Tinariwen: Royal Sahara Blues at the BBC Proms

The Tinariwen story begins amid the grim realities of guerilla warfare – a warfare that continues today, alas, driven by Ansar Dine’s deadly Islamist violence (like the Taliban, they’ve banned music and even kidnapped one of the band members, who was thankfully released soon afterwards). As a boy, founding member Ibrahim Ag Alhabib saw his father killed during a Tamashek uprising in Mali in 1963. By 1980, with Alhassane Ag Touhami (still a band member), they were playing weddings and parties, spent time in the refugee camps of Algeria and Libya, trained for rebel sorties under Colonel Gaddafi, started making cassettes (hand-distributed across the Sahara) and, after a 1991 peace accord, turned to music full-time.

Since The Radio Tisdas Sessions of 2001 brought them global attention, they have toured the world over and over, the band’s membership evolving to embrace younger players and guest artists, but more or less retaining the same core structure of guitars, percussion, vocals and bass. They’ve released 11 studio albums in total – some recorded in exile from warfare in the US – the most recent being Amatssou in 2023, following which they played Glastonbury for the second time.

Now, for the first time, at the end of August, on a sweltering, late-summer night in London, they play the BBC Proms, weaving their desert blues magic to a packed house across a 15-song set at the Royal Albert Hall. They open with the brooding minimalism of ‘Azawad’, a new song about the conflict their people face, an acoustic reading minus the heavy distortion and fuzz that electrifies the recorded version. ‘Kek Alghalm’ from Amatssou follows, its tightly strung rhythms crisscrossing into a propulsive all-terrain drive. The soulful ‘Cler Achel’ is the first of numerous succulent blues, slow-cooked to fall from the bone, wrapped around a filigree solo guitar that gives way to a velvety chorus of call-and-response vocals.

They begin fairly subdued, especially in comparison to the electric, loaded nature of the album recordings, and there could have been an extra stack or two of speakers and an amp that hits 11, that would suit classic desert rockers like ‘Nànnuflày’ down to the ground. As it is, it’s an intimate, enveloping, intense experience, deeply rhythmic and deeply mesmeric, building slowly and surely to a point, like a pyramid. Everything gets livelier on a deliciously lengthy three-song encore, the band expanding from a single solo acoustic guitar to create something like an old-fashioned blues-rock rave-up, complete with a mini bass solo and old-guy stage dancing, culminating in ‘Chaghaybou’, a barn burner that’s very much in the band tradition.

Their Tamashek clothes are as they were when I first saw them, their between-song repartee is just as minimal (“welcome to desert,” “is okay?” “thank you”), and their stage show has barely changed in form or nature. While the world, and their bit of it, has changed in the way that war and terror changes things, as a nomad nation of musicians they are an inspiring and compelling constant, and their music proves as potent and absorbing as ever.

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today