Given the globe-wide mourning over the last month, we have to ask Savale about the time David Bowie asked Asian Dub Foundation to perform at his Meltdown Festival in London in 2002. “He came to see us, two nights in a row in 1997,” says Savale. “We were his favourite community music band. He’d also asked us to work with him and tour with him but nothing came of it. The band on the whole were quite ambivalent about it at the time.” Sorry – what? “I know. The only two people in the world who don’t like Bowie were in the band; I don’t know anyone else who doesn’t like him.”
Savale, on the other hand, became intensely engaged with Bowie’s music at a very young age. “He had a huge influence on me personally,” he says. “Before I was even 13 I was listening to him. I was the only one in the band who had a Bowie period in their life.”
Contrary to the normal order of things, Asian Dub Foundation’s music seems to have influenced Bowie, rather than the other way round. “People said Bowie’s album Earthling was influenced by us,” says Savale. It makes sense – the 1997 release Earthling made a clear embrace of the electronica and drum and bass music prominent in the UK at the time.
The music Asian Dub Foundation performed at the Bowie-curated Meltdown Festival was their live re-scoring to French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz’s cult classic, La Haine. The project was wildly successful for the band and they’re still performing the score, unchanged, 15 years on. Kassovitz was in the audience that night and was ecstatic with what he heard. He even made a point of meeting the band after the show.
“He was jumping around in his seat,” says Savale. Interestingly, Asian Dub Foundation’s live re-scoring came about almost accidentally. “The La Haine project came from an off-the-cuff remark that became set in stone,” Savale says. “We’d been collaborating with an avant-garde classical composer and that wasn’t working. We were going to play for a festival at the Barbican – Only Connect, which was old films, new music – in 2001, where DJs played music to films. I had this insane idea of an insane experiment doing a live soundtrack to a film in front of an audience. What film would ADF do? La Haine. Such a significant and innovative film. And that was it. We had three weeks to create it and we pulled it off. No one had done anything like this before, not to a film like La Haine.”
This bold experiment is indicative of Asian Dub Foundation’s divergence from predictable activities. “We break the rules. We’re the band that does things in reverse. Projects that we plan out are least likely to happen. Most of the things that have got us somewhere are unpredictable or unplanned. Like the Bowie thing – he came to see us; we didn’t go to see him. And meeting Iggy Pop in Croatia – he just came up to me and said, ‘I’m Jim. Pleased to meet you.’ He was still with the Stooges then. He rang my house. I thought ‘What the fuck?’ I’m still gaga about that.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
