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After soaking up an ample dose of Tony Allen’s “Lagos No
Shaking” album the night before, and particularly entangled in its rhythmic and
scatty vocals provided by Yinka Davies on the call and response track, “Don’t
Morose Your Face”, I was overly eager to meet the renowned co-inventor of the
Afrobeat sound and possibly one of the greatest drummers in the world.

As I knock at his hotel room door somewhere in the back streets
of Opebi, I am greeted by a lean looking Allen, dressed in a snug jersey
revealing toned arms. Also wearing a pair of blue jeans, a neck chain and
single earring, it’s difficult to miss his two-toned grey and black hair as he
bears a semblance to a yuppie granddad. He welcomes me to join him in some gin.

Tony Allen has been composing music for almost 50 years. It
seemed his career had really started peaking at the turn of the 2000s with his
new hybrid sound, fusing Afro-beat with Dub, electronica and funk. I was keen
to know how he felt about being described by former Roxy Music keyboard player
Brian Eno as the greatest drummer in the world.

“It feels great and cool. It means after all these years, there
was somebody who was there monitoring what you had been doing from day one till
now. I never thought somebody would come up with such an accolade. This means
that those kinds of people were even listening to your music in the first
place. The funny thing is that this is a guy that doesn’t like drummers at all.
He hadn’t seen anybody play the drums the way he would like.” Allen has become
one of Europe’s most in-demand collaborators, working with musicians across
genres, from world music supremos Susheela Rahman, and Zap Mama, to the
experimental artists like Charlotte Gainsbourg and Air.

On Damon Albarn

It was his collaboration with Damon Albarn (lead singer of the
indie-rock band Blur and creator of the 3-D band Gorrilaz) to create the band
“The Good, The Bad, and The Queen” that would earn Allen his place amongst the
drumming immortals.

“Damon happens to be my friend, you know, starting from when he
sang about me on his song “Music Is My Radar”, then I invited him to come and
sing a song on my own album “Home Cooking” and he did. Then we said sometime,
we should do something together, and we did.

“I brought him to Lagos for the first time to audition some
musicians, then we went back to London. We came back with all the equipment for
a studio, and we were at the Aphrodisiac set up for two weeks. We recorded with
a bunch of Nigerian musicians.” I asked what Damon’s impression of Nigeria was.
“First of all, his father told me, ‘take Damon to Lagos’ – because he was going
to places like Mali and Senegal. So I told him, ‘why not put your feet in the
place that you colonised?’ So he enjoyed it and he knows what he left behind.”

On return to London, the music they recorded became too grand
for them both, as they were ill-prepared for the task of shuffling all the
Nigerian musicians on the record for promotional tours around Europe.
Consequently, the music was relegated to a vault. Happily, Damon and Tony
started composing music again; and the “The Good, The Bad, and The Queen” was
born. I asked Allen what it was like creatively shifting from his roots in
Afrobeat to Indie Rock. He replied, “I’m a drummer that created my own way of
playing. I started off playing different styles of music. Afrobeat came much
later and took over and I have created my own way of manoeuvring around music.”

On new Nigerian music

Tony Allen is not enthused when it comes to the topic of the
current crop of musical talent in Nigeria. As I pick his thoughts on the
critique that Nigerian music has become disposable, he retorts, “Is it not the
truth? It’s the truth. For instance, look at what we are doing here now, this
youth of today. It wasn’t like that at our own time, you know. You were
supposed to learn how to play something. Not everybody wants to be a singer or
be miming and what have you. Miming is something of today.

“That is why you don’t see musicians. You see people going
around you but you don’t see the musicians, you don’t see where the music is
coming from. These are the things that make us not have any stance anywhere
because we don’t have anything to give. Why can’t they start learning something
if they want to stay in the music world? We are musicians. I have been playing
music for the past 50 years and it’s what I do.

He becomes even more fired up when our conversation delves into
the need to preserve our musical heritage. Currently, Peter Gabriel’s Real
World record label, DJ Miles Claret’s Soundway Records and Wrasse Records have
gained a reputation as the Holy Grail of World Music mainly of African
disposition. So when I ask why it is that a European is responsible for
preserving our culture, Allen gestures with his palms faced and says, “I have
asked this same question to people too. It is our mentality; what we have, we
don’t cherish it. It’s useless. It is made in Africa. We don’t cherish anything
that we have. To those ones that cherish it, they are making good use of it.
Tomorrow now, you will see that when everything disappears here completely,
when you are looking for archives, you have to go to Europe to look for it. I
think something is wrong and sometimes, I think it’s from the top.” He later
tells me that the French Cultural Centre is partly responsible for grooming a
lot of Nigerian artists, which is the responsibility of our own cultural
ministry.

On Fela Kuti

As we waltz down nostalgic pathways in our conversation, I ask
about the name that has become a prefix to his own career: Fela Kuti, with whom
he recorded over 30 albums. “Fela was like a brother to me. He is a guy that I
could never see a second of him. When I said I wanted to be the best drummer,
which I didn’t know how I would achieve that, but I said it, I started working
towards it until I met Fela. When I met him, I needed a challenge and he was
the only person that could give me that challenge. I will never be tired of
being referred to as Fela’s drummer; there is always a trace.”

Why I left

Allen feels saddened about the fact that he had to leave Nigeria
to gain recognition; and the Lagos he once knew, he believes, is almost
obsolete. “The music industry here has gone down, and recording studios folded
up. Where are the artists to play live? Nightlife has disappeared. Everybody is
scared of robberies and all the dangerous stories. Musicians arrive in the club
but they play to the empty house. So there was no point and that was why I
left.”

Despite his feeling of disenchantment, Allen has always been in
synchronised harmony with the tool of his trade: the drums. “It’s my passion,
it’s my baby, the drums are part of me. I don’t want to think of anything else.
It’s me physically and spiritually working on the drums. The greatest musical
experience is just to catch me unawares. Just let me be there.”

This August, Tony Allen will turn 70 years old and he tells me that despite
his accolades and achievements, he is only just starting. “I have done two
albums with Nigerians and everything is over there.” And in his grumpy granddad
reprimanding tone, he says, “All I want to do is just expose real Nigerian
musicians to the world, otherwise if they carry on doing their R’n’B, it will
stay here.”