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Mali, it was four in the morning and every- one was sitting round a camp fire and singing songs as the sun was coming up.” Suddenly, in the wilds of the West African bush, Emmerson felt at home. The son of free-thinking parents – his mother a teacher from a Russian Jewish family who came to this country via Shanghai, his father (who went to live off-grid in a croft in Scotland) an architect from a family of Sunderland dock workers – had given their youngest his much-loved experience of Forest School Camps. Singing the English folk song book around the camp-fire was at the heart of it.
“And then,” says Emmerson, back in
North Senegal, “Baaba Maal turns up really late and does this set and then just goes off. So we drive all the way back. The next morning we went to his house and the first thing you do is eat and you eat with your right hand – they were sussing us out. Then his son, who’s the same age as my son Ted, he was three, came up and sat down and Kauding started playing the kora and Baaba Maal sang a song to his son and I said ‘This is amazing, this is what we want to record, we should have the recording equipment here.’ And he said ‘Ah, I thought you wanted to make a disco record.’ Because the French guy wanted to make a European disco record.”
“I said: ‘No, No!’” “He said ‘But you’re a DJ…’”
“And so we spent hours waiting for peo- ple to turn up, for power cuts to end and one night Baaba Maal turns up at two o’clock in the morning and performs Daande Lenol,
completely unplanned. He was singing it in the control room and I immediately got him out and set him up in the studio, forget the band.” And that was when Emmerson had his epiphany. He saw not just a similarity between African and Celtic music, but felt the deeper function of music and musicians in society and the connection of music with the land. Baaba Maal gave him a piece of advice. “You have to look under your own feet, you don’t have to be African to look at the earth beneath your feet.”
recording in the Strong Room Studios where he was moved by the strange swirling symbols of Jamie Reid’s art that surrounded him. Contacting Reid he said “Your studio’s great – here’s some music I recorded there.” Reid replied enclosing some new artwork saying “This is for the album you’re going to make”, though Emmerson had only just got the concept of Afro Celt Sound System in place. But cru- cially, Reid suggested Emmerson get in touch with Philip Carr-Gomm, leader of the Order Of Bards, Ovates And Druids.
R
In Senegal, Emmerson had learned about the griot tradition and it’s impossible to overstate the importance of the tradi- tional roles of the griot in the ethos of his Afro Celt Sound System. He says: “I realised that Western musicians don’t get a proper training in what it means to be a musician, like the griots,” or, he says “the Sikh tradi-
eturning to England, Emmerson completely re-assessed himself as a musician. Whilst he was questioning his life and why he was making music, he was
tion where you are told that you have a spiritual path as a musician.” Through Philip Carr-Gomm he found that there is a Western bardic tradition, “where you’re trained in the spoken word and with a function in society that resonates with that of the griot.”
This led him to explore druidry. Despite a superficial similarity in dress as far as white robes are concerned, druids have no connection whatsoever with the Ku Klux Klan. It is not a dark or murderous sect, nor is it given to arcane practices. Neither is it a religion in the organised sense of the word: it does not seek to control or subjugate its adherents. Rather it’s a philosophy that encourages individual exploration of a per- sonal spiritual path that considers humani- ty’s place in the cosmos, inviting contempla- tion on man’s interconnection with nature and one another. It recognises mankind as innately creative and encourages connec- tion with nature and to a source of pro- found wisdom as a means of inspiring and realising that creativity.
“The muse concept,” says Emmerson (which Robert Graves elucidates in The White Goddess) “is something I feel is a very useful metaphor for what you go through as a musician. You start at the dark moon – a period where all is dark, you’re staring at a blank piece of paper questioning: ‘What am I going to do? Have I got the inspiration, the power any more?’ Where’s the mojo? basically. Then the new moon (Graves’ vir- gin goddess) is the spark of creativity. The full moon is the pregnant goddess, the ful- filment of creativity, and then we’re back to dark moon and the cycle starts again.”
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