Filming a music video in an African slum is always going to attract some attention. More so when you’re imitating a very cocky Lil Wayne video walking over cars with a large entourage. This is the setting of The Very Best’s new song ‘Yoshua Alikuti’, a piss take/homage to the rappers simple yet egotistical ‘A Milli’.
But, then again, The Very Best are all about combining cultures and ideas to give birth to a pop hybrid so inescapably summery that it could almost make you forget about the biblical amounts of rain Britain has had this season. But how can new album ‘MTMTMK’ top their first effort, an album that saw guest artists such as Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and MIA appear? Answer: do that all again but on a much bigger scale. Speaking to us from somewhere slightly safer (a beautiful field in Sweden), producer and band member Johan Hugo talks Clash through working with major musicians and African gangs.
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Bruno Mars co-wrote your new track ‘We OK’. How did that come about?
The Bruno Mars thing was a weird one for us. The track was originally done with K’naan and we started it together in LA and he took it away with him and sent it back once he finished his stuff. Then we talked about it and said we should do it as a Very Best song, so I went to Malawi and put Esau over the top of it then I reproduced the song about five times before it ended up being what you hear on the album. Then when it came down to sorting out all the publishing and everything, that’s the first time I was told Bruno had written the hook with K’naan. K’naan never told me that. He just sent an email last minute saying ‘Oh shit, Bruno wrote the hook on this…you need to talk to him.’ I thought that maybe we wouldn’t be able to use the track then, but he was super cool about it on the splits and everything. I never met him, but I know he’s done a lot of work with K’naan before. To what degree Bruno had knowledge of The Very Best before or even now…I don’t know.
This isn’t the first time you’ve worked with massive artists. Is there anyone you haven’t worked with who you’d really like to?
We’ve been super fortunate to work with a lot of people I really admire in music. When we started the Very Best we were really keen to work with Phil Collins. A person we spoke a lot to for this last album was Seal. I think that would go together very well with Esau’s voice. We always wanted to work with Akon back in the day as well, but I can’t say I’m that keen anymore. Obviously I wouldn’t turn a collaboration like that down, it would be a fun experience. For me, the people we’ve managed to work with like K’naan, MIA, Ezra, for me they are the people of our generation who will be looked back as real pioneers and amazing strong artists who took their own routes and done their own thing.
How was recording this new album? Was the process different to ‘Warm Heart Of Africa’?
When we did ‘Warm Heart Of Africa’ Esau was working 18 hour days, slaving away in London in his shop, so we would have a few hours here and there just messing around then after a while we had a record. This time we came in with more of a conscious decision of what we wanted to do. We worked differently because we worked so much together. It was much more me and Esau coming out with vocal melodies together, where as last time it was me making the beat, gave it to Esau, he walked away, wrote something, came back 2 days later, recorded for an hour. That was it; that was one song. Semi-collaboration. This time it was me and Esau working like any other band would.
What first attracted you to have Esau as a frontman?
He was running this junk shop in Clapton, East London. Etienne (from Radioclit, Johan’s former project) just used to pass his shop and ended up buying a bike from him and then started to invite him to parties. Then I met Esau. I remember very well, he was this guy at the party standing alone in the corner with this big smile on his face, confused to why he was there. We got along very well straight away, even though he said he was a drummer and he didn’t turn out to be a drummer. As soon as he was in the studio and I played him some tracks, he hummed along with something and I was really intrigued by his vocals straight away. I completely fell in love with the way he sang.
The new video for ‘Yoshua Alikuti’ is a skit of Lil Wayne’s ‘A Milli’. What’s the idea behind the video?
We love Lil Wayne, but at the same time it was a bit of a piss take. Honoring it and at the same time giving a little peak towards the hip-hop community that always talks about how everything is so ghetto. It’s a video that I’ve been thinking about for a long time doing. Lil Wayne’s video is such a simple video and it always caught my attention that it could be done in an African slum environment. It would be funny and kind of sarcastic, but at the same time paying homage. It’s absolutely no diss, but it’s to get people thinking a bit, but at the same time enjoy it.
So how did the video come about?
We shot that in Nairobi, Kenya, with Village Beat (a creative collective that uses art to amplify the voice of African villages), who had been out in Kenya filming a documentary about street kids addicted to glue. They’d been filming in this particular slum in Nairobi, so they knew the local gang very well, who ended up being our kind of protectors and helpers on the shoot. If it wasn’t for them we wouldn’t have been able to do a video like this. This slum is much harder than the slums in Malawi where Esau is from.
Did you encounter any trouble on the shoot?
There’s always trouble going on, but on the first day we almost got robbed going out of the slum. We had this driver who was taking us out every night, and the gang that controlled the area where we were filming wouldn’t let us stay after nightfall, but we ended up staying later every night because there was too much to do. On the first night when we left, just when we got out of their territory and into the next one, some people jumped in through the windows of the car and tried to get some camera equipment and open the trunk of the car. We managed to wriggle ourselves out of it and shut the windows and get away. It was a good wake up call to be alert.
Words by Jamie Carson
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‘MTMTMK’ is out now.