Tinariwen

Lloyd Gedye on Tinariwen and the future of Tuareg Rock.

When this band of former rebel warriors laid down their guns to pick up guitars they placed the Tuareg people on the cultural map, bringing some much-needed awareness to the plight of the nomadic people's difficult existence in the Sahara desert.

Although they regularly play shows across Europe and the United States, their music has also been promoted by mainstream media, raising the profile of the Tuareg's first rock stars.

Influential British music magazine Uncut recently awarded Tinariwen its Uncut Music Award for their 2009 album Imidiwan. The band returned to the desert with a makeshift studio set-up to record an earthier collection of songs for Imidiwan, after the experimentation of 2007's Aman Iman and 2004's Amassakoul, which saw the band incorporating some Western influences into their music.

So while Tinariwen return to their roots, their music has inspired a new generation of Tuareg rockers who are hell-bent on carrying their legacy forward. The most exciting of these young groups is Tamikrest, which translated from Tamasheq means junction, connection, knot or coalition -- a fitting name for the seven-piece band whose members hail from Mali, Niger and Algeria.

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Tinariwen Performance Review

Mark Jenkins reviews Tinariwen's performance at Lisner Auditorium.

It's been only a decade since the core members of Tinariwen, who performed Thursday night at Lisner Auditorium, were in revolt against the government of Mali. Nowadays, the group expresses the travails of the nomadic Tuareg (or Tamashek) people with music that meshes traditional melodies with twangy electric guitars. The robed and turbaned musicians' material doesn't offer a lot of variety, but its loping rhythms and scratchy, scrambling timbres are exhilarating.

Tinariwen is a loosely aligned outfit, and only five of the 15 musicians featured on its latest album, "Aman Iman: Water Is Life," appeared at Lisner. In promotional photographs, bushy-haired Ibrahim Ag Alhabib usually stands at the center, but on this tour Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni led the band (as he did in 2004). By singing solo or playing acoustic guitar Spanish-style, Alhousseyni sometimes varied the group's sound. More often, however, he joined the communal clatter of such tunes as "Tamatant Tilay," a onetime war anthem that works just as well as an ecstatic dance song.

If the members of Tinariwen were once outcasts, their opening act was a consummate insider: Vieux Farka Touré is descended from generations of Malian nobility and is the son of the revered singer-guitarist Ali Farka Tour¿, who died last year. Yet the two acts proved both musically and personally compatible; Tinariwen bassist Eyadou Ag Leche joined the opener for one song, and later Touré added his guitar to the headliners' arsenal.

Tour¿ didn't sing much, ceding some of the occasional vocals to his quintet's percussionist. The 50-minute set was haphazardly paced and didn't encompass the stylistic range of his recent self-titled album, which features two duets with his father. Yet none of that mattered whenever Touré unloosed his guitar, playing fluid, eloquent solos.

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Tinariwen

Interview with Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, Tinariwen's guitarist and singer.

The Tuareg people of West Africa are descended from nomads who traveled in caravans along the Sahara desert. They've been fighting for an independent homeland for decades and in the '80s, the Tuareg rebelled against the nation of Mali. The struggle has often been violent and bitter, but a group of musicians emerged out of the rebellion.

The members of Tinariwen, which translates as "open spaces," put down their weapons to combine traditional musical styles with blazing electric guitars.

Earlier this year, Tinariwen released its third album, Aman Iman: Water Is Life. The band creates a unique sound all its own with blues and African percussion and poetry.

One of Tinariwen's guitarists and singers, Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, grew up in the desert. It wasn't until 1982, when he went to Algeria, that he heard the music of Tinariwen and legendary desert-blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure.

"It was the first time I heard Tamasheq voices singing with guitars," Alhousseyni says in an interview with Scott Simon. "At home, we didn't have those kind of instruments — just the flute and the tom-tom drum — and for me to hear the guitar and the Tamasheq voices was very moving, very beautiful."

Around the same time, his experience with the guitar was also new and exciting.

Initially, Alhousseyni had a certain resistance to the guitar because of its traditional role with the griot culture's traditional hereditary musicians. But he was attracted to the guitar through other players learning the instrument, and finally in 1986 the barriers came down and he decided to fully embrace the guitar. While electric guitars are not a traditional part of Tuareg life, Tinariwen was a group coming up in the context of rebellion.

