Martin Cradick and Baka Beyond appeared on the Bob Harris show on 20th June 1998, here is a transcription of their conversation:

BH I first started hearing your music, obviously, on the Meeting Pool album, and one of the things that so much interested me about the make up of that record was the mix of the field recordings that you made, you brought those back then and added instrumentation in the UK, and the Meeting Pool was the result of that, and I thought that the way that you had done it was so sensitive and just so right and nice. It was as a result of spending time, was it not, with the Baka people - can you talk about them and describe them and their situation for us?

MC They are hunter-gatherers and they live quite deep into the forest, it's about ten kilometers from the nearest town which has no electricity itself and that is being put in about now for the first time. So they spend a great deal of time sitting around playing music and then the men go off hunting and the women gathering the food. But music is central to all aspects of their life partly...I've come to the conclusion that its because living in the forest it's vitally important to hear things so right from the moment you are born you are learning to listen because every sound you hear is important to life, whereas when you grow up in the west or even in the towns in Africa there are so many sounds that you have to cut out you are actually learning not to listen - and that just makes them brilliant musicians because 90% of music is listening.

BH Funnily enough on the general topic of noise pollution - so many people are becoming more and more aware of it now, aren't they, and the sounds that go on around us in our lives, which actually aren't the real sounds of life, as it were....

MC Yes, I mean, people complain about noisy neighbours. Personally I live in Bath and back onto an estate and I quite enjoy the noise of the neighbours. It's the noise of traffic that provides this big background hum that just cuts off sounds. Su does workshops at schools and one of the tests that the children do is before they play any music they are just quiet and listen to see what is the furthest thing away that they can hear and invariably it's the nearest road to the school and you can't hear beyond that.

BH So the Meeting Pool album came out, and since then you have maintained your links with the Baka people, haven't you? How is the relationship between you and them working.

MC In fact the first album we did was Spirit Of The Forest, which was much more of a collaboration with music we wrote in the forest with the Baka. The Meeting Pool came out after a band had toured some of that, so it is a further evolution. When we brought Spirit Of The Forest out we also brought out Heart Of The Forest which is purely recordings of their traditional music. There are royalties for that and royalties for their compositions and playing on Spirit Of The Forest and for playing on the other albums. We put into a charity called One Heart. We've just been back there to discuss with them projects for the funds from that and it's on-going really.

BH What sort of projects are you talking about.

MC Well, their situation is very basic at the moment. The first thing that has to be done now is in order to move towards getting some land rights for them. In Cameroon they have a community forest program, but first they have to be recognised as Cameroon citizens. We managed to get the whole band identity cards last time we were there, and then the next stage is to get legitimacy for their village and then grow out to legitimacy for their area of the forest.

BH I haven't got the first two albums, I must get hold of copies of those and start to play them. My introduction to the group was the Meeting Pool and I was just so struck by the charm and beauty of it. The new album, Journey Between, is another move on again because there is less direct use of field recordings in this one, am I right about that?

MC Yes, I didn't want to use field recordings just for the sake of it, and the music moves on, and in between recording The Meeting Pool, I was helping out Saga N'Gom's band in Senegal so I went over recording there. While I was there some of the musicians there, Alassane N'Gom particularly, sang on the track 'Migrations', we had a very rough early mix of it, well not even a mix of it - a rough backing of it, and he improvised some vocals for it which we have incorporated, and the percussion group, Kakucheche, were touring in England and they came to our studio to lay down some percussion. The Baka music is very good as a foundation that a lot of music from all over the world can relate to so it becomes quite a good fusion point to mix different culture's music, but it's more from individual musicians that you meet rather than some grand idea of let's go and meet some people from Timbuktu. You meet people just from travelling and from playing music together - it's communication - finding the common points in different musicians.

BH I was reading in the news just recently that it's precisely this group of people whose lives are currently under threat because there's a lot of deforestation going on there, isn't there?

MC Well, there's a lot of logging happening in Cameroon now. They, like most of the countries there have a national debt and to pay the interest on that they are pretty much forced to be selling off their national resources. So they have sold a lot of concessions. The area where the particular band we were living in has been logged in the past and there's not active logging going on there - but all around there is, and the forest is shrinking in size and so there is a lot of the Baka who are in very great problems, and some who are living further in where it's not really interfered too much yet. But it's an ongoing problem. The Cameroon government have quite good restrictions on it, but in reality this doesn't make a lot of difference.

BH That seems to be the way doesn't it. Do you think this represents a serious threat to the ongoing life for them as it has been. Are they going to have to change?

MC Well, they are changing in that there is more and more influence. But the logging threat is more from building roads and people coming in, more trade, more farming, rather than clear-cutting the forest as they did in South America, for instance. But it is affecting them. We've been going there for six years and it's difficult to generalise beyond our experience there. In your limited experience of being there you see changes each time. Some of them are real changes, some of them you just notice different things from the last time you were there. I wouldn't like to say exactly what is their specific problem as far as the logging goes.

BH Is it difficult for you not to get involved in the politics of the situation.

MC Yes, I used to think that music and politics should keep well apart, but, as soon as you do anything in Africa you suddenly realise that politics is involved. You do your best to circumvent it, but last time we were there I spent three days with the delege de culture for the Western Province because he discovered what we were doing and wanted to be in control of the money that's going through. It's not for me to say that he was going to do anything bad with it but it's like as soon as there is money there it's like a pot of honey for people to come around.

BH I just want to touch on the One Heart Project, because One Heart is really the umbrella title that describes what we've been talking about - the relationship between yourself and the musicians that you work with. Can you outline the aims and goals of One Heart.

MC The name comes from the Baka women who, when we asked what should be done with anything that was gained in the west from the music. They said as long as it is done with one heart then that's alright with us. Ideally it would be nice to expand it to other music as well but basically using music to raise funds to plough straight back to development projects for communities. So the music, especially traditional music...there are a lot of people in other parts of Cameroon, who are very good musicians, but they see the only way of making money is by playing jazz in big hotels so the traditional music gets lost. So its a matter of making a channel so that they can see returns from their traditional music, and it gives that respect, and it's there for the community as well, which is what the music is for.

BH Let me just give the address of One Heart because you can contact Baka Beyond and learn about all these various projects from: Global Music Exchange, 4 Thomas Street, Bath BA1 5NW. There is a web site address http://baka.co.uk. Many thanks for being on the program this afternoon.

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