Stewart Copeland went to darkest Africa and returned with a Land Roverful of samples, songs and stories.

"In the North of the Congo, The Bantu are the ruling tribe. Part of the reason why they are the ruling tribe is that they're two inches taller than the Pygmies."

Stewart Copeland's cocktail party stories have become ridiculously interesting of late. Anecdotes about Masai rituals and Zairean raindances nestle cheek by jowl with tales of everyday Megastars and their favourite guitar strings.

This wealth of experience and subsequent show-stopping memoirs are attributable to what Copeland calls a "shrivelled personality".

In the Police you live an existence that's very far removed from everyday life," he explains. "You're shielded from normal problems so your personality begins to shrink and shrivel."

To combat this personality-as-prune syndrome The Police decided to give it a rest for a couple of years and focus their attentions on more personal matters. Sting and his multifarious talents recorded a solo LP and reacquainted himself with the thespian art. Andy Summers made a foray into the world of film scoring and Copeland, who'd already achieved major success with his soundtrack for Coppola's Rumblefish went one better and materialised in Africa to film an hour-long travelogue-cum-cultural statement. The Rhythmatist is a study of the civilised and unmapped areas of Central Africa's French colonies, Congo and Zaire, and is loosely based around Copeland's tongue-in-cheek quest for the essence of rhythm. Whilst on location he found himself becoming increasingly interested in the indigenous music of these regions and in particular Lingala, the pidgin French singing that is peculiar to the area. So he recorded a great deal of complete Folk songs and samples of voices and drums and took them home to rearrange and embellish with his own ideas. The result is a fascinating hybrid of sounds and musical cultures that is now an LP as well as a video. But was there a deeper motive than the flippant Fleetwoodesque search for the origins of rhythm?

"For some mysterious reason," philosophises Copeland, "this obscure talent that I have with rhythm is rewarded incredibly by society. Why is it that society rewards me because I am clever with rhythms more than it rewards people who are clever with a scalpel and save people's lives? But I wasn't out there to expand the frontiers of musicology and bring back a thesis on the drop beat of the Giriami — mind you I did find out a lot about that. This quest for the origins of rhythm is too corny for words. Ginger Baker went out there and so did Mick Fleetwood and they came back with documentaries on drums and drummers in Africa. There's more to it than that. Africa as a continent has a natural sense of rhythm and that's nothing racial — it's just that the societies there are a lot more cohesive because they sing and dance together more. There's less of a distinction between artist and audience. Music is much closer to the surface."

To talk about African music per se is a massive generalisation. Regional music varies enormously and there are hundreds of regions.

"You can't talk about African music as a whole," he explains. "There's the Fela Kuti/King Sunny Adetype Nigerian music which is electric guitars, bass and drums and that comes from Benin and the Ivory Coast. Then there's South Africa which you probably heard on Malcolm McLaren's album Duck Rock. In Central Africa there's Lingala music from Congo and Zaire and is listened to right over to Kenya and Tanzania. The singers are just unbelievable, they wipe Fela and Sunny Ade right off the map. They're so melodic. The rhythms are Calypso type Salsa rhythms but the vocal melodies are really something. You'll get like three singers singing a harmony, really close, with loads of melodic twists and switches in the harmonies and the guys who play use the most incredible equipment. The drummers play these really dubious Rock drums with no names and the amps are so old, real sub-Generation X 1977 stuff — lots of weird Italian brand names."

In the Fourth World's unmapped jungle areas, amps and electric guitars are rendered useless due to the absence of electricity and the fact that you can't buy a plectrum for miles. Instruments used in the Fourth World are nearer to the bongo/tabla affairs associated with jungle music.

"They make their drums out of logs with human skins and elephant skins. Actually the Japanese are experimenting with synthesizing the human skin sound. I've got this elephant skin drum that still has bristles on it. It looks like it's been taken from an elephant's bum or something. The skins have dried up now so they don't sound so good but they sounded great in the jungle because of the moisture," he continues. "They tune their drums by throwing them in a fire or just replacing the skin with a thinner one or a tighter one."

Copeland spent many evenings jamming with Pygmies and the like who are renowned for their rhythmic capabilities. Had he, in the time out there, come across a better drummer or percussionist than himself?

"There wasn't anything they could do that I couldn't. There were some very surprised Africans in some obscure villages out there," he laughs. "When I played on their little kits they immediately broke out in huge smiles and suddenly I was their long lost brother and all the babies were brought out to be kissed. It was amazing how it broke down barriers. Music was an instant rapport.

"Some of the songs had very complex rhythms and arrangements. So I'd sort of hold it down while they went through their weird time changes and come back in by following their gyrations and things. It didn't really give you much of a chance to lurch out.

"The Pygmies perform this very strange sort of clapping music," he adds. "It normally starts with a kid clapping or banging a drum that seemed pretty incoherent to the untutored ear, but then everyone joins in and they all clap different rhythms. The thing is, that despite all clapping totally different patterns they're all held together by a tempo. Then they all start singing with their own rhythms so there's this amazing crosstalk of rhythm. I found myself clapping along with them, looking down at my hands thinking, 'If I ever start counting I'm gonna lose this completely'. I was in there completely but I had no idea what I was doing."

