Womadelaide: Angelique Kidjo comes out of the shadows

African superstar Angelique Kidjo has reclaimed Talking Heads’ classic 1980 album Remain In Light — and made it her own.

• Womadelaide: The 2019 line-up

Back in 1983, not many western audiences would have realised that the electronic rock of Talking Heads’ groundbreaking album Remain in Light borrowed heavily from the complex polyrhythms of African music, in particular those of Afrobeat master Fela Kuti.

But when young singer Angelique Kidjo, having recently fled from Benin to Paris, heard the band’s hit single Once in a Lifetime playing at a student party, she instantly recognised the sounds of her homeland.

“Three months after I arrived in France, I was tagging along, trying to make friends with students, and we ended up in the apartment of one of them who said … ‘You want free food?’

“I said, ‘Hell yeah, I’m coming’. They were playing cassettes — it was still the period of cassettes, with a bunch of different songs.

Womadelaide 2019. Angelique Kidjo. Picture: Danny Clinch

“When Once in a Lifetime came up, I was sitting there with my body but my spirit was back home in Benin … I didn’t know who it was, because the cassette didn’t have a cover.

“For the last decade, I hadn’t had access to any other music than the propaganda music of the Communist dictatorship.’’

Now, three decades later, Kidjo has reclaimed the iconic Talking Heads album, bringing it home to its African roots by re-recording Remain in Light in its entirety and rearranging the songs with traditional instrumentation and vocals, as well as her own signature sound.

As a struggling student, Kidjo didn’t have the resources to track down the whole Talking Heads album in the 1980s: “I needed money to pay my tuition, to eat, for my rent’’.

“But it stayed with me, somehow. Now I was in Europe, I wanted to listen to everything I hadn’t heard for the last 10 years — everything that walked by me. It took a long time.’’

Kidjo studied music at the CIM, Centre d’Informations Musicales, a reputable jazz school in Paris but didn’t share her theories about the influences of African music on Talking Heads’ recordings with her teachers or fellow students at the time.

She says they would have dismissed her opinions because she was a young African woman who wouldn’t, in their opinion, know anything about rock’n’roll.

Womadelaide 2019. Angelique Kidjo. Picture: Youri Lanquette

“They didn’t know anything about it — that’s the sad part about it. All they think about is the traditional music,’’ she now says.

“The history of Europe, and especially of France, is linked to Africa, but people don’t make any effort — they are in a bubble, and have arrogance. They don’t understand that it is because of my continent’s wealth that they are where they are.

“The culture of black people has been everywhere — because all of us, it doesn’t matter where we come from on this planet, if we call ourselves homo-sapiens, we are Africans.’’

In fact, Kidjo could not have been more correct in her musical observations. One of the out-takes from Talking Heads’ 1980 recording sessions for Remain in Light is titled Fela’s Riff, and was included as a bonus track on the album’s 2006 reissue.

Even though it would be many more years before she connected the dots, when Kidjo’s career finally broke internationally in the early 1990s, one of the first rock stars she met was Talking Heads’ frontman and principal songwriter David Byrne.

“When I came to America, and I released my first album Logozo with Island Records, I came to play in New York at SOB’s (world music venue Sounds Of Brazil). The first artist that came was David Byrne.’’

Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne on stage with Angelique Kidjo in 2017.

Kidjo recalls her record company publicist — who, until that point, “thought that, because I was African, she was doing me a favour’’ — burst into her dressing room, excited by the news that Byrne was coming.

“David Byrne at that time had long hair — I was looking at him, going ‘Is this guy real?’ — and he was just talking about the music from my part of the world.

“It was the first time somebody wasn’t asking me: Who? Benin what? I was like, Jesus, I like this guy already — I don’t even know what music he does.

“I started understanding that he was part of the Remain in Light album — but until then, I didn’t link it to the song that I listened to, because I never knew the name of the band.’’

In order to bring the deeply layered, polyrhythmic compositions of Remain in Light to life on tour back in 1980, the four-member Talking Heads had to expand to a 10-piece band, adding a percussionist, two backing singers, a guitarist, Funkadelic keyboard player Bernie Worrell and an additional bassist.

Cover of Talking Heads’ original 1980 album Remain In Light.

Kidjo says she took a long path to finally making her own adaptation of Remain in Light, which began about four years ago.

“It was a long discussion I was having with my management. Sometimes I would be in London humming … and they couldn’t figure out what it was because I was singing it wrong.

“They finally said ‘It sounds like Once in a Lifetime’ … then they played it for me and I said ‘Yeah! That’s the song!’

“They said the whole album is an iconic album (Remain in Light was selected for preservation by the US Library of Congress in 2017). I said really? I want to hear it.

“I sat down and started listening to it and, in that moment, it was a no-brainer: I’ve got to do this. It was profound.’’

Angelique Kidjo’s 2018 reinterpretation of the Remain in Light album

Still inspired by the experience of recording “celebratory material” for her 2014 album Eve, Kidjo took other songs and folkloric tales she had heard during that research and wove them into the fabric of the Remain in Light songs.

“It was right after the album Eve that I did with the women of Benin. At the centre of our music is this kind of call-and-response. That’s the type of thing that I heard in this album, also.

“So I went back to the recording that I did in Benin with the women, in different villages, and it was a spooky moment. You put one song next to the other, and for me, it was obvious that I needed to use the wisdom and the proverbs of my country.’’

Other vocal sections were written especially by Kidjo to complement the original Talking Heads songs.

“From the moment I started listening to Born under Punches, the image I had was corruption as a fire eating everything up,” she says.

“We didn’t invite the westerner to our continent but everything that happens to us, until today, is because of the greed of the rich countries.

Womadelaide 2019: Angelique Kidjo. Picture: Sofia and Mauro, supplied

“Today, look at what is going on. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, women are still being raped, people are still killing each other — for what? Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the richest on the planet — we need the copper to have our electric cars, we need the tungsten and the cobalt for the computer and the phone — and everyday children work in those places to get us what we need.’’

Later, when recording Cross-eyed and Painless with Fela Kuti’s original Africa ’70 band drummer Tony Allen, Kidjo effortlessly dropped in lyrics from Kuti’s classic song Lady. She brings a similar sense of feminist empowerment to her interpretation of The Great Curve.

“Mother Earth is feminine,’’ she says. “It’s kind of heartbreaking that we have allowed ourselves to believe that if we live and breathe money, we are going to be safe. Mother Earth knows no white, no black, no blue, no red, no rich and no poor.

“As with the dinosaurs, when Mother Earth says I’m sick of you, we’re all gone.’’

Where Talking Heads’ original version of Once in a Lifetime could be interpreted as a song about loss or missed opportunities, Kidjo transforms it into a vibrant celebration, about casting off shackles and grabbing life by the horns.

“I wanted to bring to the whole album an African beauty and resilience. We don’t have time to be dwelling on the philosophical about how do we live … we survive,’’ she says.

“We manage to really live and have fun and celebrate life.’’

Angelique Kidjo will perform Remain In Light as part of Womadelaide, Botanic Park, from March 8 to 11. Book at womadelaide.com.au