Live tonight at 8.15pm BST, we kick off our collaboration with Boiler Room with a livestream of Tony Allen’s performance at Dekmantel festival in Amsterdam, in association with the British Council. Gateways – Tony Allen and Nigeria is a week-long exploration of Nigerian music, using the great drummer as its starting point, and moving through the Afrobeats scene, Nigerian disco, the way technology is changing the music scene in the country, and taking in key figures in modern Nigerian music, such as Don Jazzy and Davido.

Tomorrow, we’ll be bringing you Boiler Room’s film of Tony Allen offering a drum lesson, and a brilliant intro with the maestro from G2 Film & Music, by Tim Jonze, in which he discusses – among many other things – how to get off heroin, how European promoters won’t let him play for long enough, and his relationship with Fela Kuti, with whom he invented and refined the style known as Afrobeat.

“There are many things I know about Fela that nobody knows,” he tells us. “A lot of discussions we had, that we never discussed with nobody. So of course I pity him when he is passing through all these rigours of being beaten up. Many limbs, broken legs, everything. I used to pity him – why do you want to do this? At a point I just said: ‘This guy is going to be an icon, and they will kill him one day.’ Because nobody ever tried that in [Nigeria]. To sing against the government? Most of the bands I knew were praising them, they would do flattery in order to become rich. Fela was against flattery, and so was I. I don’t want to play the music of flattery.”

You’ll be able to read that online from 8am tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy the show – after it finishes, it will loop for 72 hours, so you can catch up over the weekend if you miss it on Thursday night.