Born into the struggle

Femi Kuti has both Nigeria's music and its deadly political conflicts in his blood, he explains to Nick Hasted

Femi Kuti is sitting in a near-empty old London pub. It is just like the ones his father Fela, the most crucial of all African stars, knew in 1962, when he was studying music here, and Femi was born.

But the scenes playing in his head are of the Lagos of 1978, when soldiers burnt his father's place down and threw his grandmother from a window. These moments sealed Fela in his role as Nigeria's indomitable, doomed figurehead of musical and moral resistance, and ensured Femi would forge his own dangerous path.

This handsome 45-year-old, sitting in his coat and African scarf on a warm English day, laughs as often as he twists into introspective gloom. On the day the soldiers came, he arrived to find Fela's commune and club, the Shrine, a smoking husk. "My mother started crying. Everything was on fire, in the centre of town."

They found his father later, in a military hospital. Fela's 75-year-old mother had been tossed out of a first-floor window. "She'd broken her spine. It was hell. I was scared, I was everything. You're asking the question... but it's something I've locked out of my mind." He is looking deep inwards. "I was too young then. It was so much, so much, so much... Even till now, everything I do unconsciously reacts to those things in the past."

Fela Kuti's legacy to the world came when, with his Africa 70 band, he forged Afrobeat from jazz, high-life and James Brown-style funk. But it was in Nigeria, where he blatantly smoked marijuana, married 28 women and intemperately railed against the authorities who frequently jailed him, that Kuti was king. He died in 1997.

Next week, Femi will lead the 11th annual Felabration festival. It will culminate with a show by Africa Express, the series of lauded Afro-Western cross-pollinations begun by Damon Albarn. Artists from Amadou and Mariam to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea will go to Lagos first, before playing the following week at Koko, in Camden, as part of the BBC Electric Proms. "That's very important politically," Femi says. "People are coming to Lagos this time – not just from it."

After dallying with hip-hop, touring with Jane's Addiction and briefly having a deal with Motown, Femi's first studio album in seven years, Day to Day, is a fierce restatement of Afrobeat and jazz verities.

"I taught myself the trumpet, and the piano as well," he tells me. "I got the undercurrent I would like in my music, pushing you like heavy heartbeats. Influences are Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Morgan, my father especially. I've listened to them to find myself, and my contribution. I think this is me, really me. People say: 'You are not doing what your father is doing. You are setting new standards.' So hopefully now you will see the branches, and the fruit will start to come out. Maybe the forest, or a big city, will come out of this record, who knows?"

This growth has been a process since the teenage years when it seemed he would amount to nothing. "That was the time my father started to have all his problems," he recalls. "All my friends had gone to university and were coming back as doctors, lawyers. I was smoking grass at my father's house, believing I was a great musician. I lost track. I can't really place my finger on why. Everything just went wrong in my life."

His grandmother berated him when he was 16 to practise. Fela brought him on stage to play a sax solo in front of a crowd of 10,000 near Paris soon afterwards. Now the mournful trumpet solos bracketing "They Will Run" on Day to Day show 30 years of devoted playing has paid off. The song's angry core, though, reflects earlier, tempestuous times. "It was very hard, very scary," he says of his 1970s upbringing. "The police, the SSS, were always following us. I was victimised in school, because of who my father was. They would say: [sneering] 'Ah, your father smokes hemp, he wears underwear.' I'd say, 'Your father wears a coat and tie, he's a slave!' And we would start punching, and the teacher would come."

And yet, on songs such as "Traitors of Africa" and "Beng Beng Beng", Femi has never stepped back from the confrontations that left his father in chains, weeks before his death. Would doing otherwise betray what his family went through?

"Yes. How do I want to be received in heaven when I arrive? As a coward, or somebody who stood by his heritage? Maybe if I chose to go the other way, I would find an excuse to be a coward!", he laughs. "I don't think that's a sin. Many times I've thought, 'Wow, if I go that way, I could die.' Even on the world stage. Because Bush [Senior] was the head of the CIA when instructions were given to the Nigerian government to make sure my father was killed. Can I believe now that the American government is not on my case?"

If Femi's life sometimes seems more like a resistance fighter's than a musician's, that struggle's centre remains the Shrine, where he plays weekly, as Fela did.

"It gives people hope," he says. "Some guys, it's their whole world. I'm so involved in the fight to keep the club, when I'm playing, I become many people in one, thinking: 'I wish I could take a holiday... ah, the government, from what you said tonight, they are going to be on your case... ah, bastards...' All those thoughts come." He goes on. "My father wasn't very tactical. He would just think: 'Ah! I'm going to do this! Brilliant idea! Let's go!' If I was there, I would say: 'We're going to get beaten up. We might lose our lives. Everybody write your will...' I must prepare...

"Even if I'm touched and I survive, I know what I'm going to do next. I'm going to come and get you. And if I die, my spirit will fight on."