Tinariwen: Getting booked

Some ideas you can never quite classify as being audacious or just economy-brand terrible. So it is with plans for a book about Tinariwen, written by their manager Andrew Morgan:

Andy describes his book as "a full length work of documentary 'faction', told either from the first person point of view, with plenty of my own experiences of meeting the band and traveling to the desert, or more from the point of the view of the band members and the other 'companions' who have been on their incredible journey with them. I haven't decided yet. Its ambition is to be the most in-depth piece of writing about Tinariwen, modern Touareg history and the whole ishumar generation in the English language."

Hmm. If it comes off - and it could, in a Julian Cope sort-of fashion - that's going to be an incredible book.

If it doesn't, we might have to look the other way and whistle.

Meanwhile, the band are lined up to play Tamanrasset, the unofficial capital of the Touareg people. This is going to be a homecoming show - Tinariwen haven't played there since the 1980s. Their people are pitching it as the "sub-Saharan music event of the decade", which is the sort of bombast you'd expect from PR people but does have something of the ring of truth.

I missed, by the way, the release a couple of weeks back of Imidiwan: Companions. I'd make more of a fuss about it, but I see from Twitter that the X Factor is on so we're apparently all pretending we want music dead.