biography

The Loire region of western France may be famed for its wine, chateaux, and lush expansive countryside but you won't find any mention of the region's rich musical subculture in any of the glossy tourist brochures or coffee table souvenir books. The fact is, you can gaze at the dreamy spires of Blois or sip glasses of chilled Rosé d'Anjou in some riverside bistro but until you've moshed to the gallic grunge of Les Thugs, skanked to the deep dub of Zenzile, waltzed to the romany rock of Thierry Robin or marvelled at the kaleidoscopic sounds of Lo'Jo, you haven't really experienced the Loire of today at all.

Lo'Jo come from Angers, an outwardly staid and stolid burgh on the northern banks of the great river. The story of the group is deeply rooted in the city and its environs but they have always treated the place more as base from which they can take flight, in body or in spirit, to seek out inspiration and sounds from far away places. Denis Péan, Lo'Jo's founder, poet, lyricist and shaman in chief, made "the most important journey" of his life when he left the farm and old catholic culture of his parents and moved two miles up the road to Angers where he enroled in the music conservatory. There he met multi instrumentalist and violin maestro Richard Bourreau and together they started to plot ways of turning their kaleidoscopic musical and cultural interests into a new live music combo. The very first Lo'Jo appearance, as a trio, took place in Angers in 1982.

For the next seven years or so Lo'Jo morphed into a multitude of different line-ups and performed, on average, three or four times a year. The group was inextricably linked with a loose tribe of dedicated counterculturalists; acrobats, painters, street theatre performers, sculptors, trapeze artists, writers, poets and movie makers, in short, alternative types of every description - who cohabited and cooperated in the vibrant subculture of the region. For that reason Lo'Jo concerts were often more like events, with a rich variety of artistic talents pooled to create memorable multi-sensory feasts for their audiences. They were more a tribe than a group, with the barefooted Péan leading the dance like some gypsy caïd, and were thus quite logically known as Lo'Jo Triban throughout much of this period. In 1988 Lo'Jo hooked up with a famed local theatre troupe called the Companie Jo Bithume with whom they created a complete musical called 'Décrocher La Lune' ('Unhook the Moon') which subsequently toured throughout France and then went further afield to Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Poland. Lo'Jo released their first CD 'Depuis Très Longtemps' ('For A Long Time') in 1989, which comprised the music for the 'Décrocher La Lune' show.

By the early 1990s Lo'Jo were beginning to establish a unique musical identity which wove all kinds of brightly coloured musical threads like French chanson, African, Arabic, Romany, Funk, Jazz, Dub music together with street theatre and circus performance, two artistic spheres that are very popular and highly regarded in France, as well as the unleashed metaphysical wanderings of Denis Péan's lyrical imagination. The line-up was also condensing into a relatively stable shape consisting of bass, drums, violin, guitar, vocals, accordion and sax. At around this time, Nadia, the first of the two famous Nid El Mourid backing vocalist sisters joined the band. In 1991 Lo'Jo visited the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion with Companie Jo Bithume and then put together a new show called 'Dechpouk ze World' which they took to the Lincoln Center and CMJ festival in New York. They also released a one track 5 inch CD single called 'Siempre'.

In 1992 Lo'Jo finally began to be noticed in Paris, the centre of France's very Paris-centric music industry, and they signed an album deal with the FNAC Musique label. The next year they released their first fully fledged CD album, 'Fils de Zamal', produced by Jean-Michel Reusser who has also worked with Hector Zazou, Jean-Philippe Rykiel, Laurie Anderson and John Cage. Lo'Jo then collaborated with a Angers-based film collective called ZUR, as well as film director Frédérique Bourreau, brother of violinist Richard, to make a video for the first single from the album, which was entitled 'Under Ze Fire'. Lo'Jo release one further CD, an EP called 'G7 of Destruction and Artisans of Peace' for FNAC Musique, before the company imploded in a welter of back-biting and bankruptcies. The group were forced to retreat to their new haven in the village of Brissac-Quincé, south of Angers, to regroup and rethink.

