L’Orchestre National de Barbès

Back on the scene with Alik

Paris 

13/02/2008 - 

It’s official, the Orchestre National de Barbès - ONB to their fans - are not over and done with. After almost a decade’s silence on the recording front, not to mention persistent rumours about in-fighting, exhaustion and imminent splits, the ONB have just made a resounding comeback with a new album. Alik ("Look!"), featuring seven musicians from the band’s original line-up, proves that the ONB have lost none of their legendary energy or on-stage kick.

After waiting almost a decade for a new batch of songs from the multi-cultural melting-pot of the ONB, it seems appropriate to wonder what exactly happened between February 1997, the year the band emerged with their first live album, and their official comeback in February of this year. The ONB followed their lightning live start with an acclaimed studio album, Poulina, released in May 1999. Meanwhile, the collective had taken to the road on a seemingly incessant tour, playing hundreds of dates at home and abroad. As anyone who has seen the ONB live in concert will confirm, the multi-ethnic collective are at their best leaping about on stage, their infectious energy spilling over into the crowd and whipping all present into a state of collective frenzy. One thing’s for sure and that is that the ONB’s innovative mix of Maghrebin, African and Western influences had never been quite so successfully fused before this gregarious bunch came along.

On the road again

However, over the years the ONB’s gruelling schedule of concert dates began to take its toll. There was no let-up in the group’s frenetic touring, no time to rest before or after Poulina with concert dates piling up across France, Europe and South America. What’s more, for a band with a live reputation to maintain the group threw their all into every date on the schedule - and when they finally wound up their marathon tour in 2002 band members were literally on their last legs. "After such a physically demanding time on the road, we all felt the need to go our separate ways for a bit and recharge our batteries," explains Luis Saldanha, ONB’s manager and sound engineer. "Some members of the group went off and did solo albums while others chose to have a complete change of scene, playing with other bands."

This recharging process lasted several years until the disparate members of the ONB felt the pull to come together and work as a collective again. "Meanwhile, we’d also swapped record labels," Saldanha explains, "But we insisted on keeping up our work on our own label, Sulali, at the same time. That was a non-negotiable condition. Sulali is a vital means of maintaining our artistic independence. We also had to sort out a number of problems that had come up with management and the tour promoter we’d been working with. We’d toured intensively for many years, trying to make a name for ourselves. But the financial rewards were pretty thin during that time. Money’s never been a prime motivating factor for us, but you can’t totally overlook it. In the end, we realised that over the years the tour promoter we’d been working with had systematically undersold the ONB because he was trying to get lesser-known artists on the same bill. He was basically bartering us to concert venues, saying ‘OK, I’ll give you the ONB at a cut rate, if you take this other band, too.’ But at the end of the day we were the ones having to get out there and do all the work!"

Older and wiser

After a long period of reflection and negotiation, during which time the ONB never ceased to get out there on the road, the idea of going back into the studio to make another album gradually began to take hold. "The thing is, writing material together isn’t that easy when there’s so many of us involved," Saldanha admits, "You get someone coming along with a melody line, someone else chipping in lyrics and other occasions when someone brings along both at once. Then we all have to put our heads together and prune things back over and over again until we lick a song into true ONB style. The master wizard who oversees the whole melting-pot process is Youssef Boukella." (Boukella, the ONB’s bass-player and one of the core members of the group from day one, left his native Algeria to move to Paris in the 1980s and played with a host of stars there including TakFarinas and Rai singer Cheb Mami).

Never a band to do anything like anyone else, the ONB recorded their new album, Alik, bit by bit, laying tracks down over a twelve-month period in the famous L’Usine studio. (The studio, in the Paris suburb of Arcueil, has since been pulled down after being declared a public danger). Meanwhile, the band tested out songs from their new album at a series of concerts throughout the summer of 2007, which allowed them to see which songs went down well with the crowd and also to hone and prune arrangements along the way.

Looking back over the last decade, Saldanha appears to have found some personal serenity these days. "Let’s just say 1999 was the year the ONB had an adolescent crisis," he jokes, "We spent the whole time arguing with each other and most of the time we didn’t even know why. But we’re older and wiser now. I think we understand one another better these days, but the great thing is our on-stage energy’s exactly the same!" Alik has a resolutely more rock'n'roll feel than previous ONB releases and this time round many of the songs are in French as well. There’s also an interesting cover of the Rolling Stones’s classic Sympathy for the Devil, a sort of ‘passing nod’ to the Stones who regularly played a track by the ONB before going out on stage on their Bridges to Babylon tour in 1998.

Meanwhile, the ONB are currently out on the road again themselves with an impressive series of concert dates lined up over the coming months. The band are also working on a new album as we speak. ONB are definitively back to stay. Let’s just hope they don’t wear themselves out too much this time round!

Orchestre National de Barbès Alik (Wagram) 2008
Forthcoming ONB tour dates include : 
L’Elysée-Montmartre, Paris (14/15 Feb), Oslo (23 Feb), Sarreguemines (7 March), Nice (15 March), Biarritz (22 March), Trappes (5 April), Printemps de Bourges festival (19 April), Strasbourg (20 April), Quimper (26 April) and L’Olympia, Paris (31 May).

Mélanie  Bosquet

Translation : Julie  Street