Music

They’ve been described as ‘the Stones and The Clash of the Sahara rolled into one’, compared to The White Stripes and feature in a documentary called ‘The Guitars Of Revolution’.

Tinariwen are nomadic Touareg blues musicians from the southern Sahara. Formed in the early ’80s, their music was incubated in Gaddafi’s rebel camps as their people fought a bitter war of independence against the Malian government, and their songs of hope and home became part of the resistance’s folklore: giving birth to an iconic image of the warrior musician riding into battle with a gun in one hand and a guitar in the other. It’s a fabulous image that carries echoes of the guitar-slinging Sandinistas or Woody Guthrie’s slogan ‘This Guitar Kills Fascists’ and it’s especially resonant for those of us who yearn for music that stands for more than the self aggrandisement and love for excess that marrs so much rock and rap.

Tinariwen first toured the UK with Algerian rai singer Rachid Taha as part of the African Soul Rebels franchise. Their latest, and frankly brilliant, album ‘Aman Iman’ (‘Water Is Life’) is produced by Robert Plant’s guitarist Justin Adams, who gives their trancey desert blues a glistening rock edge. It’s released, oddly enough, on Independiente and their image as gun-toting rebels certainly gives their music an edge labelmates Travis don’t have; main man Ibrahim Ag Alhabib is a brooding presence who you’d frankly fancy to kick the butt of a dozen Liam Gallaghers. But it’s also an image that can obscure the beauty of their music: make no mistake about it, they are one most entrancing, compelling bands we’ve heard in a long time. So it’s hard not to feel that boiling them down to a stereotype of guns, guitars and goat stew is, well, a bit trivial.

Indeed when we caught up with the band at the beginning of their European tour, co-leader Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni was keen to stress that the band are more than just a stereotype. ‘Our message is that we’re an ancient, complex, nuanced culture and just as you don’t all wear bowler hats, there is more to us than the cliché of a bluesman on a camel’. It’s a complexity that comes across in their otherworldly music, which combines primeval desert soul with Santana-esque guitars and hypnotic Eastern modes, all driven by rhythmic handclaps, percussion and ancient call-and-response vocals, as they move effortlessly between scuzzy blues and mesmerisingly funky drones. Which isn’t to say that they haven’t in turn been influenced by Western music. As Abdallah points out, ‘You have to remember that we started out as a collective of singer-songwriters and we all brought our own influences. I was into country music, others were into Ali Farka Touré. Santana was a big influence, even Boney M – after all in the desert, it’s hard to be choosy.’ And that’s the great thing about Tinariwen, for all of their otherness, their music is oddly familiar and when they nod their heads like members of the Quo or one of the band starts dancing like Alexei Sayle you realise that, at heart, we all want the same thing – to lose ourselves in music. Few bands let you do it better.