Obituary: Amadou Bagayoko (1954–2025)

The untimely death of Amadou Bagayoko a month before he and his wife Mariam Doumbia were to commence a European tour with performances at the Cheltenham and Brighton festivals has robbed the world of one of Africa’s finest-ever guitarists.

Essaying a thrilling mix of blues, rock and traditional African rhythms on a string of eight best-selling albums since their international debut in 1998, Amadou & Mariam took African music into the Western mainstream in a way only rivalled in recent years by Tinariwen.

They supported Coldplay and U2 on tour, recorded the official anthem for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany and performed at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in 2009 to celebrate Barack Obama’s awarding of the prize. “I don’t think there’s ever been a band from Africa with whom people have engaged in quite such a way,” Damon Albarn is quoted as saying – Albarn co-produced their Grammy-nominated 2008 album Welcome to Mali.

When the couple met in 1976 as students at a school for the blind in Bamako, little did they know that they were not only destined to spend their lives together as husband and wife but would become one of Africa’s most successful musical exports.

Born with congenital cataracts on both eyes, Amadou’s sight deteriorated throughout his childhood until by the age of 16, he was completely blind. Four years his junior, Mariam lost her sight at the age of five after an untreated bout of measles. They met in 1975 at Bamako’s Union Malienne Des Aveugles, an institute for the blind, where they used music to overcome their disability. At the institute, they sang and played together in the Eclipse Orchestra, a band mentored by Idrissa Soumaoro, keyboard player with Les Ambassadeurs du Motel, whose line-up included Salif Keita as lead singer and in which a youthful Amadou also played.

After marrying in 1980, they began performing as a husband-and-wife duo. Initially, their two voices were accompanied solely by Amadou’s guitar, but the sound soon expanded to include a full backing band.

After relocating to Abidjan in 1986, the couple recorded a raft of popular local cassettes – later reissued as the box set 1990-1995: L’Intégrale des Années Maliennes. They then briefly returned to Mali before relocating to Paris in 1996, where they met record company executive Marc-Antoine Moreau during a six-month residency playing in an African restaurant in Paris. Moreau became their manager, secured them a recording deal and produced their first album to be released outside Africa, 1998’s Sou Ni Tilé. The album included the single ‘Je Pense à Toi’, one of many love songs Amadou has written for his wife over the previous two decades. It became a surprise hit on French radio and the album went gold.

Further albums followed, but it was 2005’s Dimanche à Bamako, produced by Manu Chao, that launched them into the mainstream. The album won multiple awards and turned “the blind couple from Mali” into Western rock festival favourites from Glastonbury to Coachella.

Amadou served as president of the Malian Federation of Artists, and together with Mariam, was an ambassador for Sightsavers International and Water Aid. “When you get to a certain level… you must give a voice to messages that can change things in this world,” he told The Guardian in 2012.