Eventually, by sheer force of will and the tireless efforts of manager Philippe Brix, who has been with the group since the beginning, Lo'Jo managed to get back into the ring. They produced a multimedia show with film-activists ZUR called 'Triban de Lo'Jo' in 1994 and toured in Europe. The next year Lo'Jo put together a special show for the annual Chalon-sur Soane street theatre festival, a mecca for street performers from all over the world and Yamina joined her elder sister Nadia as a backing vocalist. With a consolidated line-up of musicians, manager and technicians, Lo'Jo teamed up with Max Amphoux, owner of EMMA music publishers and label, a veteran of the French music scene who quickly recognised the band's unique appeal, and, in the face of widespread indifference from many quarters of French show business, agreed to finance a new CD. Lo'Jo also began to work with the English producer and guitarist Justin Adams, famed for his work with Sinead O'Connor, Natasha Atlas, Ghostland, Jah Wobble and now, Robert Plant. Together Adams and Lo'Jo recorded the CD 'Mojo Radio' at Black Box Studios near Angers. The album was released on EMMA in 1997 to generous enthusiasm from most quarters. In the meantime Lo'Jo created another multimedia extravaganza with ZUR entitled 'Cinémizik' and Denis Péan published his first book of writings called 'Les Passagers Ordinaires des Temps'.

By this time Lo'Jo had been spotted by Peter Gabriel's WOMAD Festival organisation, and they proceeded to perform in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, South Africa and the USA under it's banner. Thanks to the fantastic good fortune that Angers is twinned with Bamako, the capital of Mali in West Africa, Lo'Jo also started performing in Africa and creating links with African artists, notably the Gangbé Brass Band from Cotonou in Benin, who they collaborated and recorded with for more than two years. Nicolas 'Kham' Meslien and Mathieu Rousseau, joined Lo'Jo as bassist and drummer respectively, and the group recorded their second CD with EMMA and Justin Adams, 'Bohème De Cristal', which was released in 2000. Meanwhile the group toured ceaselessly, with WOMAD and under their own steam, leaving few corners of the globe untouched by their pan-cultural delirium. They also re-visited Bamako several times and it was there that they met the Saharan group Tinariwen, ex-rebels from the 1990s Touareg uprising, with whom they minted a solid and lasting relationship. Various Touareg musicians, and others from different parts of West Africa were invited to Les Nuits Toucouleurs, an festival which Lo'Jo help to organise each year in Angers. Lo'Jo also began talking with their Touareg interlocutors of a harebrained scheme to organise a festival of music deep in the Sahara desert.

It was in January 2001, under the first full moon, and lunar eclipse, of the new Millennium that the Festival in the Desert took place for the first time, in the plains of In-Amadjel in the far north-eastern corner of Mali. The remote desert location, the attempted hi-jack of the PA system, the visit of the Malian prime minister and the event in general have already achieved legendary status. Lo'Jo were one of the few non-African groups to perform at the event. A year later they released 'Lune des Siens', their third CD for EMMA productions. The general consensus is that this album, later released as 'Au Cabaret Sauvage' on the World Village label in the USA and other European countries, is the best Lo'Jo have ever produced. After almost two decades of mind-boggling musical adventures and gritty survival against numerous odds Lo'Jo have honed their sound down to something incomparable either in France or the rest of the world. The English paper The Independent have called them "one of the best live bands in the world" and Billboard hailed 'Au Cabaret Sauvage' as "one of the world releases of 2002".

In 2003 Lo'Jo performed at the third edition of the Festival in the Desert
which took place near Timbuktu in northern Mali. They appear on the
resulting CD and DVD. In 2003 they also released their first live CD - "Ce Soir là"

In 2004 and 2005 they continued to tour extensively throughout Europe North
America, Australasia and Japan. They also released a new version of "Au
Cabaret Sauvage" with an extra track as well as a travelogue DVD of their
visit to the Festival of the Desert

Their new album "Bazar Savant" is being released in January 2006 in France,
and will be released elsewhere later in 2006. LO'JO will be touring a lot in
2006 in support of this release

The tribe keeps going from strength to strength.

      Andy Morgan