Natacha Atlas was born in Brussels of Anglo-Middle Eastern parentage, and lived there until the age of eight before moving to the UK. At the age of 18, after travelling for extended periods through Turkey, Greece and the Middle East, she found herself back in Brussels, making her first forays as a professional performer by guesting with a Salsa band made up of Chilean and Cuban émigrés, and also bellydancing in a succession of Turkish and Arabic nightclubs. By the time she returned to Britain, the elements were in place to launch her music career. “I hooked up with a couple of people who said, ‘let’s do some demos,’ and I led the direction which was Arabic-Spanish. It was World Music but at that time I wasn’t even aware of that scene, that context.” Through a mutual friend, a tape of those first demos made its way into the hands of Nation Records, a label promoting western-Arabic fusion set up by former Southern Death Cult drummer Aki Nawas.
“With Nation Records, I was suddenly in this arena that was functioning and doing festivals.” They hooked Natacha up with Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart as lead vocalist and co-songwriter on the Mercury-nominated 1991 album Rising Above Bedlam. In 1992, Nation introduced her to Transglobal Underground. “That was the beginning. When that took off it really took off and we were touring the whole time.” Beginning with 1993’s Dream of 100 Nations, Natacha conspired with Tim Whelan, Hami Lee and guests ranging from Nick Page to percussionist Neil Sparkes and Dhol drummer Johnny Kalsi, to fuse north African and Arabic music with the digital realms of western pop, dance and rock.
“It was almost like a schooling,” she says, “an apprenticeship, learning the ropes of the music business. And we had a lot of fun. It got a little overwhelming, but we did have some fantastic experiences and some very strange shows.”
TGU’s Tim Whelan, Nick Page and Hami Lee urged her to record her own solo album as early as 1993, and Diaspora, made with members of TGU and sporting a similar dub-infused, beats-driven hybrid of dance and Arabic forms, was released in 1995. Halim followed in 1997, alongside classic TGU albums International Times (1994), Psyhic Karaoke (1997) and Natacha’s final album with the group, Rejoice, Rejoice.
“We were all getting really tired and were not getting any time off. We were going to have to do things differently.” 1998 was the last Transglobal outing for Natacha fronting it, but she went out with a bang – supporting Jimmy Page and Robert Plant on a world tour with the ferocious Dhol Foundation.
“They were extraordinary times. And we’re still in touch. Last year I did a couple of shows with them, and the year before we did a reunion gig at Budapest, which was great fun. There’s always some connection. There’s never been a parting of the ways.”
Following 2001’s Ayeshteni, which featured an electrifying cover of Screaming Jay Hawkins’ I Put A Spell On You, came an ambient project (Foretold in the Language of Dreams) with composer Marc Eagleton, Syrian quanun player Abdullah Chhadeh and World and British folk pioneer Andrew Cronshaw. 2003’s Something Dangerous featured a duet with Sinead O Connor, and 2006’s Mish Maoul (‘Unbelievable’) reunited her with Nick Page on a set of beats-driven songs with shaabi elements, while 2007’s Ana Hina was a drastic departure from her earlier work as it refocused the singer , to much critical acclaim, on her early devotion to the music of Lebanese stars Fairuz and the Rahbani Brothers , Egyptian Abdel Halim Hafez, and others, and abandoned the world of electronica for an acoustic, ensemble approach, with the arrangements orchestrated by Harvey Brough.
Now, with her new album, Natacha takes the acoustic modus operandi of Ana Hina to a new level. “The new album follows on from El Nowm, the last track on Ana Hina, which was partly inspired by the music of Zad Moultaka,” she reveals. Moultaka is a Paris-based Lebanese pianist and composer who specialises in harmonising the Occidental with the Oriential – his piano with the oud, for instance. “He’s much more experimental than we are in a sense,” says Natacha, who describes new tracks such as Ghoroub as a “classical composition with a Moultaka edge that’s just strings and vocals, and it’s quite dark, with words inspired by the Bengali poet Tagore.
The majority of the songs on Mounqaliba were co-written in classical Arabic with Natacha’s musical partner Samy Bishai, who was brought up in Egypt and taught western classical violin by Russians and Armenians in Alexandria. The two of them began work on what would become Mounqaliba just days after concluding an 18-month world tour of Ana Hina in November 2009.
For Natacha, working on the album has been an intense process of creation played out in the confines of a southeast London recording studio overlooking the container ports of the Thames – an apt location in which to fashion her trademark fusion of Arabic and western music.
“I’ve been much more involved in the musical composition on this album. I’ve been more involved from start to finish here than on any other album I’ve ever made.” The title track began as “a lament about the state of the world, about how we seem to be in a state of reversal, how everything is cock-eyed and upside down and we are far from being civilised. It’s like we’re in the dark ages in some perverse modern way, so it was a lament. But it ended up as an instrumental with voices on it – but no words.”
Though the album’s main themes are dark, that darkness is leavened by the likes of Nafoura (Fountain), a song based on one of Natacha’s poems, and which closes the album with a paean to love and its illuminating powers with the words “you are my fountain of light, you are my secret garden.” There is also a buoyant and joyous reading of a 400-year-old Mwashah – excerpted from an epic of classical Arabic poetry – arranged by Atlas and Bishai in the east-west orchestral style of the Rahbani brothers. Alongside a 400-year-old cover comes her beautifully lush, liquid reading of Nick Drake’s classic Riverman, and a new song from Transglobal’s Tim Whelan and Natacha’s cousin (and regular percussionist) Aly El Minyawi. Though largely acoustic, and featuring ney, accordion and piano among the fusion of East-West string ensembles and orchestral textures, Natacha does make a return to digital beats.
“There is one track where we’ve treated the Arabic percussion with electronic programming. A lot of the time when Arabic music is fused with western music they conform the Arabic beats to western beats because it’s one of the easiest ways to bring the two worlds together, but we’ve not done that, we’ve glitched it instead, so it has a modern feel without losing its Arabic identity.”
Touches of electronic sound design – along with field recordings from Cairo, Marrakech and elsewhere – appear on the album’s six cinematic ‘interludes’, which also features her Turkish keyboard player singing in the powerful, intricate muezzin style, and the words and ideas of Peter Joseph from the Zeitgeist movement.
“He narrated a movie called Addendum, which is about the monetary system. He says really thought-provoking things – about how the monetary system was created, how it works, and how it doesn’t work and how there’s no intrinsic incentive to solve any profitable problems. So with the album title, and this idea of us going into reversal, back to chaos, I thought it would be interesting to use these excerpts. And Peter Joseph gave us kind permission to use what we wanted. We have six interludes and they make interesting cinematic musical journeys on their own. They have a programmatic purpose within the album, correlating to the music around them. So for me it truly is a concept album, it’s not something I’ve ever done before.”
Tim Cumming, 2010