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Tuesday, August 19, 2008, 13:48
This is a real coup for Cornwall and the Princess Pavilion venue as the kings and queens of "Assouf" or Saharan desert guitar poetry are now among the best live propositions in the world.
A truly mesmerising experience, Tinariwen meld Toureg songs and chants with cyclical, raw electric blues riffs, at times sounding like a sandswept, alien Rolling Stones.
Since the first Festival in the Desert in 2001, which they helped to organise, the band have become one of the most successful and exciting musical exports ever to emerge from west Africa.
The founding members spent the 1980s holed-up in Libyan military camps dreaming of dignity and self-determination for their own people, the Kel Tamashek of the southern Sahara, and singing songs for an entire generation of young Touareg.
Their rolling yearning grooves and uncompromising messages of simplicity and freedom, distilled over 20 years of struggle, rebellion and exile, have earned them two BBC World Music Award nominations, countless accolades and citations, the attention of high-profile fans such as Robert Plant, Santana, The Edge and Thom Yorke, and the enduring respect of their own people.
They were the undoubted highlight of the Africa Calling Live 8 concert at the Eden Project a couple of years ago.
Their most recent album, Aman Iman, made the top 10 albums of 2007 in the Observer Music Magazine, Songlines, the Independent, Word Magazine, HMV Choice, fRoots among many others.
For those naysayers who condemn world music as boring (and believe me I've met a few in Cornwall since excitedly advocating this gig), get to Falmouth, open your mind and witness one of the globe's truly great bands.
Tickets are £20 in advance or £22.50 on the door from the Pavilion box office on 01326 211222, The Poly – Falmouth, Hall for Cornwall and the website www.princesspavilion.co.uk
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■ Tinariwen – the hypnotic African blues merchants return to Cornwall.
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