The final performance of this year’s Llais festival isn’t one of its highest-profile turns, nor one of the better attended – there are maybe 60 people in the WMC’s spartan Weston Studio space to watch Somaliland’s Sahra Halgan and her French band. It’s most often been the case in my life, though, that the most life-affirming performances happen in the least assuming rooms, and I wouldn’t have traded this one for the world.
Halgan, who released her third album Hiddo Dhawr in the spring to a justly positive reception and has been touring it over the summer – including to Wales, playing Ystradgynlais about six weeks before this Llais date – comes with a biography that’s virtuous, unconventional and irresistible. A singing nurse in late-1980s Somaliland as it sought to gain independence from Somalia, levels of civil unrest led her to emigrate to France, where she met the musicians who’d give her songs a unique psych-rock backing. She’s since returned to Somaliland and runs its only arts venue/café, also called Hiddo Dhawr.
Onstage, Halgan wraps the Somaliland flag around her microphone base, and gives us background about where some of these songs come from in that regard: her vocal style on Diiyoohidii is based on the nation’s indigenous qaraami music, though her three musicians keep things in uptempo, semi-rocking territory. They make for a fabulous quartet, energetic if unassuming live, and it feels like cosmic happenstance that they came together in this way.
Aymeric Krol is a fine drummer, capable of rocking conventionally but with a modified kit and a background learning Malian percussion styles; he switches to kora for a few quieter numbers later on, too. Guitarist Maël Salètes has a wide pool of influences, though it’s when he’s at his most boisterous that his established love of Dutch postpunk band The Ex really flows from his amp. And Régis Monte, switching between three keyboards, makes everything swing majorly.
The set stretches to around 75 minutes once a quick, called-for encore is carried out, and doesn’t feel at all flabby. Magool, with its folky core melody, is so jaunty it should be almost intolerable, but only charms; Hooyalay combines abstract-sounding percussion with treacle-dark electric blues guitar and Halgan’s weighty vocal ululations. And, left until the end-before-the-encore, is Hiddo Dhawr’s pre-album single, the endlessly handclappable Sharaf, organ-driven garage funk that could/would light up any of the previous five decades and sounds just peachy in this one too. This isn’t the sort of show that needs bells, whistles or velvet seat covers to be a great experience, merely four fine players cooking as one.
Llais: Sahra Halgan, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Sun 13 Oct
words NOEL GARDNER photos SIMON AYRE
