Would you say the cultural history of Joujouka is core to the music as well as the work of Hamri ?
FR: Gysin’s paintings especially his Moroccan ones were heavily influenced by Sufi sects. I have recently seen a review of a 1956 art show by Hamri which Gysin organized at the 1001 Nights restaurant. Gysin and Hamri set up 1001 Nights to allow the Master Musicians of Joujouka to be seen by a wider audience.The reviewer noted that all of Mohamed Hamri’s works were related to the local magic of his home village of Joujouka/Jajouka, and the titles reflected this. I think it will emerge just how much influence Hamri had on Burroughs and Gysin when writers and researchers start to look in that direction.
The scene on the DVD of The Master Musicians of Joujouka playing with drummer Brian Downey, from Thin Lizzy, and Hamri, cajoling and gently teasing more from the musicians, is another real highlight for me, what memories do you have of that gig?
FR: The first time I saw Brian Downey he was in the recording studio nailing his drum kit to the floor for the first session of my band The Baby Snakes’ first album, Sweet Hunger. We finished the drum tracks by nine that night. Brian Downey is possibly the greatest rock drummer still with us and ranks with Charlie Watts and John Bonham easily.
To get Brian and The Master Musicians of Joujouka together was a major musical moment. Brian is as instinctive as they are and he gelled instantly. His love of the blues and jazz informed the cool sound of Thin Lizzy. With Joujouka he provided a masterful and powerful sequence of rhythms that completely fitted their beats. That was a remarkable event and improvisation. Ramuncho Matta, the surrealist painter Roberto Matta’s son, provided abstract murals on his guitar and The Baby Snakes guitarist Niall O’Sullivan gave Boujeloud a hard rock edge. Nothing interfered with the Joujouka sound, it all just got harder and nastier. Beautiful. The musicians loved it. They have a great fascination with drum kits.
What is the connection to your collaborative cultural vehicle, The Islamic Diggers?
Joe Ambrose: The Diggers started life as a sort of anarchist movement. I edited an underground magazine called The Digger after I left university and that name derived from the Digger proto- anarchists in the English Civil War (as opposed to the contemporaneous Levellers who were proto-socialist), Emmet Grogan’s Diggers in San Francisco during the Summer of Love (also anarchist in orientation), and Oscar Wilde’s university-days Diggers movement which sought to dig out a road which disappeared into a bog – in other words a road going nowhere.
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