Gillett plays “radio ping pong” with his guests: first, Gillett plays a track, then the week’s guest, then Gillett, and so on, sometimes exploring a theme, sometimes simply sharing music they enjoy. Given the specialist nature of the show, and Gillett’s vast expertise, guests usually delight in trying to find rarities he hasn’t heard. Amadou & Mariam played Rod Stewart’s Sailing.
Nestling among the more usual rootsy, exotic, lo-fi fare, this mainstay of mainstream radio came as a shock to Gillett’s listeners. Finding Stewart’s naff, overfamiliar anthem on one of the few stretches of the airwaves still safe from the dreaded playlist even led to a few complaints. But Gillett got the point. “Heard in Bamako, Mali,” Gillett concluded, “the song fulfilled the role that world music has for some of us today, being sung in an unfamiliar language and following a different range of musical conventions from their own.” So, world music is a relativist concept. Viewed from the right perspective, all music can be world music — it all depends on where you are when you hear it.
Having played a song whose natural home was on Radio 2, Gillett added, wouldn’t it be fitting if Radio 2 reciprocated by playing Amadou & Mariam? Indeed, it would, but so far it hasn’t happened. (That’s Radio 2’s loss — its audience would love it.) This hasn’t stopped the duo’s album Dimanche à Bamako selling extremely well, with worldwide sales nearing 600,000.
Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia first met 29 years ago in Bamako, at the Institute for the Blind. In 1980, they married and played their first concert together. During the 1980s, they became stars in Mali, but in 1986 they moved to the Ivory Coast, for eminently practical reasons. “At that time, there were no recording studios in Mali,” Amadou explains. In the mid-1990s, they began playing and recording in France, winning new fans for their music, which is, as one critic accurately put it, “as bouncy as two toddlers jumping on a mattress”.
One of their new fans was the Franco-Latin hit-maker Manu Chao, who raved about their work in press interviews. “We read that he liked our style,” says Mariam. “Nobody in Mali knows him, but we knew his records, so we arranged to meet. Our first meeting was in the studio — we just went straight to work together. We brought some songs and he brought some songs. At first, we recorded in Paris, but then we went to Mali so he could pick up the ambience.”
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When I recently had a conversation with one of those world-music purists we mentioned earlier, he argued that nobody in Britain listened to African music. I suggested Amadou & Mariam, and he sniffed: “That’s not real African music.” He had a point — Dimanche à Bamako is a hybrid of Amadou & Mariam’s Malian blues and Chao’s sample- and hook-heavy Europop — but the Malian couple’s music has always been a combination of many musical styles. Chao’s production on Dimanche à Bamako is not the first time the duo have encountered Latin music.
“When I learnt to play guitar at the age of 14, I began by playing Cuban and Spanish music,” says Amadou. “It’s what I heard on the radio and at dances. Salsa was everywhere. After that came my Jimi Hendrix period.” Amadou laughs, remembering his attempts to emulate the guitar hero’s, severely hampered by a lack of the effects pedals that shaped the sound. When Amadou played with Les Ambassadeurs, the house band at Bamako’s most exclusive nightclub, his repertoire expanded further; first via the demands of the crowds, and second through the records fellow musicians brought back from trips to England: Pink Floyd, Bad Company, Stevie Wonder, Rod Stewart.
So, the success of Dimanche à Bamako rests not just on three decades of musical expertise, but on an extraordinarily wide range of musical ingredients. And if a few tracks rest heavily on Chao’s trademark production, it was the more traditional Coulibaly — driven by Amadou’s distinctive snaking guitar lines — that Radio 1’s Zane Lowe picked up on, naming it the “sleeper hit” of last year. Amadou & Mariam may not be chart-toppers yet, but they are about to surge forward again. They are nominated for — and hotly tipped to win — two BBC World Music Awards next month, and are nominated for the World Music Grammy. They will also be appearing on this year’s African Soul Rebels tour, along with the Algerian folk balladeer Souad Massi and the Sudanese rapper Emmanuel Jal. (The first gig is on February 17, at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester.)
Like Amadou & Mariam, Massi highlights both the constant melding of musical styles that makes up much world music and the intriguing channels through which musical influences spread. The notable influence of western folk and country in her music, she once noted, derived from a youth spent watching cowboy movies.
If western music is influencing African musicians, then this is simply the repayment of an old debt. Despite Amadou’s multicultural range, his roots are in Mali’s Bambara music, which an increasing number of western musicians cite as the source of the blues. “Everywhere we go, people say that,” says Amadou, “and I believe it’s true. There are many musical styles in Mali, but Bambara is very close to the blues.”
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It’s no surprise, then, that Amadou & Mariam are making inroads into the US market, fuelling music-industry opinion that Dimanche à Bamako will eventually sell more than 1m copies — remarkable for an African album. Now the couple’s early, African recordings are being re-released. A compilation, The Best of the Mali Years, is out in March; a five-CD box set follows.
That should give you something to listen to — after you’ve finished bouncing along to Dimanche à Bamako.
For details of the African Soul Rebels tour, visit www.wrasserecords.com