Tuesday 20/10/09 Tinariwen @ Sheffield Academy

As opposed to the contrived cod-rebellion of most of what passes off as rock music, Tinariwen are the real deal, a band’s whose music emerged as a by-product of their active involvement in the long-standing, deadly feud between nomadic Tuaregs and Malian government troops.

With a past bloody enough to the make the most notorious gangstas hard core rap has to offer quake in their box-fresh trainers, you’d expect Tinariwen’s music to throb with barely contained aggression. Instead, they infuse traditional Tuareg folk song formats with the added bite of the sharpest electric guitar sounds this side of vintage blues masters, landing with a majestic sound that makes the warmth of longing and nostalgia coexist harmoniously with a harshness that conveys the unforgiving conditions in which Tuaregs have been eking out a living for centuries. No wonder the band’s been one of the most sustained success stories of the African music boom of the last few years. The entirely deserved, wide-spread acclaim’s reflected in the diversity of tonight’s enthusiastic near-capacity crowd, with people you wouldn’t normally expect to encounter at the same event - dreadlocked neo-hippies, hipsters, respectable elderly folks – united by an appreciation for Tinariwen’s one-off brand of desert blues.  

It takes a while for Tinariwen to warm up tonight, the first few tunes resembling a laidback soundcheck rather than an actual show in front of a paying crowd. By the time main songwriter Ibrahim Ag Alhabib steps up to the microphone clutching his battered-beyond belief guitar, however, the eight-piece are firing on all cylinders, replacing the miserable, freezing drizzle falling on the streets outside with liberal sprinklings of the intense desert heat of Tinariwen’s home terrain in the Tuareg regions of Mali, with results that milk hypnotic prowess from sparingly administrated, flab-free elements – call and response vocals, percussion, subtly dub-influenced bass lines, repetitive riffs - that in the wrong hands would be a one-way ticket to monotony. The set’s drawn more or less equally from the band’s four internationally available albums, ‘The Radio Tisdas Sessions’ (2001), ‘Amassakoul’ (2004), ‘Aman Iman’ (2007) and ‘Imidiwan’ (2009). Picking highlights would be a bit beside the point, though. Live, Tinariwen are all about cooking up a unified feel, an enchanting forward-momentum where borders between individual songs become meaningless. 

In the absence of Tinariwen’s female backing singers, Ag Alhabib’s the undisputed focal point, a totem of gently imposing cool who looks on in wry amusement as his fellow singer-guitarists Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni and Hassan Ag Touhami embark on a range of crowd-pleasing dance routines. By the time the band close the proceedings with the lean groove of ‘Amassakoul’ highlight ‘Chet Boghassa’, however, even Ibrahim has to crack a smile, so all-pervasively powerful is the fine-tuned assault of this remarkable band in full flight.