Misha Somerville in Africa

23 Aug 2009 in Music, Writing

From the Highlands to Timbuktu

ANDREW MACKAY reports on Highland musician Misha Somerville’s trip to Africa and the book he wrote about the highs and lows of travelling through West Africa

BORN and brought up in the Highlands, Misha Somerville owes much to the wild landscape and culture of the area. It was exploring the remote areas and travelling around festivals here with the band Croft No. Five that must have sown the seed that would eventually lead him to go seeking out cultures and landscapes further afield.

When the band started to get opportunities to play in other countries, they jumped at the chance, spending several years travelling to festivals and venues throughout Europe and America. While they took their own adaptation of Highland music to these stages – from New York to Prague – so too did the culture of the places they visited influence their music.

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It was an inspired cocktail of sound which can be heard on albums Attention All Personnel and Talk of the Future. At times it seemed as if it might not be possible to contain so many elements within one sound, and this may in fact have been the reason that the band eventually spilt in 2006.

But for Misha this offered a blank canvas – where there had once been tour schedules, hotels, planes, buses and sound checks, there was now a wide open space. It was an opportunity he grabbed with both hands, and he turned to Africa as the next step to satisfying an ever growing thirst. Setting out alone he travelled from Barcelona, eventually reaching Timbuktu several months later.

The journey was curtailed by a bout of Malaria and then, on his return, he started suffering from ME [Myalgic Encephalitis, aka chronic fatigue syndrome]. House bound for months at a time and unable to watch TV or play music, he found a new way to pass the time when he started writing, an activity that helped him to stay positive through a potentially miserable time.

With rough notes taken during the trip through Africa, he wrote a book called Bamako Boom Boom and decided to donate the proceeds to the charity Hand in Hand.

The book is a personal account which paints a picture different from the traditional image we have on hearing the word ‘Africa’. While many photographs and writing from this great continent hang on clichés which exploit Africa’s vulnerability, Somerville may well be looking for the other side of Africa – the one which we hear little about; the community, the colour, the music, the dance and the big smile which comes to Africans’ faces so readily.

It was Somerville’s first time writing anything in almost ten years. “I had to teach myself to write with pen and paper again,” he laughed, “and by the end of the first page my hand was ready to drop off!”

In fact he had several barriers to overcome; “it’s easy to end up asking if what you’re writing is any good,” he recalled. “I struggled with English at school and I’m not the biggest reader – I mean I had nothing to say that I was any good at writing at all. But I was to able to apply lessons learned working on other creative projects where you try to leave that kind of unconstructive judgement to the end of the process so it doesn’t cloud the creative process.

“In the end most of the book actually told itself – the narrative was there in my head already, and there were all the bits in between which needed subsequent drafts to whittle it down into a shape I liked.”

Most of the book was written in Abriachan, near Loch Ness, and Somerville, who has lived in Glasgow for much of the last ten years, has an interesting perspective on the effect this has on the creative process: “Well, I notice when I go back to the Highlands the space there to expand into is great for developing ideas. Looking back, Croft No. Five were influenced massively by this, and I feel it any time I’m back in the Highlands now. I think you could probably stretch this one stage further and say it offers you much more space as person to develop.”

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If you look at the Highlands cultural legacy – from the music to its reputation for producing colourful characters – you might be inclined to agree with him. Somerville certainly has some interesting things to say. You could argue that it wouldn’t be difficult after a trip to Timbuktu, but Bamako Boom Boom is undoubtedly written by someone who isn’t afraid to go right out to the extremes of world. As Somerville experienced, these far flung places we hear so little about, are often where the most fascinating revelations are made.

Bamako Boom Boom is available from Borders and Waterstones priced £6 – proceeds to the Hand in Hand charity