My World: Benjamin Zephaniah

Alex Robinson chats to the urban poet, music lover and man who said ‘up yours’ to an OBE

Benjamin Zephaniah is a creative renaissance man. His poetry is an articulate voice for community and identity and a sharp, witty critique of British society. He was an educational adviser to both Tory and Labour governments; he’s a playwright, novelist, academic, plus one of the UK’s cultural icons. He’s also refreshingly down-to-earth. And he loves music.

It’s always been there, he says: “Like food. And the only time it wasn’t – when I was in prison – I really felt its absence. I remember that we managed to get hold of a little transistor radio and me and a couple of other Black guys heard ‘I Shot the Sheriff ’. We jumped up shouting – ‘Great! Bob Marley!’ Then we realised it was some white guy – Eric Clapton – and we all went quiet. It was great though.”

“For me‚” he continues, “music does two really important things. The first is to turn people on politically – and by this I really mean anti-politically – getting people to open up to addressing real issues. I was round a friend’s house once and I heard Bob Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’‚ about a Black boxer wrongly imprisoned. It woke me up to the political situation for Black people in the US.”

“The second thing music can do is to touch people. I want music – whoever is singing it – be they Rasta, Buddhist or Sikh, to talk to you in a place which isn’t physical. Anyone can talk about booty. But to really sing and talk to you in a place that can’t be measured – this is truly special.”

Music, he says – unlike religion – is non-denominational: “I want to get to that place in all of us which is not about the church or material but which lies in all or our hearts. Take Rasta music. It touches people all over the world spiritually but they don’t have to be Rasta to connect. And I’m touched by music from the Sufi tradition – like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.”

Creating a playlist however was a difficult, frustrating task: “I just don’t have a top ten. What I listen to varies. Sometimes I’m dancey. Though I have to be careful as when I dance nowadays I look like an uncle at somebody’s wedding. Sometimes I’m quieter. And when I’m doing stuff round the house, I listen to classical. Particularly Rachmaninov at the moment.” His selection, he insists, is very much a reflection of how he was feeling at the time. But there are reasons behind all of his choices.

Manu Dibango, for instance, was one of the first artists who got him listening to African music: “I was round a friend’s house. And at the time I was a Peter Tosh school, no compromise roots-reggae man. I remember that I was laughing at his record collection, which was mainly soul and funk – more ‘get down’ than ‘get up, stand up’. But then he slipped on this LP by Manu Dibango and the first track blew me away. The way he played that horn took me back to Africa. Yet it was so modern too.”

The Terry Hall and Mushtaq choice was a record Zephaniah loved the moment it came out: “I was carrying it around with me when doing interviews and telling everyone it was my album of the year. I actually toured with The Specials and was a good friend of Neville [Staple]. But I didn’t get to know Terry. He was on his own. More introvert. But for a while after this record came out, I was worshipping him. After The Specials he’d been doing a lot of musical ventures trying to find the right format for his voice. And although I would never have dreamt of him playing with Mushtaq, I thought it worked so well – the whole tempo, everything just suited his voice so well.”

He discovered Lila Downs in Mexico: “At gigs people interested in you sometimes recommend stuff. And after a show out there this woman came up to me and said, ‘Benjamin, you should listen to this woman. She listens to you’. So I did and was so touched. I am fascinated by how people can be touched even lyrically – by the use of words – when they can’t speak the language.”

Huong Thanh has a similar effect. A singer-songwriter friend struggling to find her musical identity asked him for advice. “And when I asked her who she wanted to sound like, she pulled out Huong Thanh and said ‘like this’. So I took the CD away and listened to it. It’s so soothing. I had a Vietnamese girlfriend at the time I got the CD and she thought ‘wow!’ – she was dead impressed.”

He met Daara J at the BBC Awards for World Music in 2005: “I agree with everything they say about rap. Rap is essentially African. They haven’t started a new kind of African rap – traditional people there have been speaking in rhyme and with rhythm there for hundreds of years.”

And this brings us back to Zephaniah’s poetry which is both rooted in tradition and strikingly modern. And although critical, it’s also an optimistic celebration of Britain – and especially London’s melting-pot potential – where cultures and colours come together in a spirit of community to create a new understanding, touched in that special place and finding “not a way to peace, but that peace is the way”:

‘I love dis concrete jungle still
With all its sirens and its speed
The people here united will
Create a kind of London breed.’

This article originally appeared in Songlines #48 (December 2007)