Mdou moctar

Finneas has little to offer without his sister Billie Eilish

No truth is more self-evident than that there are those whose best emerges only when they are paired with others: Lennon and McCartney, Morecambe and Wise, Clough and Taylor. And it’s perhaps even harder for a behind-the-scenes collaborator to step out in their own right. Jack Antonoff, for example, is one of the creative powerhouses of modern pop: he co-writes and produces songs for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Lorde, who plainly regard him as intrinsic to their success. His work probably reaches more ears than any other songwriter on Earth. But when he writes and produces those songs for himself? The magic vanishes. The band he fronts, Bleachers,

Watch kids go giddy in Niamey: Mdou Moctar live in Niger reviewed

The other week someone posted on Twitter a link to a YouTube clip titled ‘Family Lotus and D.J. Cookin’ at the Golden Inn, July 4 1981’. It showed a bunch of long-haired people on a makeshift stage in the New Mexico desert and a handful of people dancing around in the dust to the music, which was a weird, trippy, hyper-freaky form of electrified banjo music: ‘psychedelic bluegrass’, apparently. Watching the stream of the Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar was an unnervingly similar experience: he and his three-piece backing band were set up in the dust outside a friend’s house, watched by whoever came along. And Moctar’s guitar playing — blurrily