With a major label album deal and endorsements from music stars like Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin and Thom Yorke of Radiohead, as well as critics like long-term champion DJ Andy Kershaw, who hailed the band’s latest release “Aman Iman” as the album of 2007 even before the end of 2006, Tinariwen has been tipped as the band to “shatter the world music glass ceiling” by the music press.

However, lead singer and guitarist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib is not surprised by the positive response the band has received from music fans in Europe.

“This success has come very slowly and gradually, so I really couldn’t use the word ‘surprise’,” Ag Alhabib said. “We did our first concerts in Europe in 2001. Six years later it’s beginning to look very good.

“I think people are fascinated by our story, by our look... and also I think western ears can hear echoes of rock, the blues, funk, even reggae in our music, and all these things they can relate to pretty easily.

“If we sang and played in Arabic scales, with ‘difficult’ notes, then the situation would be quite different. But in Berber music there’s a familiarity because its roots go back to some kind of common past, common with many types of European music at least.”

Ag Alhabib and his bandmates, who belong to Mali’s Touareg minority, admit they know little about the Highlands.

“Our manager Andy says that’s very beautiful up there, so we’re looking forward to seeing it,” Ag Alhabib added.

One thing the band does have in common with some Highland musicians, though, is that it uses a relatively little known language, Tamashek, for its songs, and Ag Alhabib is adamant there will be no move into a more widely known language like French or Arabic for Tinariwen, which takes its name from the Touareg word for “deserts” or “empty places.”

“It’s very important that we sing in Tamashek. In fact, it’s unavoidable,” he stated.

“Tamashek is our native language, our first tongue, and we don’t master any other language well enough to sing in it consistently. We do occasionally sing in French, as on the track ‘Arawan’ on our last record ‘Amassakoul’, but this is very rare.

“Tamashek is the language of the Touareg and of the desert. When we started out we very much saw it as our mission to communicate with our fellow Touareg, to raise awareness of the challenges and dangers which we faced as a people. At the time there were no Tamashek radio stations, or newspapers, or magazines or TV stations. Our songs were like ‘bulletins’ to the Touareg nation, and therefore it was crucial that we sang in Tamashek.

“Also, Tamashek is the only language that could really describe our home, the desert, and our situation. That’s probably the same with your language. There are words in Tamashek that are untranslatable, and these words describe our situation better than any other. And of course, we’re proud of our language... it’s a very poetic medium, and has served our poets well for centuries. So we want to be the ambassadors of this language and make sure that it’s heard throughout the world and that it survives.”

Tinariwen was reportedly the first Touareg band to use electric guitars when they first came together in the mid-1990s, but Ag Alhabib revealed this innovation caused less upset with their fellow Touaregs in Mali, Algeria and Niger, than critics overseas.

“The only criticism has come from European ‘purists’ who have made declarations about what Touareg music should and shouldn’t be. We don’t take any of that very seriously,” he commented.

“We just play the music we want to play, and let other people sort their own problems out.”

The members of Tinariwen carried guns for a time during the Libyan-led rebellion in the mid-1990s

Each member of the band has their different influences and musical loves, Ag Alhabib added, and while his own taste is for traditional Touareg music and other desert musicians like the late Ali Farka Touré and his friend Afel Bocoum from the Malian town of Niafunke, but more unexpectedly, he also professes a love for country and western, especially Bob Dylan and Don Williams.

“I like acoustic music a lot,” he added.

The members of Tinariwen were involved in the Libyan-backed rebellion against the Mali government over land and economic issues until a peace agreement was reached in 1996 and reputedly band members would go on military operations with a rifle in hand and a guitar strapped to their backs.

Today, however, Ag Alhabib, whose own father was killed in an earlier rebellion in the 1960s, has no doubt about which is the more effective weapon.

“I think the difference is that the gun has a very limited use, which can always been contradicted and argued, whereas music has a much wider use, which is almost always positive,” he suggested.

“We carried guns for a limited period of time in our lives, because we had to and because we all felt that there was a job to be done which couldn’t be done in any other way. But we’ve always been musicians first and foremost. We played music before we were soldiers, and we’re playing it now, long after our soldiering days have ended.

“The armed conflict brought us certain limited gains but it was easily ignored and dismissed by the world at large as just another little African war. Now our music is being heard all over the world and through our music people are learning that there is an ancient people called the Touareg, that they live in a beautiful wilderness called the Sahara desert and that they have a very, very rich culture. The gun could never have taught people that.”

One comparison western critics continually draw with the music of Tinariwen and their countryman Farka Touré is its similarity to the blues, but until recently, this was not something which would have occurred to Tinariwen.

“We often get asked about this blues thing,” Ag Alhabib said.

“The fact is that we had no idea that the American blues existed until we started travelling in 2001 and meeting people who talked to us about it.

“Some comparisons are legitimate, because the historical connections are there. The blues originally came from West Africa, and so do we. It’s a natural affinity. There’s also an emotional link. A lot of our music talks about pain, suffering, longing, nostalgia and exile. There’s one word that sums all these feelings up...‘assouf’. ‘Assouf’ is our word for ‘the blues’.”

* Tinariwen appear at The Ironworks on Tuesday as part of the Eden Court in Exile programme.

c.macleod@inverness-courier.co.uk

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