Soundway Records put out the kind of hard-funkin’ 1960s and 1970s music that your dad used to play on a Saturday morning: exquisite highlife, calypso, cumbia, afro-rock, Latin, jazz and blues from obscure artists with fabulous names like The Cutlass Dance Band, Monsieur Dolor et Les Guitar Boys and K. Frimpong & His Cubanos Fiestas. Great music played by proper bands with real instruments who encapsulated the hope and excitement of Africa’s early post-independence halcyon days; artists who may have been swallowed up by the tides of time were it not for the new-wave of musical missionaries – Gilles Peterson, Analog Africa’s Samy Ben Redjeb, former Blur frontman Damon Albarn and Soundway’s Miles Cleret for example – who are devoted to bringing old and new music from ‘over there’ to new audiences ‘over here’.  Since 2002, British DJ and Soundway founder Cleret has released over twenty beautifully packaged and digitally remastered compilations from Panama, the French Caribbean, Ghana, Nigeria and Benin. On the eve of his latest Soundway compilation, Ghana Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Ghanaian Blues 1968-81 (out now), he talks to AfriPOP! about the joys of crate-digging in the Motherland and just why African music in Europe is so different from music on the continent.

How did a white British kid from Brighton become so interested in African music?

My dad was always big on American jazz and soul so I grew up with that in my house. I got into hip hop when I was a teenager, then funk and soul and jazz-funk fusion and it was sort of a side step from that.

And then you travelled to Ghana…

Yeah, I went for a month. And because I was always a bit of a vinyl junkie, I would look for these old funk or highlife records which I soon realised weren’t available outside Ghana – or even in Ghana most of the time. So I came up with the idea of doing an album of the sort of stuff I found and I quickly realised it was a template that could fit any country in the world where small recording scenes were in danger of dying out because nobody was looking after the music.

And where do you find the records?

All over the place. I’ve contacted old record labels and recording artists from the time, I’ve tracked down old collectors and found records in lofts, basements and lock-ups. It’s been like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle when the pieces are scattered in different locations – very hard work but very rewarding.

Why do a lot of European artists/DJs seem interested in unearthing African music from the post-independence period?

I think the 1960 and 1970s was probably the most exciting time in African music, or music, period. Finally the African recording industry got a bit more freedom from the big, European-run labels like Decca, Phillips and EMI. After years of being run by outsiders, Africans finally had a chance to run their own labels and dictate what kind of music they wanted to put out and what came out was something really fresh and exciting.

What do you think about the gulf between the sort of African music that is popular in the West and the sort of African music popular with young people on, and from, the continent?

It’s regrettable. I find the way that world music or African music is put on at places like the Barbican a bit sad. It’s like it’s something to be sat down in a chair and looked at, rather than involved with. The guys that made this music originally were playing out on Friday, Saturday and Sunday until daybreak; people weren’t sat in £30 seats looking at them politely, they were up dancing all night. But I think that’s a lot of that is to do with the grants it takes to get these bands over. R&B is R&B whether it’s from Nigeria or America so as a producer you want to do something that is a bit different. Which is a shame because I was doing a party in Hackney the other weekend and there were 600 people out dancing until 5am and we were playing all these old records and these weren’t people in their 50s and 60s: these were people in their 20s and 30s from all over London, of all different ages and races, just having a good time. That’s what its all about, really.

Do you think there is a danger in this positioning of African culture as something anthropological or historic rather than contemporary?

The main problem is that the music industry in Ghana and Nigeria suffers from piracy so there isn’t much money invested in new music. Yeah, there are amazing rappers and singers, but a lot of hip-life, for example, is lyrical and not much money is invested in the music side of it, so the production can be slightly shaky and there is not much actual music involved. There was a big technological revolution in the 1980s which saw a whole band of 15 people suddenly replaced by one keyboard. It put a lot musicians out of work and they haven’t been in work since, so you go to a lot of African countries now and sure there are tons of rapper but there are very few musicians.

A lot of these compilations are distributed mainly in Europe. Can you envisage a time when they are sold or even popular in their country of origin?

Well, as I said before, the main problem is pirating. It’s really hard to get past that. In Nigeria you can buy tons of old highlife records from the 1960s and 1970s but not one penny of it will go back to the copyright owner. I know companies that are trying to do it legitimately but they are really struggling because CD duplication is so prolific. It’s a bit different with somewhere like Colombia where I am working on a new compilation at the moment because there is a younger generation who are interested in older music and African music as well. On the Caribbean coast in Colombia where there is a big population of people with African roots, they still have DJ battles with old highlife records. There are a number of young people in African countries who are really into the old music and their heritage but they are still a minority. That’s why its so important that these stories are told and these artists are remembered, because otherwise the newer generations will never even know it existed.