"One of the goals of the rebellion was to bring modern things to the desert, to upgrade our lives," Alhousseyni says. "The electric guitar was one of those things we could bring. We found that there was a very natural fit with the guitar and our way of traditionally singing that was just very beautiful and very pleasing."

Still fighting in song, Tinariwen seeks to give its people recognition with the words, music and actions of its members' everyday lives.

"I am not a politician," Alhousseyni says. "We are artists. And yet we live in a time where the Tuareg can't really make these separations as clearly as that. We have to be artists, politicians, nomads, businessmen — everything. I feel that our culture needs to have not necessarily a homeland, but a special consideration within the society. We don't want to just blend into the general population. Our culture is very distinct and must be able to preserve its distinct identity."

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Tinariwen

Paul Fisher interviews Tinariwen's manager Andy Morgan.

Tinariwen are arguably the hottest act in world music right now. A group of nomadic Tuaregs from the southern Sahara desert in Mali who play a pulsating brand of "desert blues" on electric guitars, their epic journey has already become the stuff of legend. Founded at the end of the 1970s, they wrote songs of the suffering caused by catastrophic droughts, the pain of exile and struggles for political freedom.

In the early '80s they were lured into Col. Gadaffi-sponsored military training camps in Libya. Their songs became the mouthpiece of the rebellion of the Tuaregs — Muslim tribesmen descended from the Berbers of North Africa who share their own language, Tamasheq.

By 1990, the main members of the group were armed with Kalashnikovs and fighting in Tuareg rebellions in northern Mali and Niger.

In 2001 they helped organize the Festival in the Desert, where they were seen by Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, one of a growing list of rock stars championing their music — and their cause — that includes Carlos Santana, Thom Yorke of Radiohead and U2's Bono.

According to their manager, Englishman Andy Morgan, who also first saw them at the inaugural Festival in the Desert, the story shouldn't get in the way of the music.

"Tinariwen are musicians first and foremost. The older members of the band did receive military training in the Libyan camps, and most of them also took part in the rebellion of '90-'91. But they consider this an episode . . . brief, painful, harrowing . . . but an episode nonetheless. They were musicians before it happened, and they've been musicians ever since.

"In the late 1980s, when Mali was still dominated by the military dictatorship of Moussa Traore [the leader who took power in a coup in 1968 and led Mali for 23 years], there seemed to be no other way for the Tuaregs to make themselves heard or respected other than taking up arms and fighting."

Talking music, their now trademark sound emerged when one of the founders of the group, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, transposed Tuareg melodies to the electric guitar, adding in blues, rock, and Berber and Arabic influences. This was a radical approach to a fairly rigid tradition, but one that didn't cause much adverse reaction.

"There was no Dylanesque backlash," says Morgan, referring to the reaction of some Bob Dylan fans when the folk singer went electric in 1965. "Tuareg society and culture was simply too dispersed, and too isolated, for such a 'unified' cultural phenomenon as a backlash to occur.

"On the other hand, I think that there was definitely a generation gap between the youth, or the ishumar, as they're known, and their parents, who had grown up in the '40s and '50s and who only knew a very ancient nomadic existence, with clear social standards and hierarchies."

Tinariwen in some ways symbolize a new way of life for the Tuareg. "They are the first generation of Tuareg to have significant dealings with the modern world," says Morgan. "They were the first to live in exile, the first to deal with a wage economy, the first to travel far from their ancestral homes, the first to listen to Western rock and pop, the first to use the guitar as their main instrument of choice."

Indeed, it's difficult to understand Tinariwen without understanding their context in the history of their people. "To take a very specific example, in the old days, before independence, it was considered the height of bad manners for an adult Tuareg male to show his full face in public, unveiled," says Morgan. "The older members of Tuareg society still live like that. Eyadou, Tinariwen's bassist, has told me that he has an uncle, living in southern Algeria, whose full face he has never seen. In contrast, Ibrahim, the founder of Tinariwen, refuses to wear the veil. For him it symbolizes the old hierarchies, and old isolation of the Tuareg. It's what he has fought against."

Apart from attracting the praise of rock glitterati, Tinariwen have actively been promoted to a mainstream rock audience by their record company Independiente, whose roster includes Travis and Embrace. The Japan Times spoke with the group just as they were about to take to the stage to support The Rolling Stones in front of 65,000 people at Dublin's Slane Castle.

