IT’S fascinating watching Angélique Kidjo on television or, more likely, on Youtube. I’ve seen her on talk shows where she sings with joy and dances around a studio but when she talks, she weighs up every word, her brow furrowed as she denounces the “racist, sexist” Donald Trump or when she speaks of her own experience of racism in France or when she talks about the role of women in the world.
Does she think women have a special role in the world that is being subjugated for thousands of years?
“Absolutely!” she declares. “We are the ones that educated boys and girls. My mom is an example. She told my brothers: 'You want to eat in this house, you work for it. It's not written anywhere that a woman should be a man's slave. If it takes two to have a kid, it takes two to have responsibility. If you don't go to the market and look at how I go and buy stuff, if you don't learn how to cook, the devil will come after you!'
“My feminism that way started. If you treat someone fairly you'll be treated back fairly. If you treat a woman badly in the home, the kids will grow up thinking women have no backbone – they do.
“We are the ones that carry your baby so from day one, the woman is the one to do everything and men think that that gives them power to go around bragging about their own masculinity. My father used to say that machismo is the fear of women."
She adds: “When you lay a hand on a women it's showing your cowardice."
The musical and intellectual sides of the Benin-born singer and Unicef ambassador can be traced back to her upbringing in Cotonou, the largest city and economic centre of Benin.
“My father's village was Ouidah but I have many villages because my mom comes from two different places, so I'd go from one place to the other,” she recalls.
Angélique’s father was a musician and photographer while her mother ran a theatre/dance company so there was always music of all kinds in the house.
“The interesting thing I'm realising as an adult today it the fact that my parents never said to me, 'You can't listen to this’, she recalls.
“In the morning I can listen to traditional music and Bach will come after, followed by The Beatles. Any kind of music that was there was the youth of my brother because we have a huge gap of at least a decade. I was living his childhood and he was living mine.”
Being one of nine (very talented) children, the young Angélique joined her siblings in the Kidjo Brothers band and became one of Benin’s few prominent female singers, something that not everyone welcomed.
“People used to look down on female singers as if they were all prostitutes,” she recalls.
Still, Angélique was well capable of taking the sticks and stones and she eventually fronted her own band and had hit albums before, when she was 23 years old in 1983, she moved to Paris and ended up more successful on the international scene than she was at home.
With such an eclectic taste in music growing up, it’s no wonder that Angélique was able to blend all those different influences, from the Beninese vocal style called zinli and voodoo-influenced folk music to dance music, funk, reggae and jazz.
Her breakthrough album was Logozo which has been voted one of the best dance albums ever.
However, her latest is perhaps surprising, her own track-by-track take on the Talking Heads album, Remain In Light. Why so?
“When I got to Paris in 1983, it was a real melting pot and I listened to all kinds of music to help me fit in but people would say to me, for example ‘that’s not African music, that’s rock and roll’ because Africans weren’t sophisticated enough to play rock and roll. But to me, it was all African music.
“In 1992, I heard Remain In Light for the first time. After Logozo, I was on tour in America and one evening I was introduced to David Byrne, but I wasn’t aware that he had written Remain In Light,” she laughs. (Byrne was influenced by Nigerian musician Fela Kuti when making the album).
“We talked a lot about music so I went back to listen to the album and then I decided to record my own 'African' version of it.”
Angélique’s Remain In Light is a real humdinger, a vibrant, quirky amalgam of her strong, low voice, a superlative brassy backing band and of course, David Byrne’s lyrics. A must-listen.
:: Angélique Kidjo is playing at the Grand Opera House on Monday October 29 at 7.30pm as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival.
