Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia are among the starriest musicians in Mali, a country preternaturally abundant in music.
They have been married for nearly 30 years. Both are blind. In London for a couple of appearances in advance of the release of their new album, they reminisce in soft-spoken French about their early career, perched on their Clerkenwell hotel bed, occasionally touching hands.
They met at the Institute for the Young Blind in Bamako, in 1974. “I was a pupil there,” Doumbia says.
“And I taught dancing and singing.” Bagayoko, four years her elder, already had a musical career by the time he started to lose his sight, at the age of 14.
He played guitar for Les Ambassadeurs du Motel, one of Mali’s important bands. “It was a grand orchestre de variété,” he recalls, “with many singers.”
One of them was Salif Keita, who is now one of the best-known stars in Mali. “It was an education for me.” He went to the institute as musical director.
Perhaps surprisingly, Bagayoko credits England as a musical influence. “When we were young, we listened to a lot, not on the radio but on cassettes. Pink Floyd, blues, rock. The English like good music a lot — Led Zeppelin, AC/DC.”
They started courting in 1976, when Doumbia was 18, and married in 1980.
They moved to Abidjan, in Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa. “In Mali,” explains Bagayoko, “there were no studios. Côte d’Ivoire was where the producers were. The radio played music. There were record shops.”
In Abidjan, they recorded four cassettes of funky African blues, Bagayoko’s guitar churning in impossibly deep riffs and Doumbia’s singing fervent and powerful.
They made one more cassette in Mali and then decamped to France, where they made three CDs with the producer Marc-Antoine Moreau.
These won them many admirers — and one in particular. “Manu Chao heard one of the songs on the radio and wrote in the paper he’d heard us and liked the music.”
Chao, a French-Gallician singer, is immensely popular throughout Europe, except in Britain. “We knew Mano Negra [Chao’s erstwhile band] and Clandestinos [his blockbuster solo album]. Marc-Antoine put us in touch with him.”
They fooled around in a studio, Chao and Bagayoko on acoustic guitars, Doumbia singing. “We looked at each other and said: ‘Why not make an album?’”
Life in the popular lane
The CD they released in 2005, Dimanche àBamako, was a fruitful collaboration for all of them. Chao leavened their relentlessness; they gave some gravitas to his whimsy.
It sold more than half a million copies in Europe and propelled Amadou and Mariam into a new league.
This transformed their lives. “We travelled a lot,” says Doumbia. “We went to festivals, people asked us for autographs.”
Bagayoko says drily that the aftermath left them occupés.” It was a Disque d’Or, then it went platinum, we won the Victoires de la Musique. We went to the United States. Lots of people got to know more about Mali.”
Amadou and Mariam used their new found fame to promote their own causes as well, becoming ambassadors for the NGO Sightsavers International. “What we did gave us a lot of exposure,” Bagayoko says.
“We went to the European parliament to ask them to finance education for the handicapped, to alert people to the problems of the blind.”
Disability is a huge, overlooked problem in the developing world. One third of the 75 million primary-aged children not attending school are disabled — a condition that trumps gender, household economic status or rural living as a barrier to education.
The couple’s new CD, Welcome to Mali, lacks Chao but a host of other guests crowd in. Damon Albarn co-wrote Sabali and produced Ce n’est pas bon.
The Somalian rapper K’Naan joins them for Africa — cheekily, if geographically approximately, calling it “the original West Coast/East Coast collaboration”. Toumani Diabaté, says Bagayoko airily, “did his kora”.
The guitarists Keziah Jones and M (Mathieu Chedid) are also present, supplementing Bagayoko’s playing.
Recorded in Bamako, Dakar, Paris and London, Welcome to Mali varies their sound: There is brass on Compagnon de la Vie; Afrobeat on the title track.
I Follow You starts as a delicate piano ballad and is sung in English.
“We have travelled,” says Doumbia, “met people — and lots of people come through Mali. And we hear grooves, we hear rhythms we like. It all ended up on the album.”
Many of these guests have shared a stage with Amadou and Mariam as part of Albarn’s live jam project Africa Express.
Albarn conceived it as a riposte to Bob Geldof, who put together the Live Aid concerts without originally including a single African musician.
Constant through the years
Africa Express brings together African and Western musicians for a lengthy series of musical partnerships and baton passes.
The cast changes each time but Amadou and Mariam have been part of every concert since its debut in 2006 in Bamako.
“I have done all the editions,” says Bagayoko proudly, “Glastonbury, Kinshasa, Lagos ...” Recently Africa Express rolled into London for a seven-hour marathon in Camden.
“It’s a mixture. Everybody is on together, the Africans with the rest.”
