All aboard the Africa Express!

[John Ashworth]

All aboard the Africa Express!

A collaboration of African and western musicians, Africa Express is now headlining festivals and planning a huge train tour of the UK this year.

Caspar Llewellyn Smith
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 10 May 2012 20.30 BST

'It's always felt like a journey on an African train," says Baaba Maal of his involvement with the organisation known as Africa Express. "You set off without any sense of expectation whatsoever," he continues, speaking down a crackly line en route to a gig of his own in Mauritania, "but along the way you meet some amazing people."

The Senegalese singer has long been one of African music's superstars, and in a career stretching back to the late 80s (he is now 58), he has worked with a host of musicians from the rest of the world. But the Africa Express project especially seems to have galvanised him, so much so that this autumn, he is prepared to spend a week on board a real train, travelling across the UK, in the company of several dozen acts.

Damon Albarn, who helped found the enterprise, says: "It's just going to be so much fun – we'll be rehearsing on the train and playing all over the country. It's crazy, but you have to try something different."

(And he adds, his head still in his current project, Dr Dee, "it should be a bit like a Mummers play.")

Before then, the Africa Express Soundsystem – an offshoot band – headline the Great Escape festival in Brighton this Saturday, further evidence that what started as a well-meaning pipedream has now, over the course of more than five years, developed serious momentum. The gig features several emerging African stars such as Spoek Mathambo – the South African originator of what he describes as "township tech" – and Ghanaian rapper M3nsa, alongside the likes of Noisettes vocalist Shingai Shoniwa, who is British but of Zimbabwean descent. The train metaphor is re-employed by M3nsa: "It feels like we're picking up super-talented artists at every stop – each bringing something special for a party going on in the last caboose!"

The origins of Africa Express lie in a trip Albarn made to Mali in 2002 and his subsequent dismay at the glaring absence of African acts at the Live 8 concerts in July 2005 (Hyde Park saw Youssou N'Dour singing his part on 7 Seconds when Dido covered the old Neneh Cherry hit, but that was it). In the aftermath, the then Blur frontman and a small group of promoters, managers and likeminded individuals considered how to foster a new dialogue between some of western pop's more open-eared acts and their counterparts in Africa.

First came another trip to Bamako in Mali, bringing Fatboy Slim, Martha Wainwright, Jamie T and Martina Topley Bird to jam with the likes of the blind duo Amadou and Mariam and the ngoni player Bassekou Kouyate. Following a session at the house of the great singer Salif Keita, the journalist Ian Birrell, another founder of the enterprise, remembers Fatboy saying: "That was like the greatest ever edition of Later ... with Jools."

Suitably inspired, a pub gig in Brixton followed, with Albarn's new band the Good, the Bad and the Queen making their debut alongside Amadou and Mariam. Then came an epic gig at Glastonbury in 2007, an unannounced five-hour spectacular on the Park Stage, involving Baaba Maal and Somalian rapper K'Naan alongside the Specials' Terry Hall, Billy Bragg, Hard-Fi and many more. Further shows followed, including a mind-boggling nine-hour marathon involving 134 artists in Liverpool, a gig that opened the Electric Proms in London, a gig in front of 25,000 people in central Paris and another on a beach in northern Spain with an audience twice that size. Typical of these Africa Express gigs was one performance at that last show when Algerian star Rachid Taha was joined on stage for a cover of the Clash's Rock the Casbah by Mick Jones – ex of the Clash – and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, among others.