IT’S SATURDAY night in Athens and I’ve got a choice: a friend’s offering me a ticket to see Madonna at the Olympic Stadium. It cost him €80. He doesn’t want to go, I can have it for a knocked down price, he says. Or I can go to the free concert in ‘Pedion Tou Areos’ park where Asian Dub Foundation, described as ‘the last angry band in Britain’ are headlining the night to support a Youth Festival. No contest.
In a big city it’s always strange trying to find a venue you haven’t been to before. The half an hour walk to the park takes us through Exarchia, still known for its anarchism but increasingly becoming chic and trendy, as neoclassical houses are renovated, and small bars and cafés spring up in its lamp-lit back streets.
The park is dark; characters lurk, striking what seem like drug deals, down pitch-black paths between the trees.
“You sure we got the right place?” I say. “Yeah”. We choose not to wend our way through the undergrowth but walk the half-mile along the busy perimeter road, till we are caught in the crowd paying €7 as a donation to the evening. The bar volunteers pour us beakers full of vodka in plastic cups.
Asian Dub come on at midnight with their unique mix of sitar sounding rap and ragga, and their politics. This band walks the talk: a product of a community project in London in the 90s that sought to encourage talent in Asian youth.
They are working hard to combat racism, gun and knife culture, and in a great antidote line to hard ‘crew’ music they rapped, “We don’t want to be target practice”. But the biggest cheer of the evening, from the large Greek crowd, was a reference to Bush’s ‘oil wars’.
Few, it seems, supported recent US and British foreign policy. They have no appetite for war: perhaps their history has taught them to be sceptical of motives. We laugh as Sanjay’s bongos beat out his infections rhythm, and the lead singer shouts, “Hey! Watch out for weapons of mass percussion.”
I first heard this band on the soundtrack of La Haine, a brilliant French film that dispelled myths that Paris was all romance and pavement cafés, and exposed the racism and poverty in its suburbs.
For me, this was live music at its best, not the razzmatazz, spectacular down the road, where tickets cost half a week’s wages and Madonna would be singing her sexy songs with lines like, “I’ve got Turkish delight, baby and so much more”.
No one could accuse ADF of being shallow, naïve maybe, I cringed a bit at the line, “No Iraqi ever called me a Paki” but at least they were not fake.
When one of the band’s founders, Pandit G was offered an MBE, he turned it down on the basis that what he did was not about himself but his community: much of their earnings still support East London educational projects.
Their non-violent call for constructive rather than destructive action through political processes is unusual in our apathetic age, “Don’t sit on a burning fence” they sang, but we all do, except when we are dancing…
