Rock & Roll, for all its hard-partying clichés and the supposed rebellious streak that courses through its toxic veins, is inextricably linked to the many trappings of its success, such as thrashed hotel rooms and an endless supply of sex and drugs. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that per-say - wouldn't we all like a slice of that particular pie at least once in our comparatively dull, decidedly un-jet-set lives.

In that regard Rock & Roll continues to serve as a means of cultural revolution, but only in so far as style and fashion trends are concerned. Music serving as a call for genuine revolution has been thin on the ground for some time - you'd have to return to the Regan/Thatcher era for bands that actually lived on the periphery of society for the sake of their art and the right to call it as they see it.

It could be said that in light of the current environmental problems and the paranoia induced in the wake of 9/11 that, for the first time since the mid-80s, we are once again living in a highly politicised era. Obligatory Bush-baiting has thus become the norm, and while these artists intentions are, in all probability, well-meaning, the truth of the matter is that nobodies really saying anything.

When Saharan blues-rockers Tinariwen first came to international prominence with 2004s Amassakou, the hype and excitement centred as much around their members past as it did around their unique desert music. The group, formed in 1982 in Muammar al-Gaddafi's camps of Tuareg rebels, came loaded with a myth that was inseparable from their music, a myth which told of guitars nestling side by side with guns while it's members alternated between duel roles of freedom fighting rebels and guitar totting, desert-dwelling story-tellers and documenters of the trials and tribulations of a nation. They had probably never seen a hotel room, much less thrashed one.

"The beginning of Tinariwen is a very complicated story, all tied up with the lives of young Touareg men who were living in exile in Algeria and Libya in the 1970s," says tousle haired guitarist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, speaking to the Cork Independent through an interpreter.

"I had been building my own guitars out of oil cans, sticks and bicycle brakewire since the end of the 1960s. For me, throughout all that time, music was always a solace, and a means of dealing with the loneliness and emptiness which I felt. It was like therapy.

"But when I met Inteyeden and Hassan in the late 1970s, for the first time I had other people like myself, who loved music, to play with, and to build something together. I had been involved in the Touareg rebel movement since the mid 1970s, but in a very informal way. It was like a secret society then, with very few members. The first songs I wrote were about my friends and I, and about what we were living through. So they had something to do with the political struggle right from the very start. But it was only later, in the mid 1980s, that Tinariwen became a kind of official voice for the rebellion. Before then, I was only singing about my experience and my feelings."

The groups sound is difficult to put into words - sheltered from Western music, the predominant influence on Tinariwen came from the traditional music of the Mali region. As such, the characteristics of that sound can be aligned to the vastness that surrounds them. The groups guitar-heavy line-up resonate with the simplistic drone of primitive American blues, but infuse that sound with their traditional scales and melodies, slowly eeking out exotic airs that seem ramshackled, meditative, brooding and tender.

"Back in Mali, in the nomad camps, there was hardly any western music in the early days," says Ibrahim, explaining the origin of the groups sound. "Our main staple was our own traditional music, which was based around certain instruments and certain rhythms. The two most important instruments, the tindé drum and the imzad violin, are only played by women. Men play the shepherds flute and the teherdent, which is a kind of gut-string lute, very close to the ngoni of the Songhai. It's only played by traditional griots and artisans.

"That's why the guitar was so attractive to me. It seemed to promise so much freedom, and to be outside the rules and limitations of our traditional society. I first saw the guitar being played in western movies, that were projected against whitewashed walls in the villages and towns of the desert. I liked the sound of it, and the look of it, but it wasn't until I was 19 years old, in Tamanrasset, that I saw a real acoustic guitar for the first time. Once a young Touareg left his home camp, and travelled to cities like Tamanrasset, Agadez, In Salah, Ghardaia, Algiers and Tripoli, then he usually came into contact with western music. We used to love groups like Santana, Dire Straits, Don Williams, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, but because we often listened to this music on pirated cassettes, we knew very little about the musicians themselves, not even their names. But when it came to inventing our own style, we really didn't refer too much to all these western sounds, but rather just adapted the old traditional melodies and rhythms to the electric guitar. It just came through hours of playing on self-made guitars, trying different tunings."