COMO, Italy. There’s a late winter sharpness in the air, while glints of sunlight dance off Lake Como. A soft haze envelops the surrounding hills where Fatoumata Diawara has lived since 2020. It’s an unexpectedly calm spot to find the Malian star. After all, she has endured a lifetime of dramatic exiles and escapes through Ivory Coast, Mali and France, and a suitably hectic music career which has seen her work with Damon Albarn, Herbie Hancock and Bobby Womack. As it transpires, this idyllic new life with her Italian husband Nico and their two young children is precisely what she needs. “I wanted to be super calm,” she says. “It’s very quiet here. That’s very important for me, it’s like a kind of meditation. I’m learning how to relax.”
Diawara has taken the funicular railway into town to meet Uncut. We sit outside a café across from the Gothic Como Cathedral, whose bells toll as we talk over lunchtime bowls of spaghetti pomodoro. Diawara values the meal’s “simplicity”, the same pure quality she seeks in her music. Today she wears a long dark padded winter coat and tall woollen hat. She laughs often and infectiously, though she is visibly moved when she reflects on the life-changing traumas that blighted her adolescence.
The cathedral is a few blocks away from Lake Como itself. In 2020, Diawara and Damon Albarn shot a promo video on the lake for the Gorillaz single “Désolé”. In the clip, the pair can be seen grinning with delight as they speed across the surface of the water.
“Damon’s like my protector,” Diawara laughs. “He always told me, ‘Any time you want a sister, I will be there for you.’ It’s very precious, this kind of love. He’s just invited me to go to Coachella. I’m so blessed. Because why me, an African sister? He could
