It’s now 28 years since Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia met in Mali and started making music together. Mariam had grown up singing at weddings and traditional festivals while the teenaged Amadou had cut his teeth as a guitarist in Les Ambassadeurs, one of West Africa’s hottest and most legendary bands. Both are blind and they met in 1977 at the Institute for the Blind in Bamako, where they were both studying Braille and found themselves performing together in the institute’s Eclipse Orchestra. They married in 1980, the same year they played their first official concert together as a duo.

Frustrated by the lack of opportunities in Mali, in 1986 they moved to Abidjan, the capital of neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire, where they made their first recordings, on a series of cassette-only releases. Following the success of Dimanche a Bamako, these are now being issued by Because Music on CD for the first time as the single disc collection ‘1990-1995: The Best of the African Years’ (1990-1995: Le Meilleur des Années Maliennes) which is due 20th March 2006. This will be followed later in the year by a special box set featuring all five of their African cassette releases ‘1990-1995: The Complete African Years’ (1990-1995: L’Intégrale des Années Maliennes).

The cassettes made them stars back home in Mali and also reached the ears of a leading French producer who in the mid-1990s suggested they relocated to Paris. Between 1998 and 2002 they recorded three major label albums - ‘Sou Ni Tilé’, ‘Ge ni Mousso’ and ‘Wati’ - that made them favourites with world music audiences and fans of African music around the globe.

One of those who was suitably impressed was the maverick hit-maker Manu Chao, whose own 1998 album ‘Clandestino’ was a landmark in global Latin fusion. He was particularly taken with a track called ‘Je T’Aime Mon Amour, Ma Chérie’, which persuaded him that Amadou and Mariam had the potential to reach a far wider public than the specialist world music audience that had bought their records to date.

“I fell in love with that song and its melody,” he recalls. “For a year I played their records round the clock. What I liked most about them was the juxtaposition of the African blues-rock they play and the overwhelming softness they project.”

A meeting was arranged in a Paris studio and Chao offered to produce their next album. The result was ‘Dimanche à Bamako’. Recorded in both Paris and Bamako, Chao’s presence and production cleverly enhance rather than blur Amadou & Mariam’s own musical vision, in much the same symapthetic way Ry Cooder worked with the veteran Cuban musicians on Buena Vista. In short, it was a marriage made in musical heaven. Chao had sprinkled his “magic dust” all over the album, The TImes observed. But it wasn’t a takeover, but a genuine collaboration. “He brilliantly tweaks what they do, though thankfully not enough to make it sound like his own albums,” Mojo astutely noted of his contribution.

Since the release of ‘Dimanche à Bamako’, the lives of Amadou and Mariam have changed dramatically as they have made the transition from world music cult heroes to full-blown pop stars and their album has become the most celebrated African record since Youssou N’Dour’s ‘Seven Seconds’ more than a decade ago.