MDOU MOCTAR has come a long way since he built his first guitar out of wood and old bike parts. Currently holed up in Los Angeles, the charismatic desert blues prodigy and his band of brothers are about to use their well-earned international platform to rail against injustice in his Saharan homeland. “We write our songs about real life, not fiction,” hears Kevin EG Perry

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, adusty 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 Iwas far away, I thought the drummer was playing a beat and then someone was firing agun, you get what Imean?” 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 aleafy 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 aTuareg 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 astrange 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 aworld 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 record label group which includes their home at Matador. It’s a significant chance to introduce various industry players to their potent new record, but they show no sign of nerves as stage time approaches. While Moctar goes to pray in another room, Coltun explains that the songs they’ll play tonight aren’t new as such. They honed Funeral For Justice 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 Funeral For Justice, but I’m sure we’ll be working on new material too as we go.”

An imminent run of summer festival dates begins at Coachella and Coltun suggests they’ve previously enjoyed the taste of home that comes with playing in the Californian desert, even if it’s not quite the Sahara. Moctar, returning to his seat next to Coltun, says he has no expectations.