"I'm really really happy to be here," says Ibrahim Ag Alhabib. "For me it's like arriving in a special place after so many years of solitude and separation and suffering in the desert. I've always dreamed of this and now it's happening. It's a big experience. None of us really knew the music of The Rolling Stones before. But in the last few days I've been listening to some of their songs, and I love them. And I now realize that we did listen to the Stones back in the desert in the '70s and '80s but we just didn't know it was them. The problem is that we heard most of our music on bootlegged tapes, with no picture, no track titles, no sleeve notes, nothing. That's why we're always a bit uncertain about our Western music, finding it hard to name names. But the Stones are amazing. Their music has a power like the devil. It's very, very strong."

The group might not be expecting 65,000 to turn up at their concert in Japan, but their first visit two years ago did leave a lasting impression.

"I was very surprised that the Japanese are such big music fans," says Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, another of the group's main songwriters. "They seem to love our music, and are great dancers too. That really impressed me. For some reason I had this image of Japanese people as being mainly interested in technology, but not the music itself. It was great for us. Also, the food is bizarre, but the whole protocol of eating is very beautiful. We enjoyed the whole ritual. We found that the Japanese are very kind, very welcoming."

Ibrahim adds, "I found the Japanese people great, but strange in that they're in the world, but they're separate from the rest of the world. It's really as if you arrive in a parallel world — human, friendly, but completely separate. Tokyo was absolutely the opposite of our home. I saw people walking in Tokyo in a way that I've never seen before. These waves of pedestrians . . . it was frightening!"

That tour was not their first contact with Japan. One of their members, Mohammed Ag Itlale, is even nicknamed "Japonais" as he is thought to look Japanese.

"Back in the desert there's a whole lot of people who look Japanese," explains Ibrahim. "Japonais is only one of them. Nobody knows why. Maybe the shogun came there a long time ago to do his business!"

Eighty thousand copies sold of their first two albums notwithstanding, it's still too early to tell if Tinariwen has managed to crossover to a rock audience or not, according to the band's manager.

"It's very difficult to judge, mainly because the music industry itself is changing so rapidly. Nowadays, the significance of record sales has changed. They're no longer the main barometer of success. Sales of 'Aman Iman' [their third and latest album, released earlier this year] have so far been superb for an African act, and frankly pretty modest for a rock/pop act," says Morgan. "But having said that, I'm always so surprised by the extent to which Tinariwen have pervaded many people's consciousness, especially people who don't class themselves as 'world music' or 'African music' fans. I keep getting proof of that. So maybe there's something happening out there. Time will tell."

For the group, judging success and their own mission is complex.

"On a personal level, the mission has much to do with earning a living, traveling the world, having opportunities which are so rare back home in the desert," says Morgan. "But on a much wider community level, Tinariwen see themselves as ambassadors of the desert, the Tuareg. They're really very proud of their home, and their culture. They want the world to know about it, to understand what they've been through and what they were prepared to give up in their lives, for what they believe in. They want us to know how beautiful their homeland is, and how misunderstood."

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Tinariwen - Aman Imam: Water is Life

Chris Pacifico reviews Tinariwen's Aman Imam: Water is Life.

Tinariwen's mixture of French and Tamashek in their lyrics makes their eloquence all the more enigmatically exotic. The opener "Cler Achel" sees the chanting like a vintage Bollywood film soundtrack atop supple polyrhythms. "Ahimana" is a sooty campfire hymn-a-long with clip-clopping, psychedelic rhythms and slinky mantras reminiscent of King Sunny Ade that slowly dashes upward and upward, yet is in no way a crescendo. Speaking of old world music in the vinyl vault, the brittle island dub and earthy resonance of "Toumast" and "Imidiwan Winakalin" got me digging through my crates to find my Cymande records.

Aman Iman is probably the most unfettered studio release yet by Tinariwen. Producer Justin Adams, who plays guitarist in Robert Plant's Strange Sensation, goes light on the technological touches to create a full-bodied, simmering listen.

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Toumast - Ishumar

Robin Denselow reviews Toumast's Ishumar.

