The Very Best is a collaboration between Malawian vocalist Esau Mwamwaya and European production duo Radioclit (Swede Johan Karlberg and Frenchman Etienne Tron). The London-based band made their name via a freely-available online mixtape, released in 2008, that found Mwamwaya singing, in Chichewa and Swahili, over cut-up versions of songs by Vampire Weekend, M.I.A., Architecture in Helsinki, and, uh, Michael Jackson. Following all manner of blog buzz and critical acclaim, they followed it up, in 2009, with the debut Very Best album proper, Warm Heart of Africa. Drawing influence from both Eastern and Western music, it's a joyous set of steel-drum-dappled dancefloor jams that features guest performances from M.I.A. and Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig, and a star-making turn from Mwamwaya.
Interview: 3 November 2009
You just played in Malawi. What was that experience like?
"It was amazing. It was our second year playing in a row playing there at the Lake of Stars festival. It's my favorite festival in the world. It's an a remote place, small enough to be intimate, and has such an amazing, positive vibe. People travel from all over the world to Central Africa, put in a lot of effort just to get there, so everyone is just so excited to be there."
Is your music received differently in Africa than elsewhere?
"Well, there's a lot of Western people who travel to Lake of Stars, so not entirely. But, this year, we gained a lot more respect from the local crowd, I think. And we set up a little studio on-site in our bungalow, and all the big stars from Central African music came through and recorded verses, and did different versions of all of the Very Best tracks, which meant that we did a lot of work while we were there. But, even though all the biggest stars in Malawi are at the festival, it was The Very Best who was on all the front pages of the newspapers. It was the first time that Esau really got any recognition in Malawi at all, which was really cool for him."
Was it like coming crashing back to Earth, then, when you landed in America?
“[laughs] Yeah, it’s been a little bit stressful. Obviously we had to cancel the beginning of the tour [because of passport problems for Mwamwaya], which was a real shame, and then when we did get going our tour-bus broke down on the first day. We had to take a train from Washington to Boston, and Esau did that right after coming off a 36-hour flight from Malawi. It’s been amazing, though, the shows have been really good.”
The vibe of The Very Best is very 'internationalist.' Where upon the globe did you grow up?
“In a small town called Linköping in Sweden. I always wanted to be a nature photographer. I was really mad about nature and animals, that was my whole life growing up. Since I was three or four I started recording every single nature show that was on TV. I still have over 250 VHS tapes, that I watched over and over and over again. David Attenborough was my biggest hero.”
I was thinking the other day that David Attenborough is like this John Peel figure for nature documentarians. Once he dies, there’ll be no one who could possibly replace who he is and what he does.
“Exactly, man, very, very true. There’s a new series running in London as we speak. I’ve been recording them all, and when I get back from touring in a couple of days I’ll watch the whole series. I can’t wait.”
But your dreams of being a nature photographer died?
"I became a photographer during high-school, worked as a freelance photographer on the side. But, then, when I finished high-school, a lot of my friends were squatting in London. And I just wanted to get out of my hometown, so I moved over there, and got stuck just doing all kinds of random shit to get by, basically. Worked in a clothes shop for a couple of months, until someone came in and bought a shitload of clothes on a credit-card that I didn’t realize didn’t authorize, so I basically gave them £10,000 worth of clothes. I worked in a call-center, and then I became a care worker, taking care of a lady who had MS. I did that for about three years, until music started taking up too much of my time.”
When did you start making music?
“I started making beats when I was about 12 years old. Some of my close friends had a rap group, and I wanted to join. So one of the guys taught me how to make beats. I’ve been a producer since the very beginning. I never really had any ideas of what I wanted to be, I just always liked making beats. Usually I’d make really weird things, and people who hear them and just laugh, thinking I was really weird.”
Can you draw a straight-line from what you were doing then to what you’re doing now?
“Yeah, I can. Because I don’t have any musical training at all, and I don’t have a lot of respect for boundaries and things like that. I just do whatever. I just have a general disregard for rules; that’s been a common theme the entire time I’ve been making music.”
How did you and Etienne cross paths, and what did you hope to do working together?
“When me and Etienne met, we were both really fascinated by the pirate radio scene in London. We wanted to do pirate radio, but we didn’t really have the equipment or knowledge to do it. So we started Radioclit as a fake radio-show that we posted up on the internet. It was around the time when Diplo put out the first Hollertronix mixtape and signed to Ninja Tune. He used to come and stay with us, and we shared a lot of interest in similar music and, again, just mixing all kinds of music together and stuff. We were on the same tip as Diplo back then. But, with Radioclit, it took us about a year or two, though, before somebody asked us to do a remix, and by then we'd decided we should be a production outfit. There was never too much thought to what we were gonna do. When I'm in the studio, the more I try to plan something, the more chance that it's not going to come out that way. I just try to go forward on intuition and instincts when I work. The less I think and the more in-the-zone I can get, the better."
Next: "'Julia' was a beat that we made for Lil' Wayne a couple of years ago..."
