They stopped me for two days, even though I had a work permit for America. "I was on my way to play in Tahiti back in March and went through Los Angeles in transit. Her songs are no longer banned in her homeland, but these days simply being an Algerian has brought problems elsewhere. The new album includes songs of nostalgia and longing for Algeria, although she was able to return last year to visit her family. And then there was Berber music, chaabi and rai. "I started at school with classical music, then flamenco, then rock. It's a complex, unlikely mix that reflects all the different styles she heard growing up in Algeria. The new album includes one song, Ilham, that she sings "in Arabic, but in the Berber style - more like Malian music and the music of black Africa". Her own ancestry dates back to the Berbers who already lived in North Africa before the Arab invasions. "He and his band came in to listen every night, and then to play," Massi explains. The Malian singer was mixing his new album in an adjoining studio. Then there are other African influences, with the appearance of various members of Salif Keita's band. The best orchestral track, the tragic Denia Wezmen, echoes a very different tradition and was, she says, inspired by Mohamed Abdel Wahab, the celebrated Egyptian producer and arranger who mixed Arabic with Latin influences in his work for the legendary singer Oum Kalthoum. There are sections recorded with an orchestra - a reminder, she says, that she started out studying Western classical music in Algiers, "and I was listening to cello music when I was pregnant". Since then she has acquired an excellent band and mixed the gentle ballads with anything from Arabic styles and flamenco to sturdy pop anthems with a North African edge. It would be hard to imagine British labels showing similar bravery. An appearance in 1999 at the Femmes d'Algerie women's festival soon after her arrival in Paris was followed by broadcasts on the adventurous Radio Nova and then a record contract. Here was a girl with long black hair and jeans and a powerful, intimate voice playing acoustic guitar and singing about exile and tragic love affairs.
Her songs are a world away from Algeria's best-known pop style, rai, and though she sings mostly in Arabic, her early work was a North African answer to Joan Baez or Francoise Hardy. Massi's gently melodic tristesse is matched with a musical style that turns all previous concepts of Algerian music upside down. I didn't have an easy childhood, and then came the civil war. Even in Algeria with my family, I had a solitary side. I don't know if it's because of the life I've led up to now. I have happy moments, but I'm melancholy.
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"I don't know how to answer - I'm a very melancholy person, and I don't know why.
Now her six-week-old daughter, Yngy (emerald in Persian), is being cared for in the next room as Massi explains why the songs on her new album, Mesk Elil (Honeysuckle), are once again so exquisitely sad. It's something she's keen to do - "I thought he was black when I heard his voice" - but was delayed, she said, because she was pregnant. Her last album, Deb (Heartbroken), sold 200,000 copies and she will no doubt win even more of a following if a planned duet with Paul Weller goes ahead. It is only six years since she fled Algeria, and in that time she has established herself as a celebrity in France, with a growing global following.įor the West, at least, she is now surely not just the best-known female singer from North Africa but from the Arabic-speaking world. In the offices of a record company on Paris's Left Bank, Souad Massi is trying to explain why she is "a complicated person, and not happy". Sadness is exquisite in the hands of the Arabic-speaking world's best-known singer.
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