Tunng w/ Tinariwen – De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill on Sea 18/03/09

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How do you react when one of the founding members leaves your band? If you are Tunng, the answer appears to be recruit three Tuareg tribesmen from the band Tinariwen to fill the gap. The bands first came together as part of Radio Three’s ‘Late Junction’ sessions, where they were given one day in the studio to work up a couple of songs together on the hoof. The current tour seem to be the logical extension of this concept.

To see three Tuareg musicians in full costume take the stage in a modernist pavilion in a sleepy town on the Sussex coast was a surreal experience, but one that the band seemed to take in their stride, reeling out a series of languid guitar lines and laid back desert blues that has been their stock in trade for over 20 years. Opening with three songs, they got the crowd swaying and dancing before the members of Tunng join them onstage. Running through the first two tracks of collaboration things seemed to work well, Tunng’s electronics adding to Tinirawen’s flowing groove and vocally mashing tracks together- a sort of ‘one song to the tune of another’ type affair.

It was clear from the offset that the members of Tunng were in awe of their collaborators, thanking them in broken french and explaining the meanings of songs in hushed reverence. Perhaps as a result of this respect and admiration, or perhaps because it was the first night, the band seemed very nervous- particularly in comparison to the so-laid-back-he’s-virtually-horizontal Tinariwen frontman Abdallah. It also became swiftly apparent that the collaboration was under-rehearsed, with band members frequently coming in at the wrong time, and awkward moments caused by ‘forgetting’ how the song begins, or having to call out chord changes. The band members knew that there was something amiss too, revealing that they had only practiced for four days in the run up to the show. The sheer level of the challenge was emphasized by Tunng frontman Mike Lindsay’s admission that it had been a ‘crazy few days’ trying to fuse together songs in two very different styles, without a common language. While Tinariwen’s material worked well in collaboration, it seemed Tunng were unsure how to include them in their own material, meaning that for much of the set Abdullah and Eyadou were tragically underused, largely reduced to clapping or dancing, and infrequently called upon to add their distinctive, rolling Toureg sounds into the mix. Luckily for the audience, Abdullah’s dancing was an entertainment in itself, somewhat overshadowing the debut of a new, unfinished and sadly underwhelming new Tunng song.

While Tinariwen were a delight, there was an overwhelming sense of disappointment to the evening, a feeling of an opportunity lost. There is clearly potential in this collaboration, but it is hard not to feel that it is a potential that, on tonight’s evidence, will need far more than four days rehearsal to unlock.