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Sample Track 1:
"Robert Plant & Justin Adams - Win My Train Fare Back Home" from Festival in the Desert
Sample Track 2:
"Takamba Super Onze - Super 11" from Festival in the Desert
Sample Track 3:
"Ali Farka Toure - Karaw" from Festival in the Desert
Sample Track 4:
"Oumou Sangare - Wayena" from Festival in the Desert
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Festival in the Desert
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A Plant In The Desert

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Afropop Worldwide The following article is brought to you courtesy of Afropop Worldwide News Learn more about Afropop and read the remainder of this piece at www.Afropop.org

Banning Eyre and Sean Barlow caught up with Robert Plant one morning recently at the Festival in the Desert in Essakane, Mali as he was about to go meet with his guitarist Justin Adams about the songs they were putting together to perform at the Festival. Having visited Morocco with former Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page some 30 years ago, Plant was already familiar with North African music and culture.

BE: Did you pretty much hear about this festival and decide, I'm going to go right away?

RP: Justin Adams was invited because he had played at the first Festival (of the Desert), the year before last, and he mentioned it a year ago when we were working on our last record together. And I said, "If it's on then I'm coming."

Sean Barlow: What are your impressions so far about the Festival in the Desert?

RP: The organization is phenomenal, the location is stupendous, but in real terms, where are we? But my impressions are that there is a lot gasoline being used here and this is an incredibly poor country. I think the political means to an end must far outweigh any of our musical flirtations. There is stuff going on here that we are not privy to. There are bonds and friendships being made, alliances of some kind or another, and the music is, for some of the intentions, it's probably just a soundtrack. So I don't know the full picture of what this is all about. I'm a different kind of ambassador to the ones in the next air-conditioned tents.

BE: Were you ever tempted at the time when you were discovered that music in Morocco to bring your vast audience along?

RP: With Led Zeppelin, from the beginning to the end, we touched on the music of Morocco and India. And being English, I was surrounded by people of India and Pakistan from the beginning of time. So we were very aware of that and Jimmy Page's work and relationship with George Harrison from the Beatles and our links through Ravi Shankar with musicians in Bombay, we recorded some amazing stuff there in '71, it was always there in our hearts--"Kashmir" and songs that came out of the ether. We weren't following in anybody else's footsteps. We were just playing the way we felt.

But to take an American or English audience into this, it's just… It has to have its own feet and its own legs. You also have to be careful that it doesn't just become a coffee table moment in Western culture because it's all very well listening to Tinariwen and saying this is amazing stuff. The trouble is, with the coarseness and the cynicism of the world which we arrived from, that it is just another book on the table. It's another disc to play to replace Mark Knopfler and Sting, but yet it has nothing to do with that at all.

But that's the way it goes, I guess. Robert Johnson, that packaged CBS multi-CD, 40 years after he was murdered, got a gold disc. And that's not so bad. I mean, music is music and it should be spread around. We can't covet this. Everybody should be aware of this. But taking it to a Led Zeppelin audience in 1975, that was quite a painful place to be.

BE: You said you used to play tapes of that stuff before the shows. What was the audience reaction to that?

People used to hold there ears and run away and go buy another beer. But it's a hard thing to get into even if you're not a singer. I mean even as a singer I realize how restricted my capabilities are. I know how limited what I do is, and how it works, or did work, in one genre but across another it's real tough.

BE: The world has changed too in terms of that audience you're talking about, in terms of their openness. They have had such much exposure now and there is this growing fringe of people that do understand the difference between all these things.

RP: I think there is also a political, and a civil, and a humane link between all people. And I think the more that the regimes in the west get it wrong, the more there is an empathy and a sympathy and a sort of reaching out from a predominantly hollow western society based on certain ideals. Those times, people do look, like in the 60's people moved towards Ravi Shankar and the whole Indian thing. People were looking for something more tangible and less cynical. So I think there is a little avenue for this music to open up in a natural way.

Transcribed by Christina Zanfagna for www.afropop.org

 12/01/03 >> go there
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