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you get that taste you have when you hear a great album. You think ‘Is that all? How come it’s over? I want more!’ And you’re forced to go back and listen to it again. Then you hear things you missed the first time. It’s like an addiction, you’re not satisfied, but you are satisfied. So many senses in your mind wake up. It baffles me because, if you ask me how it came about, I cannot tell you, it just happened. Which proves that composers are something spiri- tual, we’re a medium for higher forces to express things that we cannot touch or feel.”
Femi’s voice has never sounded stronger. “I thought more about my vocals this time. With previous albums I let the problems I was singing about affect me more when I was writing and record- ing the songs. Whereas this time I had more control over my thoughts and actions. This has a great deal to do with Sodi, who saw my frustration when I was coming into the studio and tried to make me relax. He said ‘Look, you need to focus on the album.’ I think after ten years he knows how to get me to relax in the stu- dio. So the first day might be very problematic and he’ll say ‘OK, go home, sleep.’ I come back fresh and he says ‘Oh yes, this is the Femi we want to hear.’ So I’m relaxed, but still not losing the intensity of what I have to say. Probably this has to do with grow- ing up as well. My maturity, my age, all these years of experience of touring. I think it has to do with so many things.”
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Although the songs are shorter and more disciplined than is the Afroberat norm, in many ways this is the straightest Afrobeat album he’s ever done. The ultimate statement which he can now move on from. “Yes, I didn’t realise that was happening and by the end of the project, it was taking everything out of me: my mind, physically… and I was like ‘OK, that’s enough, leave my life alone. Now I need something else.”
emi and his band have regular gigs at his Lagos club, The Shrine. “We play three hours, two times a week: every Thursday and Sunday. The Thursdays are more like a party, a rehearsal, when I drill the band to play for the Sunday, which is more like a concert, more intense. On
Thursday I try new stuff and we’ll probably play a number two times, to make sure they understand where I’m coming from, so we can get it right for the concert on Sunday.”
The Shrine is more than a music venue. “It’s a social club. It was built in honour of my father and I thought we should make it more important, make it for Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Mandela… every great person that has fought for humanity. It’s a shrine, where we use music as a force like a prayer to connect spiritually. I want people to look at it in the same way that the Christians look at a church or the Muslims at a mosque. But using music.”
I wondered what Femi made of the current Nigerian music scene. Is anyone else playing proper-job Afrobeat? “I think they all run away from it because it’s complicated. You have to think of a good horn melody, deep lyrics. What people are doing is really more for dance. They’ll just say ‘I want to get drunk today, I want to get drunk today. Today I want to get drunk!’ and that can be the only phrase of the song.”
Femi believes that critics and Afrobeat anoraks have scared
off the younger generation. “These fanatics of Afrobeat who go ‘this is not like what Fela, the founding father of Afrobeat did’, which discourages a lot of the young people from delving there. They even gave me a problem at the beginning: ‘You have to dress like your father, you have to look like your father. You’re not really Afrobeat. You have to dance like him.’ So those people always give you hell!”
It can’t be easy following in the footsteps of such a famous dad, but Femi appears to have come to terms with the legacy. “I soon realised that I’d never be my father and that made me quick- ly identify who I was. People didn’t like me at the beginning, because they wanted me to be my father. His fan-base wanted somebody to take over from him. It took them another decade to understand that ‘OK, he’s different, but we like what he’s doing.’ Europe appreciated me before Nigeria.”
Femi isn’t surprised by the political unrest of late in Nigeria.
“It’s expected because the poverty levels are so bad. It’s very fright- ening now and I feel it’s going to turn into a state of anarchy soon. All the signs are there. There are too many people that have had enough and are ready to do anything. We need a complete over- haul, an eradication of poverty. But I think it’s too late. I think the corruption is too far gone. And much as I wake up every day and pray for there to be hope, I must go to my album’s title, there’s just No Place For My Dream.”
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