INTERVIEW : DANAKIL
Interview by : Julien Saint-Jours
Pictures by : Mathieu Large / DR
on Tuesday, December 29th 2009 - 31 155 views
Nine years after his debut, Danakil filled the Olympia in Paris last October. In the meantime there have been three albums (including a live one), and numerous tours. A good stretch of road covered in a short decade, which Balik (singer) and Das (sax) look back on with us.
Reggaefrance / You've been playing together for nine years. How do you look back on the road you've travelled?
Danakil / Balik: We really lived it day by day. Of course, when you look back nine years later, you see things differently from how you experienced them at the time. We still see it as an adventure among friends. We were at school together, we started out really for the music, to have a blast at rehearsals, and we've always seen it that way.
The seven or eight tours we've done in France, we thought of them in the same way, as the best way to spend the summer with friends playing music on the beach, without necessarily imagining at the start that all of it, put end to end, could lead us to a professional band project. We were lucky to see our dreams come true, when we didn't even dare tell ourselves that we could make music our life. The important milestone was having the album in the shops.
Das: From tour to tour the buzz simply grew, and it started to become real for us when we were able to release our albums. We struggled to exist for seven years before putting out the first album. After that, everything happened very fast: the second album, the various partnerships we were lucky enough to have... With our booker in particular, who got us into venues we had no access to before. And then there was the festival, then the live album that came out... Little by little, the buzz built, and today we are lucky to be able to fill venues all over France.
Your lyrics tackle themes as varied as French society, exclusion, Françafrique, North-South inequalities, life choices... With a collective of eight people, how does the writing work?
Balik: We know each other really well, we share the same values, we go on holiday together... For the music, we shut ourselves away for weeks on end in the provinces, so we have time to talk and discuss the themes that bring us together and move us. We discuss the music together, then I'm the one who writes the songs. Just as everyone writes their own musical parts at rehearsals, the idea is that I arrive with a lyric to work on, and we get together to pool everything. Sometimes the lyric changes and doesn't go on the music that was planned but on another one that ends up suiting it better. We also exchange views on the content of the lyrics.
Das: We've come across every scenario, we try everything. Sometimes it's the music that has been modified, sometimes it's the lyric that has changed; we really try to get the best result for us.
What are your musical influences?
Das: A huge number of vocal trios, the Mighty Diamonds, Israel Vibration, the big toasters, Third World, very foundation...
Balik: Don Carlos has always been one of my favourite singers. Steel Pulse also matters a lot to all of us, it's a vibe that suits us. After that, in the new school I love listening to Junior Kelly or Jah Mason. I also listen to a lot of hip hop... maybe even more! I have that influence, that taste: when I listen to music I need lyrics in French, and that's when I take refuge in hip hop, because I need music in French but I've never really found satisfaction in French reggae. I really liked Brahim but there aren't 50,000 others like him, so it's true that when I listen to music for my own pleasure I listen to Jamaican reggae, or English-language at any rate.
 Nous, on voit encore ça comme une aventure entre potes. 
What do you think of the current Jamaican music scene?
Das: It's funny you bring it up, because I dropped a post yesterday on the Reggaefrance forum to talk about that. For my part, there are two very different things going on in Jamaica at the moment: the new roots artists and the dancehall artists. In new roots there's loads of really good stuff going on, but personally the vocoder side annoys me to death. Then there's the Vybz Kartel side and company, which we buy into a lot less... In fact we don't listen to it at all! It's really not our thing, whether it's the themes they tackle, the view of women... In general all of that is very far from the spirit of the band.
Balik: Anyway, dancehall, in terms of rhythms, has never made us dream.
Das: But it's true that there are quite a few new roots artists who get everyone's approval, the big hits that came out lately on the new roots riddims are perfect for us... Perfect's latest tunes, for example, are heavy. We were lucky enough to do a tour with Rootz Underground two months ago. They're Jamaican, they play roots, that hadn't been seen for a long time and well, here we are, it's a new generation and what they do is terrific.
Even though you've already partly answered by saying it's not really your cup of tea, what do you think of the French reggae scene?
Das: There's still some good stuff that goes unnoticed, that nobody talks about, like us not so long ago. We do come across quite a few bands who deserve to be discovered, who sing in French, whose rhythms completely hold up.
Such as?
Balik: We have our mates, everyone we meet on the road. We often see Broussaï, Papa Style and Baldas, two one-man-band musician guys who are quite incredible and have a crazy talent!
