Cheb Mami

When Cheb Mami returned to France in May 1989, his name was again top of the bill at l’Olympia, where his vocal arabesques set the audience alight. The media enthroned him as the "Prince of Raï", seeing him as the new hope for the genre’s renewal. The same year, he performed at the New Morning club. Throughout that year, he toured in France and abroad, from Angoulême to New York to Quebec to Italy, Holland, West Germany and England, where, at the famous Womad festival (created by Peter Gabriel), the British public at last discovered raï.

After having been the first raï ambassador to the U.S.A., in New York in1989, he returned there the following year to record the album "Let Me Raï", produced in a sophisticated studio in Los Angeles by Hilton Rosenthal, the producer of the white Zulu Johnny Clegg. But, alas, the sumptuous arrangements and Mami’s voice of honey were never to reach the American public. The outbreak of the Gulf War not only scuppered Mami’s ambition to establish raï in America, but also caused the album’s flop in France, where it was banned on all French radio stations. While Western tanks ploughed through the Kuwaïti desert, Mami went through an arid period in his career. Slaloming between the French government’s anti-terrorist measures and the waves of Muslim fundamentalist bomb attacks, he continued to play small venues principally to second generation French Arab fans who identified themselves with the trance-like "Haoulou" and "Douha Allia", which had become his signature songs.