria myself, the press there wanted to know about me and wrote it up: 'Pink Floyd producer Joe Boyd …' – just because I'd produced one Pink Floyd single, 'Arnold Layne' – and so the result has been that people who originally dismissed these styles are now looking on these musicians, most of whom are in their fifties, in a new light, and trying to help them get engagements, and generally raising the level of their respect. So that's interesting.

But to get back: one of the places where this issue is very finely balanced, and where the question is most vivid: there was a musician I really wanted to record, because I'd heard him, but I ended up with his backing group alone, playing jazz-rock over Bulgarian rhythms.

It was depressing, because the rhythm section were academics and the horn charts were early-1970s Blood Sweat and Tears, but I eventually found the right guy and another. They're both big jazz fans, but like to improvise with wedding-party bands, but that's just what he does to make money. For him, the serious stuff is his jazz trio, where he plays normal Western rhythms, like 1960s-style West Coast jazz.

He was initially very resistant to the idea of touring Europe with a band playing Bulgarian rhythms and in the three months before I went back, he's come round and he's now more interested.

That's the catch that applies also to West African music: Youssou N'Dour and Salif Keïta approach their music, in the whole way they sing – their melodic and harmonic sense will always be unique, but when you get too much electronics into the rhythm track, you turn off the voice and you turn off the guitar, so you end up with a rhythm track that could be from anywhere, rock-funk, progressive, whatever.

That's a shame, and I think that what Western audiences are looking for from this music is not just an overlay on an international rhythm track, but genuinely different rhythms. That was the strength of Bob Marley: his compromises were more melodic, more lyrical; he constructed songs almost like rock songs, the lyrics were better than most reggae and the structures of his songs owed allegiance to what Western rock fans expected: a chorus, a verse, interesting lyrics, but the rhythm section was pure Jamaica.

And that's the biggest danger – and Western producers have a role to play in this, which may be perceived as condescending, but it's valuable, and it's to say, 'Hey, hang on, wait a minute, don't lose your strength. You're not offering just the melodies here, a way of singing, but a unique approach also to the bottom end of the thing.

Boy George is reportedly interested in using Najma Akhtar as a background singer on his next LP. Do you think this could happen to Yanka Rupkina, and what would you think? Would she be tempted?
Yes. Anything which is challenging and lucrative would be of great interest, but who's to say it would be a bad thing? It might result in Najma Akhtar's own records tripling in sales because of the publicity. I'm not going to say it's wrong; I'm not a purist.

Do you think world music's just a craze, or has it bitten deep into people?
There will always be faddish aspects to it. Inevitably it will be a cycle. Someone young, white and handsome will incorporate African or salsa or flamenco or Indian – a bhangra beat white man, whatever – he'll pick up the momentum and turn it into a gold or platimun record –

A sort of 'Wimoweh', you mean?
Oh God, I hope a bit better than that! It didn't touch Africa. But there's a chance now for it to work. I approve of the tag 'world music', because it improves the image of folk. But you're not talking about reggae, now, by that tag; the breadth of what's out there, in the whole world, is so rich that it can never be fully mined. It's popular, basically, because there's so much good stuff.

In the 1960s, I was interested, and I would simply have put these things in my own collection and listened to them in my own time; now I can say it'll sell 2,000 and put it out, establishing a beach-head in my catalogue. I'm delighted.

Yes, things have changed. I can now, in the present more 'tolerant' climate, come out as an Incredible String Band fan. I have all their albums from way back.

Ah, yes! They've missed out on all the nostalgia. An interesting footnote to all this: I was having dinner with the head of ethnic music on Bulgarian radio recently, in Sofia, and she was pulling out all sorts of things, but she suddenly said, 'I've got one record which I play only for pleasure. I don't know if you know it; it's one of my favourites: 5,000 Spirits?' So I pointed out my name on the back and she was absolutely stunned.

The same happened with a Cuban songwriter, Sylvio Rodríguez: he said he'd begun his career as a songwriter after hearing "Nightfall" – and he sang it in the middle of this restaurant! Also, in Russia, some friends of mine met Boris Grebenschikov and his favourite group was the Incredible String Band!

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