Simple...

... voices, guitars, percussion.
 
No, not simple at all. It doesn’t begin to explain the hypnotising sound of Tinariwen, Tuareg band from the southern Sahara who somehow turn the breath and heartbeat of the world into a sound that seems to encompass everything. I’ve heard them twice at WOMAD and couldn’t believe my luck when I found that they were playing in Oxford the evening after Joan Armatrading. So a friend and I created our own two-day, mini-festival to celebrate our four-days-apart birthdays.
 
During the day we walked in the sun; drank coffee; sheltered from torrential rain (see Extra) in a pub, in a doorway, in Christ Church Picture Gallery, wherever we could; ate a Lebanese lunch in East Oxford; walked up the canal to the buttercups and cows in Port Meadow; forgot our plan to go to the new Bodleian because we were talking so much…
 
By the time we got to Oxford Town Hall our feet were more than ready to stop but as Tinariwen started playing I felt very uncomfortable with the music being enclosed. I’ve only ever heard it free to travel and didn’t like it coming back to me from the walls. But the melodic ‘drone’ of the voices under the instruments reels you in and after a bit it stopped mattering where we were and I was as immersed as I have been each time before. And so was L and so, it seemed, was everyone else in the sold-out gig.
 
A wonderful two days.