Live in Paris

For a while, it seemed that the world's favourite desert blues sultans had lost their swing. Their performance at the Songlines Music Awards concert in 2012 coincided with the Islamist uprising in northern Mali and found them in understandably subdued and sombre mood. Thankfully, as better news emerged from back home, their groove and vitality returned; a 130-date world tour in 2014 found them back at their best. Recorded on the tour's final night, this live set finds them in celebratory form, their chops tight and road-toned and their performance fired by happy anticipation of an imminent return to their desert home. Drawing mostly on their most recent studio album Emmaar, the stinging guitar lines and camel-gaited rhythms rock with a heft that gets more thunderous as the set proceeds, spiced by the previously unrecorded blues lament ‘Azawad’ and a trio of exotic interventions by the 75-year-old Touareg poet, singer and matriarch Lalla Badi, ululating deliriously in the centuries-old traditional desert style known as tindé.