Interview: Amadou and Mariam - Hot in the shades

Published on Friday 20 February 2009 15:28

IT MIGHT just be the longest, most fruitful love affair in music. Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia have been married for 30 years, they are both blind, and in their fifties they have become Mali's hottest exports, superstars in designer shades and traditional African dress who make some of the most joyous, melodious funk and bluesy pop you're likely to encounter anywhere in the world.

"Being a couple has really helped," says Amadou. "We're always together and we never have a bad time. We help each other and when one of us is tired, the other one looks after them. It's nice not to have to worry about being lonely." Mariam nods and beams, her default response to anything Amadou says. "It's always good," she confirms. It's a story so sweet and they're so clearly besotted with each other that if their music wasn't as good as it is, it could turn your stomach.

Their latest album, Welcome To Mali, was one of last year's finest, produced in part by Damon Albarn, who says of Mariam that "her voice makes me go all funny", while Amadou is "a f***ing geezer". Franz Ferdinand adore them, they have supported Scissor Sisters, performed at the opening ceremony of the World Cup in Germany, and they tell me that last year's highpoints included playing with Johnny Marr in London and Robert Plant in the Swiss Alps. They have just been announced as special guests of Coldplay for eight shows on their US summer tour.

"We met at a blind school in Bamako, started talking about music and have never stopped," says Amadou of their first encounter in Mali's capital in 1977. "Getting together is the most important thing we've ever done. I found the woman who could be my wife. But we never thought we would become famous and do all the things we love together."

Amadou played guitar in one of West Africa's biggest bands in the Seventies, Les Ambassadeurs du Motel. Mariam started singing at weddings when she was six. "It happened very naturally," she says of word spreading about the blind girl in Bamako with the otherworldly, soulful voice. "First the neighbours asked me, then their neighbours, then the whole town. I sang for everyone in Bamako who got married, had a birthday or got their children baptised. I was very pleased when I met Amadou because I wanted to find a man and get married. But I never expected any man to be a musician who I could live and work with."

Welcome To Mali was recorded in Bamako, Dakar, Paris, where they spend part of the year, and London. This is world music in the truest sense, mixed and mashed up from a lifetime of passing around old vinyl and cassettes from Europe whenever a load would show up in Bamako, and from Amadou tuning into local radio stations on whatever continent he happened to be. When I ask him why he started playing guitar (he took up drums at the age of two), he says: "I was listening to a lot of Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd at the time." The resulting deep, bluesy riffs that he combines with traditional Malian playing are remarkable.

They have done for Mali what Buena Vista Social Club did for Cuba in the Nineties. But Amadou describes his and Mariam's sound not as world music, but as music for the world. "Our music includes blues, rock, pop. It has the influence of Africa but it's about encounters, the meetings of sounds and peoples," he says. When we speak they are in Brittany preparing for a gig, and this corner of Europe has also played its part, with Mariam's love of French chansons creeping into her singing voice and style. All this inclusiveness might make it smack of a worthy project, but this is bang up to date, thrilling pop music, more Africa Express than Live8.

Not surprising, then, that they are the poster kids (if you can call a duo with a combined age of more than 100 that) of Albarn's project set up in response to the peculiar decision not to include African musicians on Live8's bill because it might alienate audiences. "Why would you want to speak in the name of someone who isn't there?" asks Amadou. "That's the problem with Live8. Africa Express has allowed us to play music with so many different people in countries we've never been to before. We're really proud of being part of that exchange. At Coachella we were one of the first African acts to play there.

"And we saw Madonna," he adds, looking excited at the memory.

Amadou and Mariam played their first gig together in 1980. At first people weren't sure about them and they were rather reductively branded "The Blind Couple of Mali". "We were musicians before we met and we deserve to be recognised for our music, not our blindness," says Amadou, who lost his sight when he was 15, while Mariam was five when she lost hers. "It has nothing to do with being blind. But, of course, at the same time it feels special to be making something possible that everyone said was impossible. The fact of us being blind and the two of us being together affects our music, all the time. It colours how we listen, what we bring, how we respond to one another."

Friends and family were sceptical at first about their union. "There weren't really examples of blind people marrying blind people and then becoming musicians," he continues with a laugh. "Our families were worried for us but they were also encouraging. We wanted to show them that we could do it, but it was hard to convince people that we could be happy."

Thirty years on, with three children and five albums, Amadou and Mariam have convinced people over and over again. However, it was only with the release of their fourth record, Dimanche Bamako, produced by Manu Chao, that global success came. Chao, a world music supremo in his own right, heard Amadou and Mariam on the radio while driving in Paris and immediately wanted to work with them. On the first day they met, they wrote songs together. Dimanche Bamako became one of the bestselling albums to ever come out of Africa, selling half a million copies in Europe alone.

"It feels good to find success now because we're prepared for it," says Amadou. "For any musician, one of your main goals is to play in front of big audiences. Now we are."

Mariam, not for the first time, agrees with him. "It's not like we've been waiting forever, suddenly it's come, and we're tired," she says. "We're ready for it."

&#149 Amadou and Mariam play Edinburgh Picture House, Saturday. The single 'Ce N'est Pas Bon', featuring Damon Albarn on keyboards, is released March 9 www.amadou-mariam.com