The sequel to 1 Giant Leap "What About Me?" will be presented as part of the Planet MOFFOM section

MOFFOM 2008 presents the new film from 1 Giant Leap "What About Me?" at Planet MOFFOM section. The following interview appeared in Link magazine in 2005. The complete version of the interview http://www.britishcouncil.org/link-01.pdf.

When 1 Giant Leap recorded their self-titled debut album and award-winning DVD, Jamie Catto and Duncan Bridgeman were already wellestablished music producers. Catto was a founder member of celebrated electronic act Faithless and director of several of their videos. Bridgeman, meanwhile, had made his name as a producer and remixer for a whole catalogue of top-selling pop acts. Both wanted to do something entirely new, without too much reliance on samples; 1 Giant Leap’s globe-trotting mini-studio was born. They sought out unique musicians across the world, travelling any distance to work with them. As well as their recording equipment, the pair took along a digital video camera, originally to make a short promotional film for the album. The short film soon snowballed, as Catto explains:‘
"The original idea was for one short film with a rabbi and a priest and an imam and a buddhist monk, all talking about their faiths and things like humility and compassion and generosity. It would all be the same story, as we all know... but if we actually showed that, showed them talking, cut them together so they were all giving one continuous speech... We thought that would be an unbelievably powerful metaphor for the world and for what we were trying to do with the 1 Giant Leap album. From there it just spread into other subjects like death, and inspiration, and we got more and more people to talk.’

The project grew into a series of eleven short films exploring what Catto describes as ‘the unity in the diversity’ – the idea that regardless of our circumstances and experiences, the similarities between people always vastly outweighs their differences. In each film men and women from five continents share their beliefs on universal subjects like time, sex and death, and the common threads of human life shine to the forefront. For Catto, recognizing the universal in humanity is a necessary counterweight in a time where modern culture seems concerned more with differentiation and rejection:

‘At the moment, for example, we’re led to believe by the media that everyone in Islam wants to strap a bomb to their body. And it’s bull****. At the end of the day, Islamic fundamentalists are like the Ku Klux Klan in America: they’re just a tiny, tiny faction who manage to get a lot of press. There are fundamentalists in every culture, and they have the same mentality everywhere: they’re all totally uptight about sex, they’re all totally woman-hating, they’re all totally scared of children and the lack of control they have over them, and they’re all totally obsessed by certainty at the expense of any kind of liberty. That’s just as true about the West as the  East.’

The 1 Giant Leap project was endorsed by a dizzying array of iconic film stars, novelists, activists, artists... In the short film on ‘time’, for example, among those meditating on the concept are legendary music producer Brian Eno, iconic counterculture actor Dennis Hopper and pan-African superstar Baaba Maal. How did they persuade all these people to take part?

‘We made a list of people whose work we love, and we just called them up, or called up their managers. It was all people we admire, artists who are expressing something more than just entertainment, who’re coming from somewhere deeper. People we really wanted to work with. Plus I’m a pathologically needy person. I need validation from these people!’

Validation was also something of a vital question as they travelled around the world recording. Not everyone was convinced that they were not simply cultural pirates coming to plunder indigenous cultures. This came out particularly strongly in Catto’s favourite stop in the film, New Zealand:

’The Maoris are the coolest people I’ve ever come across, in terms of their philosophy as a culture and how totally unpretentious they are; they were also the most confrontational in challenging us about cultural imperialism. People were very up-front in asking: “What doyou think you’re doing, coming to our culture, nicking our stuff and cutting it up into whatever you like? Who do you think you are?”’

‘And it’s a fair question. We just said yeah, hands up, we acknowledge it, we are coming here and doing that. And we believe we’re giving a platform to unbelievably beautiful, valuable sides of your culture that no-one usually sees. We think that if your culture is going to survive it will be because it’s valued, and because people love it, and because more people than just you guys are interested in it. When you mix Maori music with our music, more people will actually hear it, in a form they can digest... We didn’t convince absolutely everyone, but at the end our fiercest opponent said, “I still wish you weren’t doing it, but I’d rather it was you than somebody else.

Catto, now with a giant Maori moko tattoo covering one side of his upper torso, is animated by an overriding belief in the power of music to cross all boundaries. When asked if he ever had any of his own doubts about the project, he enthuses:

‘I was always convinced that there was a very good chance that many, many more people were going to be exposed to what’s totally brilliant about the Maori people than were previously. And I was right in that. And that goes for a lot of amazing cultures we worked with.’

‘I mean, a lot of people, if the only thing they hear from [Indian vocalist] Asha Bhosle is a piece of Bollywood music, they’re not going to fall in love with it, end of story. A lot of people just don’t get Bollywood music. But when you mix Asha Bhosle with [REM frontman] Michael Stipe over our backing track, lots more people worldwide fall in love with it, and lots more people discover what’s so totally amazing about Asha Bhosle. But I’d be lying if I said that’s what it’s about. It’s not. Let’s not pretend we’re do-gooders – we’re artists. What we do is satisfy ourselves artistically. We are making this music to  hilosophically, spiritually and musically turn ourselves on.’

1 Giant Leap expect to finish their second album and film next summer. Provisionally titled ‘2 Sides to Everything,’ Catto describes it as ‘more paradoxical – we’re exploring the idea that the trip-ups and the temptations in life that you find yourself in are the moments in life where you truly evolve. We reject pain, we reject suffering, but ultimately pain and suffering are huge evolutionary catalysts. So the new one’ll have more “sympathy for the devil” – putting the case for the dark side, putting the case for all the things we reject.’

1 Giant Leap make world music that genuinely aspires to be the music of the entire world. The evolution of their track ‘Innocente’ gives a good indication of their overall approach: after writing and recording their backing tracks, the duo travelled to Ghana to record percussionists. String players in South Africa followed, then in India some traditional tabla and sarangi playing. In New Zealand, a traditional Maori war chant entered the mix, and finally in San Francisco rapper and social activist Michael Franti provided the lead vocal. You will never hear a musical project quite like 1 Giant Leap, because quite simply no other musical project can skilfully draw together such an astonishingly varied pool of international talent on one album.

For more details about the band, see www.1giantleap.tv.

interview by Craig Duncan, 2005