Tinariwen may have brought the rhythmic, loping desert blues of northern Mali to an international audience, but they have competition. Moussa Ag Keyna, a former member of Tinariwen, is a guitarist, singer and songwriter who was also a member of the Touareg political movement involved in the revolt against the Malian government in the early 1990s - and was injured in the fighting. In his current band, Toumast, he is joined by a female singer and percussionist Aminatou Goumar, and French and African musicians led by his producer Dan Levy, who adds anything from bass to keyboards and saxophone. The songs sound like a lighter, more western version of Tinariwen, with some fine bursts of blues guitar work and light, insistent percussion, matched by far more gloomy lyrics. Many of the songs look back to the fighting with disillusion and sadness - though there's also a fine, personal and bluesy tribute to My Camel.

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Michael Kessler interviews Tinariwen's members.

It has to be the most fascinating music story going around - a group of Touareg nomads from the Sahara Desert in northern Mali, faced with state persecution, flee to Libya. Some end up in Colonel Gaddafi's military training camps, where they record a set of underground cassettes.

Their music echoes over the sands like a siren and, heard by scores of exiled Touaregs in neighbouring Nigeria and Algeria, they become the voice and sound of a movement - the ishumar, the Sahara's Generation X.

They return to their homeland to mount a brief but violent rebellion. In 1990, they broker a peace deal with the Malian government. In 1991, they lay down their rifles. For guitars.

Tinariwen's music has won lavish praise. "The best rock'n'roll band in the world," said The Financial Times. "Sounds like a mirage: Keith Richards, Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder picking together," waxed Rolling Stone. "The kind of band that generations of Western rebel rockers could only dream of being," dared The Guardian.

In essence, it's a gentle desert blues, a sunrise-to-sunset trance on the pull of the land, human loss and the struggle of the Touareg. Indeed, as more than one critic has pointed out, this is perhaps where the blues as we know it came from.

Only Tinariwen would call it something different. "I got interested in music as a way of expressing how I felt about my past, my heritage," says Ibrahim Ag Halbib, lead singer and guitarist. "That sense of nostalgic longing, of loneliness, and suffering is our assouf, our blues."

Tinariwen's music is, as Led Zeppelin muso Robert Plant put it, "like falling in a well". The analogy functions on a number of levels - desert wells are deep, essential to survival and filled with a substance more precious than gold. Yet to make sense of the depth of Tinariwen's music, to understand how critical the pull of the desert is to their identity, you have to visit the Sahara. Which is what, after a 1000-kilometre journey through the desert, I'm fortunate enough to do.

It's here I meet Ibrahim, who is propped up between cushions inside our tent. Like many in the group, he lost family in the first rebellion of 1963. He clearly remembers his father being taken away; his weathered face drawn as he recounts his childhood loss. His expression wavers little as, between sips of tea and puffs on a cigarette, the conversation shifts to his discovery of music.

"I used to play the flute but it wasn't enough, so I got a canister, cables from my bike and a wooden pole and called it 'guitar of Ibrahim'. Some kids destroyed it so I made another one. Then when I was 17, I met a guy who taught me to play guitar. I was obsessed with getting an electric guitar and that man bought me one."

We're camped in the mountains near Tessalit, a few hundred kilometres down the road from Kidal, where many members of the group live. This is Mali's Adra des Iforas region, Touareg country where Tinariwen were born and bred. And it is here that they are truly considered heroes.

Which brings us to the reason we're here - the group are overseeing Mali's inaugural Camel Festival. Throughout the three days we're here, men in blue robes arrive on camels - replete with mobiles, Ray-Ban knock-offs and digital cameras. Jeeps of families loaded with mattresses arrive.

People descend on one another's tents to share tea, strum the guitar, chew the (goat) fat. There's no musical program but each night after the camel races, men, women, children and camels gather and howl to the electric guitars of nomadic Touareg groups from as far afield as Algeria.

Tinariwen were the driving force some years ago behind Timbuktu's Festival au Desert. What started off as a show of Mali's rich musical culture - Ali Farka Toure, Oumou Sangare, Habib Koite have all played here - has grown into something of a cult stopover for world music lovers.

But it's also attracted the mainstream of late, from musicians including Robert Plant to the likes of actor Johnny Depp. The festival seems to have outgrown Tinariwen, which is one of the reasons they've decided to go back to basics with a camel festival - a festival run by and for the Touareg.

The festival coincides with the imminent release of the group's third disc - Aman Iman (Water is Life). While no strangers to travel, they will tour Europe, the US, Canada and Australia to promote the album. It will be a chance to try a different kind of nomadism.

