That Music List: LIST 279

Hello again,

Out of tragedy and loss, unadulterated joy.

On a cold Thursday evening just gone in Sheffield, Mariam Doumbia sang the bright, addictive Afro-funk that she and husband Amadou Bagayoko popularised over more than four decades.

Amadou is no longer here, having passed away in spring 2025 at the age of 71. My foolish decision not to see them play a Migration Matters concert at the Leadmill the previous summer thus became an irreversible error. I was never going to make that mistake again this time.

Amadou's fluid, impeccable guitar lines were always going to be tricky for anyone else to replicate, but Sam Dickey, a Californian who'd studied under another titan of Malian music in Toumani Diabate, absolutely nailed the brief (as, in truth, did the remainder of a supremely tight, animated backing band), whilst also serving as Mariam's between-song translator where required.

Either side of a solo appearance by another Sam, Amadou and Mariam's own son (the de facto support act, albeit appearing bang in the middle of the evening's entertainments and at the finish), Mariam offered up a selection drawing from the duo's final studio album L'amour à la folie (whose title track I include this week) all the way back to their early-mid 2000s crossover albums, if not further.

If Sam Dickey's commentaries were taken as gospel, the emphasis appeared to be on the songs in the Amadou and Mariam canon emphasising love, companionship and the sanctity of marriage. Not surprising, arguably, given a marriage of over forty years that had had its origins in the music rooms of Mali's Institute for the Young Blind.

The duo lived these songs. Mariam still can, and whether out of a sense of joy, catharsis, or whatever else, still wants to. I'd be fibbing were I to say I have the linguistic gifts to interpret much of many of them, but a heart-rending reading of 2008's Sabali - sentiments of with you life is beautiful, I give you a big kiss, I hold you tightly, etc., - near the end of the set cut through the language barriers most powerfully of all.

And to that track, and to everything else during an action-packed ninety-minute set, an Octagon Centre audience jumped and celebrated and danced with such enthusiasm as to belie - disguise, even - the fact it was, sadly, barely half full. The wrong choice of venue, perhaps (Crookes Social Club might have suited better), or Bonfire Night competition? Who knows.

Either way, more fool those who stayed away. After all, now 68 years of age herself, who knows how many more global tours this much-loved world fusion pioneer has left.

***

In common with Amadou and Mariam, there is a missed gig element to my journey with The Chameleons, too. Unlike that example, however, it was borne of wanton ignorance.

I mentioned in another recent List that the Middleton quartet hold the distinction of being the musical act which I took longer than any other to "get". Longer than any of the French pop acts I've come to embrace. Longer still than Cardiacs. It must have taken me nearly three decades. Not three decades of continuously trying, mark you, but still.

Hailing from the part of the world covered by Piccadilly Radio, to which I listened day and night through the mid-1980s, I concede at this remove that I may have been introduced to them too early, and that may have soured me.

Compared to the janglier local acts I'd have been listening to contemporaneously, they appeared too intense, not sufficiently poppy, and their ideas seemed to be teased out for too long (Tears, with its I wasn't worried at all motif, was as close as I got to finding them memorable, but for me this too overran). In short, I spurred them for all of the reasons which I would eventually come to love them.

This was a prejudice I carried with me, its validity basically untested beyond failing to engage any more successfully with some of Chameleons leader Mark Burgess and Yves Altana's mid-1990s collaborations, into the 2010s.

It reached its nadir one late spring night in 2011, when deliberately delaying my arrival at Mercury Rev's complete run through Deserter's Songs at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall specifically to miss Mark's then project Chameleons Vox.

I know, what an utter pillock. Recalling this now, it disturbs me somewhat that I was still capable of making such blinkered decisions within the lifetime of this blog (however early on, and before encountering the transformative writings of Tom Ewing, David Bryant et al), whilst actively trying to encourage readers to give new or different stuff a go. Some music lover, that.

The thunderclap moment whereupon everything changed was owed, would you believe, to an online shopping mistake a couple of years after that. Really really.

I can't even remember what it was all these years later that I had ordered from a seller on Discogs. I only know two things. One, it wasn't the CD of The Chameleons' Radio 1 Evening Show sessions which I'd ordered, but it's what arrived. Two, I'm as certain as I can be that I didn't pay anywhere near as much as the £7.40 lowest price which any of the last 30 buyers of that album on Discogs has forked out, otherwise I'd have sought a refund.

Instead, I did what I do with any album I intend to sell or pass on, as sell or pass on I was determined I was going to do, and made sure it played properly. Which I did.

...and immediately fell head over heels for album opener Thursday's Child.

The flinty, agitated quality of Dave Fielding and Reg Smithies's opening guitar salvos. The echoey, fluid guitar washes a little later on. More relatability to the lyrics than I'd ever given the band credit for previously - perhaps serendipitously in the case of this song of years gone by and of ageing. The relative economy of the track at three and a half minutes, give or take.

Not that the length seemed to matter anymore, all of a sudden. Game on. Let's give this a proper go, after all.

A total Damascene conversion this was not, in so far as a few of the session CD's ten tracks still didn't land immediately and wouldn't number among my favourites to this day, but what did land landed with a vengeance. The haunted, two-sectioned hallucination of View from a Hill. The unmet need to be understood of Nathan's Phase (historical resonance for me there). The parallel universe stadium anthem of Home Is Where The Heart Is, icy synths, lurking sense of menace and all. And, perhaps inevitably, Up The Down Escalator, fundamentally as good a post-punk single as has ever been written.

I need hardly add; said CD never did make its appointment with the charity shop or selling-on Jiffy Bag.

Those last two tracks, or at least the studio equivalents thereof, are shared as two parts of this week's A Session of Sorts, together with a personal favourite from turn of the century first reformation long-player Why Call it Anything and a bang on-message track from last year's Arctic Moon to bring the story of The Chameleons, and my relationship with their music, right up to the present day.

I generally tend to shy away from laying on too thick any didactic message in these List essays. However, if there's anything that I'm happy for you to take from such as the above, it would be; revisit and revaluate everything whenever you have opportunity, both the music that's already in your collection and - at least as importantly - the music that isn't, as the listener you were half a lifetime or more ago isn't necessarily going to be the listener you are now.

***

Moving on, an already exceptional year for new output from Cardiacs alumni past and present has been improved yet further by the arrival of Moulded by Industry, the first album by "classic line-up" Cardiacs keyboard wizard William D Drake for eleven years.

A couple of tracks will be familiar as singles from 2023-24; a third, Me Fish Bring, from its original incarnation on 2011's The Rising of the Lights. The remainder, however, is both new and for the greater part influenced by the works of John Clare (1793-1864), "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" and in the opinion of some the most powerful writer on both nature and alienation that the rural labouring classes have ever begotten.

If that sounds potentially dry and overly scholarly, worry not - the music isn't. Listeners to the recent Marc Riley session will already be reassured that William's playful, light-touch take on eccentric English almost-pop, chamber music, prog and folk hasn't left him one iota, and there's even a discernible peppy, Europhile cool to parts of Bliss Again (the end of the first two verses each threaten to break briefly into L'Augmentation or Stereolab territory).

It ought to fall upon a more prolific editor of Wikipedia than me to update the entry on John Clare's page listing the instances of his work set to music, as no mention of Moulded by Industry exists four weeks on from its release.

***

That Music List

Saturday, 7 November 2026

LIST 279 - 07/11/2026

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LIST 279 - 07/11/2026

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