Armed only with his guitar, Michael Franti, former frontman with Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, headed to the world's most dangerous city - to play music on the street. He was surprised by what he found, he tells Brian Boyd

WHEN Michael Franti tried to assemble a bunch of musicians to go on a musical tour of Iraq, there weren't many takers. His band, Spearhead, turned him down and other musician acquaintances thought the trip too dangerous. Undeterred, the ex-Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy man arrived at Baghdad Airport for his musical mission - much to the befuddlement of the local security team.

"When I was planning the trip, I thought I would need a special US State Department clearance or something like that," says Franti. "But you don't need anything like that, you just show up in Iraq with your passport. Put it this way, I've found it more difficult to get into certain European countries. When the people at the airport asked me what I, an American, was going to be doing in Baghdad, I just told them that I would be playing music for people on the street. They said they had never heard that one before." After the officials looked through their book of immigration codes, they decided to classify him as a tourist.

The idea for the street tour came to him when he was watching the coverage of the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. "There seemed to be this celebratory tone and it seemed like the only voices being heard were those of the generals and the politicians. I wondered how the Iraqi people felt about what had happened, so I decided to go and ask them," he says.

He was surprised by just how bad conditions were in Baghdad. "It's nothing like you see on the news," he says. "At first, you're amazed at how normal it looks but then you find that every third building has been blown out and there is a shortage of most everything, mainly electricity. Also, the military presence is huge."

Taking to the streets with his guitar, he found that the local people were astonished to find out he was an American. "The people told me that I was the first American they had met who wasn't pointing a rifle in their face. They wanted to talk to me about the war - they really believed Bush when he said he was coming to liberate them but they feel really let down by what has happened since. Not just that the government is more and more controlled by the US but by the daily conditions of the place," he says. "There has been a 400% increase in cases of cancer and this is because of the use by the US of depleted uranium weapons."

At one stage, he played in front of US troops in the Baghdad Sheraton hotel bar - singing his anti-war anthem, Bomb the World. "You can't just sing songs about the war to people who agree with you," he says. "You have to sing them to the people who are making the war. It was a strange experience and they were very curious about me and what I was doing in Baghdad. Obviously, they couldn't talk to me about their personal views on the war but I have since met veterans back in the US who have talked about their total opposition to the war. I found a big difference in the reaction to me, depending on whether the US troops were on or off duty. When they were on duty, they would tell me to stop playing music, when they were off duty they reacted a bit differently."

After Baghdad, he went on to Israel and Palestine and when he returned to the US he found he had a album's worth of new songs and 200 hours of video footage from his travels that he has now made into a DVD. The album, Yell Fire!, is a politically-infused affair much in keeping with Franti's previous work. With the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy he recorded Television, The Drug Of The Nation in reaction to the first Gulf War and, since he has moved on to record with Spearhead, he has retained his polemical edge.

"I had never intended to release the DVD of my time in Iraq and Israel-Palestine, I just thought I would put up some of the stuff on my website but, when I started to edit the footage, I was recording Yell Fire! at the same time and the two sort of merged together," he says. "I called the DVD I Know I'm Not Alone and it has me talking to people on the ground in these war zones and documenting my experiences. I even tracked down the Iraqi heavy metal band Black Scorpions. They rehearse in a building with no electricity. They're in a basement and they run a generator and have to play their broken-down amplifiers over the roar and sing over the sound of the generator. When they break a string, they use bits of telephone wire to replace it".

I Know I'm Not Alone was never intended to be released commercially but Franti toured the DVD around small theatres in the US "It really seemed to spread very quickly, I started hearing about all these home screenings of the film," he says.

"People were hiring theatres to show it and it was shown in synagogues and mosques." Director Anthony Minghella has said of the DVD: "Watch this film and insist that Michael Franti becomes President of the United States".

His new single with Spearhead, also called I Am Not Alone, has earned him more airplay than anything else he has done with the band and he feels there has been a substantial change in people's attitudes to the war. "It now feels a bit like what was happening during the Vietnam War," he says. "Back then you found that the real protests back home didn't really begin until a few years after that war started and I think we're seeing that now with Iraq. The difference here is that we had no economic reasons to stay in Vietnam, but we do have them to stay in Iraq."

Since returning from the country, he has found himself more and more enraged by the ongoing coverage of the war. "You hear about all these new weapons they are sending over and the whole military campaign, but very little of the human cost. That really strikes me now, more than before. The carnage of war is impossible to understand until you get up close."

"I don't have any clearer answers now about how the conflict will end than before I went to Iraq but I do know that the situation could be benefited by an international body of support with nations willing to go there to help with the human crisis that exists there. That could spread a lot of goodwill and we're desperate for that right now. I'm not an idealist but I think there could be solutions here."

He expected a backlash after returning from Iraq but it never happened. "Now I even find myself playing shows in very conservative areas of the country - and that has never happened before. I've never been so much in the mainstream," he says. "The only slight problem I had was when I was held up by customs in the US for quite a while on my return and they were asking me about all of the places I had been. But I haven't been taken to Guantanamo Bay yet!"

Yell Fire! is available now on the Anti label. Michael Franti and Spearhead play Dublin's Tripod on December 2nd