TINARIWEN

Music |
5th November 2016

Sat 5 Nov | Doors 8.00pm
Tickets: £23.00 Early Bird | £25.00 Advance | £27.00 On the Door

The desert is a place of hardship and subtle beauty, a stark world that reveals its secrets slowly and carefully. Life in the desert is resilient and strong, and the people are gentle giants among the sand, storms, and sun. For saharan blues band tinariwen, the desert is their home, and their hypnotic and electrifying guitar rock reflects complex realities of their homebase in north west africa.

They are Tuareg, descended from nomadic people who have wandered the dunes for millennia, but the music of tinariwen travels too, reverberating far from dusty plains of mali. Their 2011 album tassili, recorded in the algerian desert — in a tent and under the stars with a esteemed cadre of musicians including nels cline and tv on the radio’s tunde adebimpe and kyp malone — won a grammy award for best world music. Now their new record emmaar returns to their roots, delivering stripped-down dirges, effervescent anthems, and above all, a return to simplicity and honesty.

Tinariwen’s own story burgeons with myth and mythos in their home country and beyond. Their tale is the stuff of legends. Founding member ibrahim ag alhabib, grew up in desolation in mali, where he witnessed his own father’s death at the age of four. Later, after seeing a western film, he built his first guitar from a bicycle wire, a stick and a tin can. The band was founded in the 1980’s in Tureg camps in Libya, where the Nomadic peoples had relocated to find work and a new life away from their homeland of the Sahara. Disillusioned by the promises of Quaddafi at the time, the Tuareg became restless again and longed for home. But the interaction with city life yielded unexpected consequences, the became exposed to western music — most notably the guitar-driven anthems of Jimi Hendrix and the American Blues — which they mixed with their own soulful dirges which they’d perform in the camps by the fire with battery-operated amps.

When revolution broke out back in Mali, they left Libya behind, hung up their guitars and picked up guns to fight for the Tuareg independence. when the dischord died down, the band returned to music, delivering songs imbued with aching beauty and lonesome poetry. Their music was bootlegged and traded around the region, earning them a devout following. Then in the late 1990s, they were discovered by western musicians and for the first time, their songs left the Sahara and were introduced to the world. For the next ten years, the Nomads now traveled the world, performing at nearly every notable festivals and venues around the globe, providing the world with a taste of the aching beauty and lonesome pleasures of Saharan assouf.

Venue: Malt Room – Standing
Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.
Wheelchair users, please refer to our accessibility page.

DATES & TIMES

5th November 2016

You might like...

Music

The Langan Band

Doors 7.30pm | Tickets £16.50 | Malt Room Standing Important information: This event will now take place on 30 March 2024. Customers with tickets to...

Book now
Music

Maya Youssef ft. Zoe Rahman and Elizabeth Nott

Doors 7.30pm | Tickets £20.50 | Theatre Hailed as ‘The queen of the qanun’, Maya Youssef is a globally renowned and award-winning qanun player and...

Book now
Music

Benjamin Francis Leftwich

Doors 7.30pm | Tickets £16.50 | + Support From Talia Rae | Malt Room Standing Artistic transformation is often associated with a blast of fanfare...

Book now

Supported by