Amadou & Mariam announce London show

Having recently appeared at Africa Express and Africa Now, Amadou & Mariam have announced a headline show at London's Koko on Wednesday 25th February 2009. This follows the release of their highly anticipated new album, 'Welcome to Mali,' released through Because on 17th November. They have also been confirmed to appear on the Culture Show (BBC2) on Thursday 20th November. Tickets for the Koko show are priced £17.50 in advance and are available from the Koko Ticketline: 0870 1451115 or online: www.comono.co.uk

'Welcome To Mali" features Damon Albarn as guest producer on the opening track and first single 'Sabali', plus special guest appearances by Keziah Jones, 'M', Tiken Jah Fakoli, Toumani Diabate and Juan Rozoff. The album was recorded over the past twelve months in Bamako, Dakar, Paris and London and was produced by their long-time manager and artistic director Marc-Antoine Moreau and Lauren Jais who, together with Manu Chao, were co-producers of 'Dimanche à Bamako' ('Sunday in Bamako'), one of the best selling albums ever to come out of Africa.

'Dimanche à Bamako,' released in 2005, propelled the Malian duo high into the French charts and won them both a prestigious Les Victoires de la Musique award (the French equivalent of the Grammys) and two BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music. Significantly, it also gave Amadou & Mariam the opportunity to tour the globe. They went from playing WOMAD to appearing at Glastonbury and from performing in small clubs to selling-out the world's major concert venues and appearing at American festivals such as Coachella and Lollapalooza. They even performed at the opening ceremony of the World Cup in Germany 2006.

Yet the story begins more than a quarter of a century before 'Dimanche à Bamako' when, in 1977, Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia met whilst attending the Institute for Young Blind in Bamako (where to this day they play and invite artists to the annual 'Paris Bamako' benefit festival).

Amadou had already cut his teeth as a teenage guitarist in the Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako, one of West Africa's hottest bands of the Seventies. Mariam had, since a young age, sung at weddings and other traditional Malian festivals. By the late 1990s, the couple were moving regularly between Bamako and Paris and released the albums 'Sou Ni Ti' (1998), 'Tje ni Mousso'