So are Tinariwen the next big crossover in world music? It's certainly the most authentic story to hit the music industry since the oldies of the Buena Vista Social Club were delivered to global audiences by World Circuit producer Nick Gold.

"It might be, but it's going to happen slowly because there's still a lot of resistance to non-English-language music, especially among radio producers," says Andy Morgan, Tinariwen's manager.

Word has it that Gold was once interested in signing up Tinariwen. He didn't and apparently he now regrets the decision. Desert blues indeed.

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Tinariwen at the Barbican London

Howard Male reviews Tinariwen's performance at the Barbican London.

As he begins the evening with a solo performance of "Tenere," charismatic frontman, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, barely tickles the strings of his Stratocaster and sings like John Lee Hooker at his most laid-back. Then the rest of the eight-piece join him, and we find out why this Touareg band are currently capturing the imagination of Mojo readers and world music fans alike.

Handclaps, and a hand-drum no bigger than a footstool, form all the percussive backdrop that's needed. This leaves plenty of space for the three guitarists, who are the heart of the band's sound, to interlock and interact, while the bass(pictured, below) throbs away in the background. One guitarist deals out angular chugging riffs. The other two issue wiry curlicues of notes, creating the illusion of baroque complexity in songs built from just one or two chords. The tone of the guitars is clean and sharp, but with an edge of distortion: the sound of electricity incarnate; no pomp, just pure African soul.

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Tinariwen

Can blue men sing the blues? The Tuareg are proud, nomadic desert people who were sometimes known as "the blue men" after the clothes dye that stained their skin.

Tuareg nomads Tinariwen ("the people of the empty spaces") are currently the hottest band in world music, with their new album Amar Iman (Water Is Life) climbing the charts in numerous countries.

If the roots of blues music are in West Africa, Tinariwen have plugged into its ancient sources, mixing them with Western rock influences (Robert Plant, the singer with Led Zeppelin, was in the audience and will sing on stage with them later in the tour).

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Stage Review: Tinariwen

Their third album, Aman Iman (Water is Life), is their heaviest and best-selling release and this was the first night of the UK tour. On stage and on record, Tinariwen weave hypnotic lines of arresting simplicity and crackling power. As a group, their ensemble sound has become tighter and stronger since they first hit international attention via the first Festival of the Desert in 2001.

A concert platform in Guilford, Surrey, is a long journey from their home base in Kidal, northern Mali, but the ley lines of rock'n'roll stretch an awful long way. Tinariwen's North African roots, thickened since their formation in the early 1980s by the sound of battery-powered amps that almost breathe at you, are as binding as any contract.

Much has been made of Tinariwen's exotic in "otherness'' - and the back story is dramatic: exile, guerrilla training in Gaddafi's camps, the Sandinista-era Clash vision of rebel rockers with Kalashnikovs, causes and guitars. But the music - that is something everyone can understand.

It's the international festival of music and the Electric Theatre had cleared the floor for a standing-only gig, which is just what you want. The show begins with dry ice and a female vocal - a perfect illustration of Tinariwen's synthesis. Ibrahim, the group's most distinctive character, opens with a haunting solo number on an amplified acoustic guitar. And then the full group come on, Ibrahim in the centre, one of four guitarists, with a percussionist crouched at the front and the three chorus singers and hand percussionist to one side.

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Gary Kaill reviews Tinariwen's Aman Iman (Water is Life)

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Tinariwen - Aman Iman

There is a saying that it only takes one drop of water to make the glass overflow. Let’s hope that proves to be the case with Aman Iman (Water is Life), the third album from Tinariwen, the fabulous exponents of an intoxicating brand of desert blues.

Admired throughout their North African homeland and by world music fans, they are yet to make a major breakthrough in the West.

Tinariwen first emerged as musical standard bearers for a youth rebellion which swept the post-colonial states of North Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.

At the root of this revolt were the unemployment, poverty and social exclusion being suffered by the Berbers, the indigenous population of the region, who prefer to be called the Amazigh, or “free” peoples of North Africa.

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Interview with Tinariwen

Hailing from the Touareg people, Tinariwen play the ‘music of the unemployed’. They spoke to Kevin Devine about their Aman Iman album

You have dedicated Aman Iman to “Peace, tolerance and development in the Sahara and the world of the oppressed.” These are powerful sentiments and I can guess where they’ve come from, but why did you choose this particular dedication?

