For decades they conducted low-level warfare against the government to win back their rights and assert their nomadic culture. But as the festival was essentially a Tuareg gathering, their lean, bone-shaking blues could soon be in vogue far beyond the desert sands It has been a long time coming. We didn't get the return trip."With an international contingent including Plant, the French band Lo'Jo and the Navajo punk band Blackfire alongside Malian blues legends such as Ali Farka Tour?the singer Oumou Sangare and the extraordinary Tuareg guitar band Tinariwen, it has already been described as one of the best live albums ever released.While Mali has been the focus of international attention since Ry Cooder's collaboration with Tour?n Talking Timbuktu, the music of the Tuareg is less well known. Jesus took us there." With a little help from an even higher authority, as Plant explains, in the shape of the BBC's Newsround.
"They've got a plane that goes from Bamako, the capital of Mali, and they said, 'If you pay your part of the fare, you can come.' And we did It was a cash deal, but they ripped us off. Plant was one of only a handful of Western artists to appear, as is documented on a dazzling CD of the best performances from Essakane, released next week.Plant was surely embarking on one of the stranger trips in his lifetime, and took the guitarists Justin Adams and Skin via a more time-honoured hippie route "We hitched," he remembers, with a grin "We hitched a ride with the Christian Brothers. The majority arrived as they do everywhere in the desert - by camel, or packed like sardines on the back of trucks. But then, if you wanted to give a map reference to the term "middle of nowhere", then the Saharan oasis of Essakane, about 65km from Timbuktu, would be a good place to start.
Earlier this year, Essakane's desert calm exploded with the arrival of a 5,000-strong audience for the third Festival in the Desert, surely the most remote and extraordinary musical gathering on earth. There is no road from Timbuktu, four hours' drive away and long held as the international standard in remoteness. The bucolic setting of Mount Ephraim Gardens, in Kent, where Robert Plant and his band Strange Sensation delivered a superlative set last week at Canterbury Fayre, is unquestionably a long way from Essakane. But there's no doubt that, one way or another, Holmes will have a significant part to play in the way movies are absorbed in years to come.The Free Association single 'Sugarman' is available on Mercury Records from 1 September; the album 'David Holmes Presents The Free Association' is reissued by Mercury on 15 September. The result was David Holmes Presents The Free Association, one of last year's outstanding albums.Never ones to rest on their laurels, Holmes and Hilton are already planning the follow-up, and hatching grandiose plans for a Free Association live spectacular - that "stage full of freaks" mentioned earlier - so it looks as if Hollywood might have to wait a little while for his return. Before long, the pair were back in Los Angeles, recording an entire album of backing tracks with the same "Wrecking Crew" of session players they'd used on Ocean's Eleven, and getting singer Petra Jean Phillipson and rapper Sean Reveron to front the tracks. Which is where the Elvis song 'A Little Less Conversation' came about, because obviously Elvis had a really strong affiliation with Las Vegas, and that track has a very contemporary feel."After the success of Ocean's Eleven, Holmes took time out to compile Come Get It I Got It, he and Hilton recording little linking pieces of breakbeat fusion-jazz to join the tracks together, an enjoyable diversion which eventually snowballed into The Free Association. "Then I tried to think of ways to identify with what was going on - with it being a contemporary film, how to be original, but set within the heart of Las Vegas.
