Musical mirage under the desert sun
All the members of Tinariwen belong to the nomadic Touareg tribe of the Southern Sahara, but they have built up a worldwide following due to their unique style. Nick Ahad reports.
ROBERT Plant says their music is what "I had been looking for all my life".
Bono is a fan, as is Thom Yorke. Carlos Santana says being on stage with them is a joy because "when I hear them, I hear the beginning of music... this is where it all comes from, they are the originators".
Describing themselves as guitar-poets, Tinariwen hail from the Southern Sahara desert, a part of the nomadic Touareg tribe. They also have a worldwide following, with fans who feel a deep connection to their music.
Not for no reason were they asked to support the Rolling Stones. The group was founded in the late Seventies by band leader Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, singing songs about his people, whose way of life hung in the balance due to catastrophic drouts which decimated their animal herds.
They joined rebel camps in the early Eighties, becoming the official mouthpiece of the Touareg rebellions, with their songs carrying messages of awareness and resistance to the far corners of the desert.
In 1990 all the founding members of the group took part in the Touareg rebellions in northern Mali and Niger.
After the rebellion, the group joined up with French band Lo'Jo and began to spread their music wider across the globe. The band wrote songs which became the soundtrack for a generation of exiled Touareg youth, living in exile in Algeria and Libya.
The band's reputation grew through the Eighties and Nineties, leading in 2001 to The Festival in the Desert, staged in Timbuktu, and the place where they first were heard by Robert Plant.
The rest of the world took note and since then the band have toured around the world and are recognised as one of the most significant bands to emerge from Africa, perhaps ever. With the release of their third album last year, Aman Iman, the band went into an entirely new league. The music was recognised as something significant which came from such a deep well that it could connect with anyone – hence the five-star reviews from publications as disparate as The Sun, New York Times and Marie Claire and awards from the BBC for World Music.
It would take a book to truly understand Tinariwen, who play at Bradford's St George's Hall tonight. Perhaps the band is best summed up by this quote from Rolling Stone: "Tinariwen capture the poetry and hardships of nomadic life and exile hypnotic, modal/vocals and a tangle of sidewinding riffs that sound like a mirage come true: Keith Richards, Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure picking side by side under an unforgiving sun."
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Tuesday 07 February 2012
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