Technically, there was a major discrepancy between Copeland and the film crew on what recording equipment should be brought along on the trip.

"I went out there with a Sony PCM F1," he says. "We took a Nagra as well which for the last 30 years has been the state-of-the-art location sound recording equipment which is excellent equipment. But the PCM is a new generation and much, much better. The soundman thought the PCM was a real pain in the ass because it meant having to take two machines. Movie people think they have it all sussed out but they're actually in the dim dark ages when it comes to technology to do with audio and they have no idea that new things are being invented because audio is just one small element of their industry and they don't really give it that much thought. The director kept wanting to leave the PCM behind but I was saying, 'Listen, this is half the size of the audio system you're using, it's 50 times the quality and 10 times more dependable. Leave your prehistoric Nagra shit behind with its goddam reel to reel and stupid threading system."

Basically there were two sets of sound to record. One was the actual sync sound for the film and the other was music that Copeland could take home and "turn into a different kind of art".

"There was the sampling side," he elaborates, "where I just programmed samples of Africans shouting and screaming and the occasional drum into the Fairlight. The other side of it was where I'd record a whole song as opposed to a two second sample and I would overdub to that or I would harmonise that and overdub it onto something else. I played all kinds of stuff over it myself and I could do that because I have my SRC Friendchip Input Module which can track anything. Up until now bands who use drum boxes input the drum box first and put a tone on the tape so they can sync up all their other machines, but the SRC Input Module will take any pulse, even if the pulse is irregular, and lock all your machines to it. For instance the Giriama tribe fluctuate a hell of a lot but this thing follows all the fluctuations.

"That allowed me to overdub drum machines and synths. The main drum machines I used were my Oberheim DMX and the Fairlight. I've got a Linn 9000 on order but the Oberheim has got the best bass drum and snare drum sound you can get and it's so easily programmable I haven't needed to look for better. The other drums I used were Tama which I had set up individually. That allows you to play the rhythm track just playing what the rhythm requires and not having the rhythm dictated by the way your drums are set up. I mean I like that groove you get from a standard set-up but this called for something different. So I approached all the drums as separate instruments."

All the tracks were recorded at Copeland's home ("I've got the obligatory Rock star's house in the country with studio attached,") and he played the majority of instruments himself with occasional input from musicians like Ray Lema who contributed some guitar and keyboards.

"I played all the drums and some Heavy Metal guitar on a Fender Stratocaster," he says, "and some bass and keyboards. Whadja mean it's not heavy metal guitar. Listen it's as heavy as I can get it, I'm a drummer okay? Not a guitarist.

"We integrated the sounds in a lot of different ways. Different things obviously required different treatments. Like the Sambura are all vocal. They're seven feet tall warriors who have no responsibility apart from practising their spear chucking, being handsome and singing. So I put a lot of swaying string chords under their songs, no rhythm because they had enough of their own. And they pogo. They stand ramrod straight while they're singing and suddenly they jump four feet in the air. So while they're singing on the album there's all these peculiar slapping sounds when they jump up and down — out of time with everything. For the Giriama I put down a backbeat and a bass line — a heavy sort of Rock 'n' Roll track under what they do which is sing with drums. I had to do some serious editing and varispeeding because their tempos really do go all over the place."

A fine one to talk. But the ultimate question. How do you mike up a Pygmy?

"With a small microphone, I guess," he chuckles, "but some of them hadn't seen a white man before, let alone a microphone."

Surprisingly the entourage experienced no hostility on their visit.

"The only problem we encountered were the Masai warriors who immediately ask for money if you point a camera or a microphone at them. I mean these guys have bones through their noses and ears stretched down to their shoulders but they know the power of the dollar."

The only genuine fear that Copeland personally endured was self-inflicted.

"It was a stunt to have me drumming in a cage surrounded by lions," he says giving the impression that he's told this one a few times before." They had the lions in one half of a 20 acre compound which was divided by a 20 foot high fence. To get the lions to charge towards the cage they drove a meat truck around my cage which was festooned with lumps of meat. Anyway before you could blink these lions had cleared this 20 foot fence no problem and they were at the meat. Before this had happened they wanted me to stand in this seven foot cage with no roof but I was saying, 'Come on, my dog could jump seven foot,' and they thought I was being a prima donna for wanting a roof. I had to insist in the end.

"Now not many people know this but lions have very poor musical sensibility and I know this because they really hated my drumming. So one of them started trying to stop me by putting his paws into the cage and another one just hurled himself against it in the hope that the cage would give and he could eat me. We actually wanted to sync this scene with another one of me drumming the same pattern but I sped up so much in the lion scene that we couldn't do that. I mean,this guy with the real big paws had caught hold of the lugs on the bass drum and had scratched big lumps off of it and he was starting to get his nose under the cage. That's when my teeth chattering got louder than the drums."

Yes, but what drums were you using?

"I had to borrow them from the local safari centre," he laughs. "Actually I got worried that Tama were going to watch the film and see that I was playing Ludwig and using Ufip cymbals and Paiste were going to be pissed off. But then again I don't know if they have distribution in Kenya."