Das: There's Moï Calamity who's delivering heavy stuff, Brahim who recently put out his new album, it's always spot on, he's backed by mates too, there's good stuff there!
In France, reggae seems locked in a straitjacket woven from green-yellow-red and “rasta is cool, rasta is good”.
Das: For the mainstream media it's certainly a big problem, enormous clichés get conveyed, like heavy smokers or slackers, but we don't call ourselves rastas!
Balik: I sincerely think you have to be honest with people, you shouldn't try to play a character... If you were born white in Paris in the 15th arrondissement, you feel “rasta” and it does you good (and I know dozens of them!), if it's a choice that brings you something positive, then great! It can come through in some people's sound, but personally I won't cast the first stone as long as the guys are sincere. We don't live it like that. I'm often asked about it in interviews, but I only mention God once in my lyrics, wondering what he thinks of what we do, if he exists at all. The main thing is to be yourself and not to dress up as something else. If you have convictions, express them whatever they are, but you shouldn't do it just to fit in with a movement, to be in tune with the times or to try to give yourself a style you won't be able to defend because it won't be you.
The image this gives of reggae is another problem... Let's not kid ourselves, there are loads of Jamaicans we see who are rastas in the proper sense, who proclaim it loudly, and having shared stages with them and seen them at work, they're guys like any others, they drink alcohol, they eat this or that, and in the end for them too this “green-yellow-red”, “Jah love” side is institutional! They can be adorable, brilliant, sincere guys, but in their culture and in the music as they've always made it they are hugely preachy, but in reality it's more to do with the music, with their name, with what they do and want to do than with personal convictions. So sometimes it goes beyond their real behaviour but nobody ever says so. I don't say this pejoratively, it's just that there's a sort of wooden language in reggae. I'm not generalising, some follow the rules to the letter and others don't, but in the end they all cry out the same message and that's what matters.
Das: It's true that the guys play on it, it's part of their image, it's something they cultivate. The media dwell on it enormously! A Jamaican in Paris in an interview, if the journalist isn't a reggae specialist, will almost always drop a reference to weed or his haircut, and so on. It's true that it's part of the clichés that circulate about reggae, but the same goes for rap or heavy metal, every style has its clichés in the mainstream media.
Your popularity is undeniable, you are currently one of the most accessible entry points to reggae for the general public; what do you say to those who consider you, let's say, an “access-reggae” band?
Balik: The people who say that are the same ones who, before we reached our audience and the Olympia, snubbed us because we sang in French. It's the first time anyone has told me that what we do is mainstream, and also the first time anyone has suggested that being mainstream could harm reggae. I've never considered us a mainstream band; success came little by little and we didn't really see the difference arrive, because people came ten more at a time, then ten more, and so on...
We're self-produced and we've never had anyone behind us, in terms of communication in particular... For example, you had never reviewed us on your site even though it's called Reggaefrance! (laughs) We did everything ourselves, nearly ten years handing out flyers on beaches, we did what was needed, so to those who reproach us I'd like to say that our audience came to us, we didn't force ourselves on them through the media. These are people who heard about us from a friend, a cousin or a colleague. Over ten years that adds up to a lot of people!
The whole thing was really built that way, our audience is made up of people close to us and we feel it at every concert, so we talk to them in that spirit, as if we knew each other a little. They follow us and come back; the first six rows are almost always the same people when we play several dates in a region. Having a mainstream reggae band should be seen rather positively since it brings people to the other artists too. As for people not liking it, I respect all opinions, but if you don't like it you don't listen and that's that. We don't need to be liked by everyone, that's not the case at all, we make our music, our lyrics, we have our vision and we put it forward, people buy into it or they don't.
Das: It happens, we meet guys who come to see us with scepticism when we share bills with Jamaicans, “purists”. At the end they come and tell us “Danakil, I couldn't stand you, it's not what I'd listen to every day on my stereo, but I loved the gig even though I didn't expect to”. We understand, we're like them, we listen to the same stuff, it's not as if we spent our day listening to French reggae! We know exactly what they hold against us, after that everyone makes their own way and no worries.
Is the next album on the way?
Balik: We've started working a bit on the next album but we still have time, it's planned for spring 2011. We plan to record part of it in Jamaica, depending on people's availability when we're there in early 2010. During the last tour we met lots of people we want to make music with, we'll see what comes up at the time, but there will be some good surprises!
|
|
© 1999-2026
RSS
