Transglobal Underground's Hamid Mantu talks to eGigs

Combining percussive-heavy Asian, Afro, and Arabic flavours with Gypsy rhythms, Dancehall, Dub, Acid House, Breakbeat, Drum 'n' Bass and more, the London based collective Transglobal Underground are to play Dingwalls, Camden on Thursday 9th April. The live date with support from Dreadzone (Soundsystem), and The Hanging Ropes is to launch their new album 'Run Devils and Demons' - a best of collection of their global music with tracks from the last two decades.

eGigs got a chance to speak to founder Hamid Mantu about the live gig, festivals, the new album, and more.

Are you looking forward to the gig on the 9th April at Dingwalls?
We haven't played that often, we did one show in London at the end of January which was at Le Vagabond Bogaloo club nights which Nelson Dilation and Rory run. It's this sort of gypsy punk, kind of Eastern European night once a month at Bardens Boudoir in London, and they put on a special event and they asked us to play at it. Initially we thought it wasn't the most suitable of venues, it's a great music venue, but we thought it wouldn't be able to accommodate all of us and our equipment on stage. But it turned out to be really good.

It's nice to come back and do London and do a good one, and we haven't had anything since. So really we're just getting ready, and in fact before the London show at Dingwalls, we have one show in Spain, at the beginning of April.

Have you been able to rehearse much?
Well, we do rehearse but various members turn up at different times, it's a bit difficult. One lives in Paris, one lives in Denmark at the moment, and another, our singer Tuup, is busy storytelling, he does that at museums and schools. He kind of has a full time job, and our dhol player has a full time job as well, so we have to rehearse in the evenings which makes it much more expensive. So it's difficult to get rehearsals together, but we try to every now and then. At the moment we're putting some new, well 'new' old tracks together for this compilation.

That's Run Devils and Demons...
Yes, that's right, we're quite excited about that because although they're old tracks going back to the first album in '91-'92 we haven't really ever played them live before. It gives an excuse to not get bored by playing all the stuff we've played for the last two years.

Are the live tracks going to be re-workings?
Some of them are slight re-workings because there's a different line-up. The mere nature of having totally different people in the group, it's going to have to change. In fact in the case of one song 'Body Machine' which is on 'Rejoice Rejoice' we're going to have to tune that to the correct tuning on the sitar, because originally it wasn't originally played on the sitar it was sung. We're adapting things as we go really, and we have to see what works and what doesn't.

Can you remember how Transglobal Underground got together?
Oh, it was about last century sometime. We started in about '91 just through people, it wasn't a live group at that time. It wasn't a live group for about two years, we just kind of disappeared into the studio and recorded our first album.

Then we did a few raves up in Scotland that was our first foray into live performance. If you can imagine three people in masks and a guitar, and some percussion, and a bellydancer, and a tablah player. It was a bit odd, it wasn't odd for us but it was odd for the people in these clubs. We'd go and do two or three an evening. It was around the time the rave scene was still big, and somehow or other we managed to find ourselves on this circuit, only for three days or so. Because we found out it wasn't really for us, but it was a good learning experience.

I remember seeing you at the old Megadog raves, so you must have decided to continue in that scene.
Yeah, I suppose, but that was a bit more of a thought out live performance, where as at the point where we first did these raves, we didn't know what to do. So we'd just go on stage put a backing track on and try and do something a bit different over the top of them. So, it wasn't really like a full blown live experience. Later on we had Natacha (Atlas) singing and we had Neil Sparkes, and we bought some proper equipment and we went out and did it for real. The MegaDog were really good at that time.

They were they should bring those back again...
Yeah, I haven't heard from any of those involved in that set up for a long, long time.

I was trying to find the first track I had of yours before this interview, I think it was on a 'Feed Your Head' cassette.
I do remember that, I've got that somewhere. That was a compilation wasn't it? Banco De Gaia is still doing what he does down in Devon. Actually we heard from him the other day. Everyone is kind of returning to this little cottage industry where we do everything ourselves, where we record, we produce, we manufacture, it seems to be the only way these days.

Were you doing that back in the day then?
We weren't doing that back then because we had Nation Records, then BMG, then Sony. There was always a few bigger labels where we'd get tour support for example, and do tours and we'd get money spent on things. Artists coming up these days don't have a hope in hell unless they get really lucky. But this time we are the record company and we have complete control about what we do, and what we release, and how we release it, and when we release it. The amount of artists, musicians, and that that ask me for advice, and it all comes back to doing it yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you. That seems to be the nature of the beast these days. It's a lot more long winded, but it's a lot more fulfilling.

