THE first time Mdou Moctar heard electronic drums, he thought they sounded like a war breaking out. The towering guitarist was nine years old. He and his friends were killing time outside the school gates in Arlit, a dusty mining town in the north of Niger, best known for producing enough uranium to power a decent chunk of the French national power grid. It was there that Moctar first picked up the sound that would soon come to obsess him: the rat-a-tat of the drums and the high, pure wail of an electric guitar. “When I was far away, I thought the drummer was playing a beat and then someone was firing a gun, you get what I mean?” he remembers, awe in his voice and fire in his eyes. “It was crazy.”
It’s 30 years later and Moctar – born Mahamadou Souleymane – is drinking tea loaded with spoonfuls of sugar in a leafy part of Silver Lake, in east Los Angeles. With his turquoise hoodie, black jeans and boxy beard he could easily pass for just another of the neighbourhood’s many hipsters, but in truth he’s a Tuareg nomad 7,500 miles from home. His new album Funeral For Justice is an existential, anti-colonial howl that rages against the wealthy countries who tear out Africa’s riches and shape them into tools of war. It opens with a stinging challenge to the powers-that-be. “Dear African leaders, hear my burning question”, Moctar sings in the Tuareg language, Tamasheq. “Why does your ear only heed France and America?”
Right now Moctar and his band – rhythm guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane, bassist Mikey Coltun and drummer Souleymane Ibrahim – are caught in a strange kind of limbo. In July 2023, a military coup in Niger made it difficult and dangerous for them to return home. They find themselves half a world away from loved ones, watching the Sahara through smartphone screens in the hills of Southern California.
Tonight they’re to play an invite-only show at the LA office of Beggars, the indie over hundreds of hours playing live together. “We’re constantly working on new music,” he says. “On this next tour we’ll obviously play songs from , but I’m sure we’ll be working on new material too as we go.”