I think it’s important for us to make it clear that the Tinariwen story isn’t just some exotic epic that happened in some obscure corner of the Sahara desert, and that is without any relevance to the wider world.

What happened to us has happened to millions of people around the world, and is still happening.

Our songs are about the Touareg, and our home in the desert. But we’d also like to think that anyone who’s in exile, who’s fighting for independence, for the survival of their people, their culture and their language, can relate to the songs too.

But having said that, we also believe in peace, tolerance and development. The rebellion we fought in the early 1990s was very painful and very brutal, especially in its effect on the civilian population.

War of any kind must always be engaged as a last resort, in self-defence. In those circumstances, no doubt the members of Tinariwen would fight again but in the meantime we place our faith and our hope in peace, tolerance and developement.

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Tinariwen

It is the hour before sundown in the desert town of Kidal and Ibrahim Ag Alhabib - aka 'the ragamuffin kid', as his nickname translates from the Tamashek - is talking about his previous incarnation as a guerilla fighter. Is it true that during the Tuareg rebellion that started in 1990, he waged war against the Malian government with a Kalashnikov and a Stratocaster strapped across each shoulder? 'That's exactly what happened,' he says softly.
Ibrahim looks like Keith Richards's younger cousin and is the charismatic star of Tinariwen, the most thrilling act in world music right now. Their third album threatens to turn them into bona fide rock stars. But Ibrahim also waged war against the government from this outwardly inhospitable corner of eastern Mali.

The Tuareg are the descendants of tribesmen described by Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC and ran the trans-Saharan trade routes for more than two millennia. Known as the Blue People, because indigo dye in their shawls stained their skin, they kept black slaves, rode camels and were simultaneously feared across vast swathes of this part of Africa and mythologised in the West.

The rhetoric of rebellion is embedded in the DNA of rock music, and tales of Tinariwen's involvement in the Tuareg struggle for liberation - following independence for Niger, Mali, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso in the 1960s - have added to their own mystique. The truth is inevitably complex and to find it necessitates a bone-jarring journey to what is still rebel territory.

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Tinariwen - Aman Iman

The phrase "Aman Iman", in the Tamashek language of the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara, means "Water is the soul", or "Water is life", and is often followed by "ach isoudar", meaning "and milk is survival". As such, it's an apt title for this latest album by Tinariwen, reflecting both the Tuareg's ongoing struggle for survival in one of the harshest environments, and the need for more nourishing fare - both physically and intellectually - required to survive in the wider world.

Until Tinariwen were discovered a few years ago and started touring outside Africa, it was rare for any Tuareg to travel outside theirhomeland; and their isolation and lack of education served them poorly during the long dispute with the Malian government, an almost secret war that has gone largely unreported. Tinariwen formed in the rebel training camps of Algeria and Libya in the early 1980s, whence they had fled following the government's crushing of a 1963 insurrection in which the parents of several members, including those of charismatic frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, were brutally slain. Several songs here date from that era, notably Ibrahim's lament "Soixante Trois" and Alhassane Ag Touhami's "Tamatant Tilay", a 1983 war cry urging the Tuareg into battle.

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Tinariwen

The Tuareg tribesmen of the Sahara have a saying, something along the lines of "Patience comes from God, haste comes from the devil". I wish somebody had told our Tuareg driver. The adage, doubtless well-suited to life lived at camel's pace under the scorching sun, is rather less pertinent when you're tearing across the desert at upwards of 60mph in that latter-day ship of the desert, the Toyota Land Cruiser.

There is only one main road linking the populous southern part of Mali, around the capital Bamako, with our destination, way up in the north-east - and we left the road behind at Gao, on the Niger river. It's another 200 miles across desert scrubland littered with boulders and trees bearing spines the size of toothpicks, following the hundreds of criss-crossing vehicle tracks over what is aptly known as a piste, to Kidal, the home base of Tinariwen, the Tuareg band whose latest album Aman Iman (Water Is Life) has just been released to huge acclaim.

By the time we reach Kidal, the suspension on two of our four vehicles has broken, their sturdy iron bars snapping like twigs as we slough around in sand and bounce over rocks and potholes. Not for nothing do the Tuareg have another saying: "The desert rules you, you don't rule the desert." Frankly, you don't even get a vote.

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