You've done live gigs from Singapore to Sarajevo, what's been your favourite venue?
I suppose some of the more memorable shows we've done have been off the beaten track. We did a show last year in the Ukraine, which was a six hour drive from Kiev, so it wasn't actually in the capital, we'd played there before in some clubs.

We drove for six hours, into the middle of nowhere, to play this festival there, we were the only western band there. In fact Tuup was the only black face in the entire festival. It was just like how you can imagine the Glastonbury Festival was when it started off in 1970. It was just a big field with a lake in the middle of it, one stage and a few stalls, and loads of mad Ukranians. It was a folk. roots festival which they have every year, and occasionally they invite a western band. Because we'd played in Kiev a couple of times before, they kind of knew us, and so they invited us to play the festival.

The main thing I remember was the journey there in this van with no shock absorbers and the roads were deeply rutted all the way, you have to suffer for your art. Sarajevo was interesting again, we played in Kazakhstan, I don't think anyone plays in Kazakhstan, I don't think many people know where it is. It's a central Asian republic, and it's south of Russia, and we played a couple of shows around six, seven years ago. We normally get at least one strange location a year, and we haven't this year as yet. I don't think the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival in Dorset counts really does it.

So you're doing that festival, have you got any others lined up?
We've got that, and Larmer Tree, we've got a fair amount this year, we're going to Hungary a couple of times, and the Czech Republic for a festival, we always seem to find ourselves in those places. We have one in France, and a few in this country, none of the really big ones.

I was going to ask if you were doing Glastonbury Festival this year.
Well, I don't know, we had a really good run of Glastonburys in the nineties we did it four years running and then after that nothing. But there is some talk of trying to get us on one of the stages this year, but we're still waiting to hear about that.

Can you remember the first time you played Glastonbury?
Yes, that was on the Jazzworld Stage when it was in a totally different location, it was just like a really small, tucked out the way. It was a bit, then, like one of those stages you find in the Avalon field, hidden away, I don't think anyone knew it was there. Of course these days it's one of the biggest stages, we've not been back there and played for years now.

What do you think it is about your music that lends it so well to festivals?
I don't know, it's all so corporate these days. A lot of people think we're not going anymore or can't recall anything we've done for the last 10 years. I find that with a lot of people. Because our releases over the last decade have been quite small releases. The last one 'Moonshout' it got a lot of really good press and people heard about us again.

The one before that, we had a really small distribution, and the album before that, 'Yes Boss Food Corner' didn't even get a proper release in this country. So a lot of people forgot about us, and thought we'd finished, and yet we were doing a lot of work in Europe, festivals, and doing what we do really but on a much scale.

Transglobal had a hand in The Imagined Village...
Yeah, we did two tracks 'Tam Lyn Retold', and 'Cold Hailey Rainy Night' of which the latter won the Radio 2 Folk Music Award, and the other one was the track with Benjamin Zephaniah. That was an interesting project to be involved with because Sheema (Mukherjee) our sitar player is playing with that group, and they toured it last year, and I think they've got a few dates this year, and they're recording another album, of a similar theme, so they in the process of looking at more material, I think it will be more acoustic based next time though. We shall see.

The words are traditional but the music for both songs was put together by us and Simon Emerson, and Eliza Carthy. It was all done over a long, period, we came up with the backing track idea, and then all the rest of it was layered on top of it. There were so many different writers, it was all pieced together slowly over the period of a year.

You've got the new compilation out, what's your favourite track on it?
I don't know, it's interesting to hear all this stuff that we've not heard in years. It's not the sort of the thing you do, to get out your band's first or second album and listen to it. It was interesting because we'd been working on it and sequencing it, and it's good to hear stuff like 'Ancient Dreams Of The Sky' and Run Devils And Demons mix of 'Shimmers' from the first album which just appeared on the 12” version of 'Shimmer' and another track 'Body Machine' we've not done that live for 10 years and we're about to resurrect that one as well.

It's a double CD there's 26 tracks on there, we did compilation about 10 years ago with Nation 'Backpacking On The Graves OF Our Ancestors' so we thought it was about time to do another one.

Transglobal Underground release their Best Of, 'Run Devils And Demons, on Monday 13th April through Nascente. For tickets to see them live at Dingwalls on Easter Thursday, click 'more about transglobal underground' link, below.

FUTURE GIGS