Buzzin Music

Tunng & Tinariwen at the Rainbow Warehouse, Birmingham – 28/03/09 – Gig Review

Tunng on stage with Tinariwen

Tunng announced their tour with Tinariwen following a beautiful collaboration on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction. The quintessentially English group weaved their electronic ornamented folk-based songs with Tinariwen’s North African blues and the results were startling.

In the Rainbow Warehouse in Birmingham, on the last night of their joint tour, there is a triumphant aura about the collaboration. The band are more at ease together on stage by this point, having had only five days before the start of the tour to try to get their songs together, and from the crowd you get the sense that something important is happening in this abandoned warehouse.

The set opens with just the three members of Tinariwen playing two songs to an audience that is enraptured by the musical foreignness.

The members of Tunng then come on to play ‘Take’ from their most recent album Good Arrows and you wonder how the two groups will pull off this collaboration that to detractors sounds like another patronising hash at African music by the English.

Immediately, their differences are glaring: Tunng are wearing hoodies to Tinariwen’s traditional headscarves; Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni can only say “Z’okay?!” in English to the crowd, whilst there is only one member of Tunng who speaks their French; Tunng’s songs are about drinking tea in bed and other such domestic pleasures, whilst Tinariwen have one about a legendary fighter involved in a helicopter crash in 1985.

But the same inherent sensitivity seen in Tunng’s songwriting reveals itself in this collaboration. When Tinariwen play their songs, Tunng donate an English folk edge to them, such as the hook-line from ‘Suprise Me 44’ on a Tinariwen song about going to school. When it is Tunng’s turn to play, Tinariwen incorporate some wonderful African guitar and vocal lines into them, such as on ‘Mother’s Daughter’.

Such absolute fusions of songs are the highlights of the set and a joy to hear. It is understandable that not every song is so perfectly balanced, with one or the other slightly surplus to requirements, but both groups seem to genuinely enjoy giving and receiving music from such utterly different contexts – Mike Lindsay often introduces an anecdote about Tinariwen with “When they’re sitting around in the desert…”.

After a rousing and comic rendition of the rock-out song ‘Soup’ a carnival atmosphere descends, and the final two songs of the set, including a rendition of ‘Bullets’ with a French chorus, are joyful celebrations of musical unity. The (somewhat unnecessarily long) encore doesn’t do justice to the previous ecstatic peak, but rounds off the set with Tinariwen the new heroes of the crowd and Tunng the returning musical pioneers.