Early in the morning, the slender Ayo returns from her walk on the banks of the Seine. “Paris is beautiful, but I could no longer live here, assures the singer, proudly wearing a cap with the logo “Tahiti”, where she now lives. I need to go surfing every morning. There are people who go to church. My temple is the ocean.” The German singer of Nigerian origin, who launched her career in France in 2006 by releasing the album Joyful (400,000 copies sold), had not returned to Paris, her adopted city, for several years. The last time was at the end of her tour for her album Royal, published in 2020.
The author of the folk supplication Down on My Knees So she found a new passion besides music: surfing. She is so addicted to the waves that she would have liked to participate in the Olympic Games with the Nigerian team. She quickly abandoned the idea. “I couldn’t keep up with the competitions, she recognizes. To qualify, you really have to put all your time into surfing and, with the concerts, the music, it was impossible. However, that’s what feeds my children.”
Nor would she have had time to record the remarkable Mami Wata, her seventh album, released on September 20, with which she finally gives us some news. A record of twelve songs that she wrote in Tahiti and that she will defend during about fifty concerts from the day after its release. The tour finished, she will return to Papeete “just before Christmas”, with her daughter, Billie-Eve, 14, and her son Julius, 7, who follow her in her globetrotting life.
Her eldest, Nile, 18, has chosen to live in New York with his father, reggae singer Patrice. She dedicated a song to him on the album, Closer, where she sings while accompanying herself on the guitar: “I wish I could hold you like before. We were traveling around the world, I would never have left you alone. As long as you were with me, you were home.” The United States, “a country I’m not a big fan of”, she said. She gave birth to her third child there, but her daughter was unable to get a visa to join them. So, to be able to join Billie-Eve in Europe, she went to live in Portugal.
“The universe sends us little messages”
The small family settled in a house along the Atlantic and began to practice surfing intensively, which they had discovered when they were younger in Hossegor, in the Landes. “I was surfing every morning and every evening, she says, all smiles. During Covid-19, it saved me, it was my therapy, otherwise I would have gone completely crazy. When you’re used to being active and it suddenly stops, it’s terrible. I was on tour for the release of my previous record, Royal, when President Macron announced that the borders would close on March 16, 2020. I returned to Portugal, my musicians returned to France. But, over the course of the various lockdowns, the restrictions linked to the pandemic have become stricter, prohibiting all gatherings, even those in the open air. “With my friends, she remembers, We still went surfing and it became a game of hide-and-seek with the police, who came to pull us out of the water by boat or in 4x4s on the beach.”
You have 52.37% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.