Mali stars shine in the darkness

In Manchester next year, rock music fans will sit through a 90-minute concert in complete darkness.

They will be led to their seats in darkness. They will cheer and clap in the darkness. The audience will pay to hear but not to see – not until the closing number at any rate – one of the most popular musical double acts in the world. The Mancunians will share, as no other rock audience has shared before, the experience of the stars they have come to hear.

In the last three years, Amadou and Mariam have found whirlwind global success in late middle age. They have been blind since their childhood in Mali, in west Africa. It was Amadou, 53, who had the idea to stage a series of concerts "dans le noir" as part of the promotional tour of the couple's much-awaited new album, Welcome to Mali, which appears next month.

"Partly this is to ask the audience to share the experience of people who have no sight – people like ourselves," Amadou says. "But also we hope that, without the distraction of seeing, the audience will concentrate on the music, will lose themselves in the music."

The first of the special gigs will be in Manchester next July because, Amadou says, "the people in Manchester responded very enthusiastically to the idea. They helped us a great deal." The intention, he says, is to hold a 90-minute concert in the darkness "but we might turn the lights on near the end".

Amadou and Mariam will give a preview of their new album – with the lights on from the beginning – at two concerts in London next week. They will join Africa Express – the freewheeling concert and jam sessions that unite African and British musicians – at Koko in Camden for the BBC Electric Proms Festival next Wednesday. They will play at a similar concert called Africa Now at the Barbican next Thursday.

Their new album, Amadou says, is "not just new but different. Before people used to say we were blues-rock. The new album is much more rock than blues. But the music is still very African, in its inspiration, in its rhythms."

The album, which appears on 17 November on the label Because, has, for the first time, some snatches of Amadou and Mariam singing in English. Most of the songs, just like those on the hugely successful 2005 album, Dimanche à Bamako, are in French or one of the Malian languages, Bambara.

The album was recorded in Bamako, Dakar, Paris and London and produced by the duo's manager and artistic director Marc-Antoine Moreau and Lauren Jais who, together with Manu Chao, were co-producers of Dimanche à Bamako. The guest producer this time is Damon Albarn. He is given a partial writing credit on the startling first track, an ethereal new departure by Amadou and Mariam into electro-rock. This song, "Sabali" ("sweetness"), will be released as a single on 27 October and has already had air-time on Radio 1.

Amadou, speaking at his guitar-strewn apartment in a Paris suburb, says: "The new album moves more towards rock and away from the blues but, in a way, this is not new for us. The sound of rock, and especially British rock, has always been in our heads."

"When we were kids in Bamako, we listened to Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. To us it didn't sound British, it sounded African."

That's not so surprising, maybe, given the African-American roots of blues, rhythm and blues and rock'n'roll. Amadou grins and shrugs. "Maybe. History is history," he said. "With blues, the roots are obvious. With British music, it's more complicated. You could say that 80 per cent of British rock music comes down from African roots. The other 20 per cent is more from a British or European tradition of songs and melodies. As kids, when we heard a ballad by a British band which was pure melody, we thought 'that is African music'. It sounded very familiar to us.

"British and African music addresses the same emotions. British people may not realise how popular British music is in Africa."

The "fusion" of rock and blues with the African tradition – which has been so successful for Amadou and Mariam in the last three years – came "quite naturally", he says. "We try new things. We meet new people. Musicians coming together, as we do in Africa Express, is always a wonderful thing. But Mariam and I still feel that we are producing African music, based on African roots and African rhythms."

Amadou was already a guitar player with a popular local band when he met Mariam in braille class at the Bamako institute for the blind in 1977. Amadou lost his sight at the age of 15 after he developed cataracts, for which simple treatment was possible, but not available. Mariam lost her sight at the age of five after bad treatment for an attack of measles.

Mariam's haunting voice had been in demand at weddings and naming ceremonies since she was a little girl. They began to sing and play music together at the institute, fell in love and got married in 1980. They have three fully-sighted children in their twenties, one of whom – their middle son, Sam – is a rapper in France.

Their first official appearance as a duo came soon after their marriage. They rapidly became popular in Mali but opportunities for a music career were scarce in the fourth poorest country in the world. They moved in 1986 to the Ivory Coast where they made their first records (since re-issued by Because Music as the single disc collection 1990-1995: The Best of the African Years and a special box set, The Complete African Years).

In the mid-1990s they moved to Paris and recorded three albums – Sou Ni Tilé, Ge ni Mousso and Wati – which brought them to the attention of fans of world and African music. One such fan was French latin fusion musician, Manu Chao. "For a year I played their records round the clock. What I liked most about them was the juxtaposition of African blues-rock and the overwhelming softness," he once said.

Manu Chao offered to produce their next album, Dimanche à Bamako. Their career rocketed. In France, they won a Victoires de la Musique award, the French equivalent of a Grammy. They won a Radio 3 award for world music in 2006.

The world has many musicians rocking into their 50s and 60s. Amadou and Mariam are unusual in having first exploded into global recognition when they were aged 50 and 47 respectively. Is first-time success hard to deal with for a pair of middle-aged rockers?

Amadou chuckles. "No, because in a sense success came to us gradually. We were a success in Mali, a success in the Ivory Coast, a success in France. By the time we became known internationally, we knew how to deal with success. We were mature people.

"It must be harder for young musicians who become internationally famous overnight. We have tried to make use of our success, to put something back into the places we came from."

The couple are ambassadors for Sight Savers International, a British charity that supports the Bamako institute where they met. The organisation also runs projects in Mali and elsewhere in Africa to prevent unnecessary blindness. Amadou and Mariam are also ambassadors for the world food programme and for international action against drought.

Many of their songs address – in a quiet and non-confrontational way – the issues of poverty, famine, disease and corruption in Africa. Is it harder to write such songs when you have become rich and successful? "No," says Amadou. " We know where we came from. We often go back. The only difficulty we have is that our schedule is now so crowded that it is difficult to find the time to write new songs."

Amadou once said that he had come to regard his blindness as a "gift". What did he mean by that? "I mean, first of all, that it was blindness which brought Mariam and I together. If we had not been blind, we would never have met and fallen in love. In that sense alone blindness has proved to be a gift to us.

"But there is also more than that. If you are blind, you have fewer distractions. You cannot go to the cinema. You cannot easily go out with your friends. Because I was blind, I concentrated on my music. I might have been a musician if I was not blind but I don't know if I would have been a good musician.

"If you are blind, I think, your sense of sound becomes richer. You appreciate the qualities of sound. That is one reason why I wanted to have a series of concerts in the darkness. I wanted the audiences to try to hear the music just as Mariam and I hear it."

Amadou and Mariam play as part of Africa Express for the Electric Proms at Koko, London NW1 (www.bbc.co.uk/electricproms) on 22 October, and Africa Now! at the Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891) on 23 October; 'Welcome to Mali' is out on 17 November on Because