I have always wondered what on Earth actually happens in Milton Keynes. On 7 August, it turns out, quite a lot did. There are some festival line-ups that you look at and wonder how on earth everyone ended up on the same poster. Erykah Badu. Ms. Lauryn Hill. Wyclef Jean. Fireboy DML. Giggs. YG Marley. Zion Marley. Somehow, last Friday, they all converged on the frankly enormous Milton Keynes National Bowl for the UK debut of Diaspora Calling!.
Conceived and curated by Ms. Lauryn Hill, Diaspora Calling! brought more than 35,000 people together for a celebration spanning generations of Black music and culture, moving between Afrobeats, hip-hop, R&B, soul, reggae, UK rap and more. The scale of the National Bowl felt appropriate. It is absolutely massive, but its sloping landscape meant you could choose your own version of the festival: head down into the crowd and get properly amongst it, or sit further up the hill with a drink and take in the stage from above.
There was plenty happening away from the stage too. Food and drink stalls stretched across the site, alongside a curated marketplace of diaspora-led artists, designers, entrepreneurs and independent businesses. It gave the day more of a festival atmosphere than simply a giant outdoor concert, and with that much space, there was room to wander, eat, drink and settle in for what was essentially an entire day of music.
Our own day started slightly strangely. Getting into the venue took long enough that Fireboy DML became the soundtrack to our queue, his set floating over the walls of the Bowl while we waited outside. Once inside, it became apparent that we hadn’t missed very much: his appearance was surprisingly brief, somewhere in the realm of ten to fifteen minutes, with only a handful of songs. Giggs followed with another unexpectedly short set, although his brought a surprise appearance from Kano for ‘P’s & Q’s’ and ‘3 Wheel-ups’. Given the calibre of artists on the bill, these blink-and-you-miss-them appearances felt a little confusing. Just as you began settling into a performance, it seemed to be over.
And then came Erykah Badu.
There are artists you know are legends, and then there is the slightly surreal experience of actually watching one demonstrate exactly why in front of you. Badu was breathtaking. Genuinely, easily one of the best live performances I have ever seen.
Everything about her commanded attention. The visuals were stunning, the styling immaculate, and Badu herself possessed an almost ridiculous amount of cool. There is probably a more sophisticated critical term for it, but sometimes the only accurate assessment is that somebody simply has swag. Badu has enough for several lifetimes.
Her set moved through tracks including ‘Appletree’, ‘Window Seat’, ‘On & On’ and ‘Back in the Day’, but it wasn’t simply the familiarity of hearing those songs live that made the performance so special. There was something almost magnetic about watching her occupy a stage. Every detail, from her outfit to the visuals surrounding her, felt completely assured. Seeing an artist with that kind of legacy perform in front of you can sometimes feel like you’re simply witnessing history because you’re supposed to recognise its importance. Badu didn’t need the weight of her reputation to make the moment feel significant. She was just that good.
Afterwards came a fairly substantial wait for the night’s final act, but rather than draining the atmosphere, the DJ set in between became one of those unexpectedly lovely festival moments. As the sun began setting over the Bowl, the music turned the hillside into its own party. People danced, screamed lyrics at each other, sat around with food and drinks and generally seemed delighted to be there. It was a chance to stop waiting for the next Big Performance and simply enjoy where we were.
And then, at around 10pm, Ms. Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean arrived.
The closing set celebrated 30 years of The Fugees’ The Score, revisiting ‘Ready or Not’ and ‘Fu-Gee-La’ while moving between their individual catalogues too. Wyclef performed ‘911’, while Hill’s solo material included ‘Ex-Factor’, ‘To Zion’ and ‘Doo Wop (That Thing)’, the latter bringing Badu back onto the stage.
Hill and Jean were backed by a brilliant live band, and together they completely took over the Bowl. Wyclef at one point played guitar with his teeth, because apparently merely playing it with his hands wasn’t sufficiently impressive. Hill, meanwhile, remained a force at the centre of everything. Hearing songs that have travelled across decades and generations performed live by the people responsible for them was one of those rare moments where the enormity of the artists in front of you really hits.
That sense of generations meeting became even more literal when YG Marley and Zion Marley joined them onstage. YG performed ‘Praise Jah in the Moonlight’, while Zion paid tribute to his grandfather Bob Marley with ‘Three Little Birds’ before performing his own ‘Best of Me’. Watching that musical lineage unfold on the same stage felt particularly fitting for an event explicitly concerned with the connections between generations and across the African diaspora.
In fact, that was perhaps Diaspora Calling! at its best. The concept behind the event extends beyond putting together an impressive line-up: Hill conceived it as a multidisciplinary platform connecting Africa and its global diaspora through music, visual art, storytelling and culture. At the National Bowl, that idea didn’t need to be overly explained. You could see it happening in front of you, from Badu to Fireboy, Giggs to the Marleys, Fugees classics to a crowd spanning generations.
The only problem was that the night didn’t end so much as get switched off.
At 11pm, while the performance was still going, the sound was cut for curfew. Suddenly, that was it. No proper goodbye, no final applause for Hill, no collective exhale after spending the best part of the day building towards this set. After such a huge celebration, the lack of closure felt bizarre, particularly when the final performance was still very clearly underway.
It was an oddly anticlimactic ending to an otherwise extraordinary day. And yes, attempting to get back from Milton Keynes afterwards was its own personal circle of hell. But somewhere between watching Erykah Badu give one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, dancing on the hill as the sun went down and watching Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean celebrate thirty years of The Score, the logistical suffering became pretty easy to forgive.
Diaspora Calling! was ambitious, occasionally confusing, sometimes chaotic, and home to performances I will probably remember for the rest of my life. For a debut on this scale, that’s a pretty difficult proposition to argue with.
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Words: Tara Choudhary
Photographer: I2I Imagery & Neo Gilder