Charlie Gillett describes how music from the developing world now fills the racks of record shops and influences musicians across the spectrum. However, mainstream radio remains deaf to its appeal, as if to say we can have any music we like, as long as it’s in English.

In 1987, the owners of several British independent record labels convened a series of meetings in an Islington pub to discuss ways to get their records into shops whose buyers had complained, “we don’t know how to pronounce the names of the artists or where to put them.” The common characteristic of these records was that they were sung in languages other than English. Various terms were discussed. ‘International Music’ sections already existed in some larger shops, where souvenir albums from Greece and Spain were stocked alongside ‘ethnic’ records from Burundi or Papua New Guinea. ‘Folk Music’ was another established concept, but many of these new foreign language records used modern production techniques and electrically amplified instruments and could not accurately be classified as ‘folk.’ Some American record labels described their music as ‘World Beat’ but that would not be a satisfactory box for a capella singers from Bulgaria. ‘Foreign Music’ was unacceptably Anglo-centric.

We settled uneasily on ‘World Music’ over-riding the reservations of those who felt that it demeaned artists to lump African bandleaders together with Pakistani devotional singers. Album-sized bin dividers were distributed to leading record shops, declaring the ‘World Music’ tag and including the logos of the dozen record label sponsors; a press release was sent out to the media. Within a few weeks, the term caught on, and it is now a dictionary definition. In the record ‘megastores’ in central London (HMV, Tower and Virgin), the World Music sections have grown steadily ever since, and now match or exceed the floor space and weekly takings of both jazz and classical music. But radio remains oblivious to all the evidence of this substantial and growing interest, and involvement in world music constitutes a labour of love rather than an act of commercial judgement. Nevertheless a number of major figures have committed their careers to it, and four in particular have had a substantial impact on the tastes of their respective audiences, two of them (Paul Simon and Ry Cooder) through collaborations with ‘world’ musicians and the other two (Peter Gabriel and David Byrne) through their world music record labels.

Paul Simon was the first to make an impact through his 1987 album, Graceland, which he recorded with South African musicians and promoted with a world tour featuring those musicians and others including Miriam Makeba. Ever since his successful partnership with Art Garfunkel broke up, Simon had been exploring and experimenting with non-mainstream musical forms, introducing his audience to Jamaican reggae (‘Mother and Child Reunion,’ ‘72) and gospel (in ‘Loves Me Like a Rock,’ ‘73); so there was continuity in his discovery and celebration of South African music fifteen years later. Ironically, the guitar-led mbaqanga style he championed was by then close to extinction – having been popular in South Africa through the fifties and sixties, it had been supplanted by more modern styles using drum machines and synthesisers. But in the wake of Graceland, a substantial section of Simon’s audience went in search of the records that had inspired him, and several veteran South African artists made successful tours of Europe, Japan and North America including the gospel group Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the mbaqanga group, Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, whose band included the master musicians guitarist Marks Mankwane and saxophonist West Nkosi.

Billboard Magazine instigated a World Music chart and the Grammy Awards incorporated a World Music section. Even if Paul Simon had never made another record after Graceland, he would have been sure of an eminent position in the pantheon of world music catalysts. For his follow-up album, Rhythm of the Saints, Simon used the street band Olodum to explore Brazilian rhythms; although it did not have quite the same impact as its predecessor, partly because Brazilian music was slightly better known to the general American public than South African music had been, it did lead to wider recognition for Olodum and other percussion-based outfits including Timbalada.

Whereas Paul Simon’s achievement was to sustain his popularity while using musicians from outside the mainstream, Ry Cooder’s career took a more surprising turn. Despite regular touring, none of the ten albums he had made under his own name during the ‘70s and early ‘80s sold more than a few thousand copies, and he switched to a more comfortable and lucrative mode of scoring soundtracks in Hollywood including the pioneering Paris Texas. In 1992, Cooder recorded an album with the Indian musician V.M.Bhatt in a one-day session for the tiny California-based Water Acoustics label. A Meeting by the River became one of the best-selling world music albums of the year and created a model for two more collaborations. The first was with the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, whose three albums for the British label World Circuit had attracted attention around the world from fascinated listeners who could hear echoes of blues musicians like Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker.

In September 1993, World Circuit’s owner Nick Gold invited Ry Cooder to Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles where he was producing Ali Farka Touré’s next album; Talking Timbuktu won the World Music Grammy Award the following year, and its world-wide sales of over 250,000 far out-stripped any previous record Cooder had made. Two years later, Cooder joined Gold in another collaborative adventure, this time in Havana, Cuba, where three albums were recorded in two weeks with a collection of veteran musicians and singers. Cooder’s most active involvement was in the album released under the title Buena Vista Social Club, a suite of famous Cuban songs revisited by various small-group combinations from a pool of over 20 participants. Another Grammy winner, this is approaching sales of a million copies in its first year, representing a triumph of faith for World Circuit, one of the few companies to achieve financial self-sufficiency while recording only world music artists.

Peter Gabriel and David Byrne both gave up positions as lead singers in world-famous rock bands (Genesis and Talking Heads, respectively) to pursue careers under their own names and to act as world music proselytisers. In 1980, Gabriel sponsored the first WOMAD Festival (World of Music, Arts and Dance), bank-rolling the expenses for musicians from around the world. Although that first festival failed to attract a big enough audience to cover its costs, the principal of an annual world music festival was established. Continuing to support and bail out WOMAD until it achieved financial self-sufficiency during the mid-nineties, Gabriel launched the Real World label in 1989 to contract and record some of the artists featured at WOMAD. Gabriel’s own albums have tended to remain fairly close to the traditions of the rock mainstream, and have sold in the millions. The closest he came to recording world music himself was the album Passion, written for the soundtrack of the Martin Scorches film, The Last Temptation of Christ; issued as the first release on Real World (distributed by Virgin/EMI), its sales have exceeded a million copies. Among the guest vocalists featured on the album was the Pakistani qawwali singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who was signed to Real World to record for the Western market. Peter Gabriel might well be proud that by the time Nusrat died in 1997 (aged 49), he was widely acclaimed as one of the great singers of his time, regardless of category or genre.

As a recording artist, David Byrne has not yet matched the success of Talking Heads with his own solo albums, some of which have been recorded with African and Latin American musicians. But his influence is still important. He launched his Luaka Bop label in 1989 with Beleza Tropical, a compilation of music from Brazil, and has since released several more outstanding collections which introduced his audience to previously unknown music from Cuba (Dancing With the Enemy), Peru (The Soul of Black Peru) and Portuguese-speaking Africa (Telling Stories to the Sea). In the United States, Luaka Bop has signed the British group Cornershop, whose latest album has given the label its biggest chart success hit, in a quirky style which just about qualifies as world music since some tracks are sung in Hindi.

In British supermarkets, an ever-more exotic array of foods from around the world competes for space on the shelves, matching and extending the ethnic range of our high street restaurants. Premier football clubs increase their gates by bringing in stars from Europe, Africa and Latin America; France recently won the World Cup with a team comprising players from seven different national or ethnic origins. But in British radio, xenophobia prevails towards music from countries outside the traditional mainstream. In the United States, radio producers are even more severe in their definitions of what qualifies as ‘popular music.’ If it’s not in English, it doesn’t get played. It is in this context that we salute the four brave men who have spent time, energy and money in following their ears and their hearts.

Charlie Gillett presents Saturday Night on Greater London Radio, compiled And This Is The World Calling, a CD featuring 14 artists from around the world (Polygram/Debutante 656 476-2), and is the author of The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1945-72 (Souvenir Press).