"Guerrilla warfare was still going on," he recalls, "and we were right in the middle of it." They were near the remote desert town of Kidal, where the 1990 Tuareg rebellion began with the seizure of an army garrison and its armoury. Though fighting had officially ended, the area was - and still is - dangerous to enter. On the way to Kidal in 2001, the truck convoy carrying the PA was hijacked by bandits armed with Kalashnikovs. Only the presence of Kheddou, one of Tinariwen's guitarists and the man who had led that 1990 uprising in Kidal, ensured the convoy's passage to the site.So, when Adams began working with Plant soon afterwards, and Plant asked what he'd been doing, they soon found they had things to talk about. Plant has been a serious collector of music from both sides of the Atlas Mountains for decades. His 1994 recordings with Jimmy Page on No Quarter featured powerful collaborations with Moroccan and Egyptian musicians, and in March 1972, he and Page played with an Indian classical orchestra in Bombay, during a month of experimental sessions Plant knew what he was talking about.
"When I heard about what Justin was doing, I said, 'Please can I come?'"In 1972," he continues, "I took Jimmy Page to this part of Morocco called the sub-Sahara, between the Atlas Mountains and what was once called the Spanish sub-Sahara." Like Essakine and Kidal, it was an area rife with conflict. "The Polisario guerrillas were very active, and there were huge problems down there." But there was also great music. "When you go into the marketplace in the Atlas Mountains and you start buying cassettes, you start listening to the lone voice, the one bandir and violin. The Berbers and hill tribes - what was left of the tribes of the Lords of the Atlas - were making this music that was eternal. It's music based on the calendar of the year and all the things to celebrate, from circumcisions to a good or bad crop. Page and I took a tape machine, and I took him down to Taroudant and to the south towards Ouarzazate and Zegora, recording people on our way. While at the same time still being Led Zeppelin."Plant's set at Essakane went down a storm with the largely Tuareg audience, with Zep classics such as "Whole Lotta Love" alongside radical reworkings of "Girl from the North Country", and a consummate exploration of Memphis rather than Malian blues on "Win My Train Fare Home".
As for his own favourites, he points firmly to the deep, edgy, elemental guitar sound of Tinariwen, "the pride of the Sahara" and lifelong political rebels with the scars to prove it. Formed in Libyan refugee camps in 1982, they are famous throughout the region as both musicians and fighters. Justin Adams produced Tinariwen's Radio Tisdas Sessions for his own label Wayward a couple of years ago "It was an extraordinary experience," he remembers. "When I first heard them, I felt, this was the music I'd been looking for all my life."For years during the guerrilla wars, he tells me, Tinariwen's working-methods were as stripped down as their music.
"They'd just sit in a room with a ghetto blaster, press 'Record' and play. And if they stopped and talked between songs, then that was what went out on cassette." Clothed and veiled in traditional Tuareg dress, the group embody the heavy gang spirit of defiance and misrule that countless rock bands, including Led Zeppelin, have sought to evoke "The Tuareg are incredible posers," Adams says "They really know how to strike a pose on a camel. Because they're veiled, that's how they recognise each other: by the pose they strike."The CD's illustrated booklet reveals what an extraordinary festival it was on just about every level, but for Plant, some of the strongest memories were of the impromptu sessions off stage. "There was a wonderful evening with Ali Farka Tour?We created a fire and sat around it, and Justin played guitar, Ali sang and I was singing, and it was probably better than anything that could be staged."But Plant also fears that the festival could simply become coffee-table exotica for an acquisitive Western audience.
