WHAT happens when you combine beautifully bouncing African rhythms with rock guitar? You get the irresistible sounds of Songhoy Blues.

Check out their kaleidoscopic video for Al Hassidi Terie and the riff-laden Soubour. Plus Bamako, the first single taken from Songhoy Blues' Resistance album with fantastic guitar licks and vocal hooks.

They've already sold out their Wednesday, January 23 gig at Manchester's Band on the Wall but you can catch them at Kendal's Brewery Art Centre the night before (January 22).

"The most important thing in music is the way you share the emotion with the crowd," explains singer Aliou Toure. "That is one of the powers of music. When you get in a club, people are drinking and dancing and talking, but when you turn the music off, people leave the club, get out of the club one by one. Which means they are not there for the drink, they are not there for each other. They are there for something else, for the power of music. When I’m on stage I’m inside the music and that love and happiness I feel on stage, I am trying to bring people with me to feel the same thing."

Songhoy Blues were formed in 2012, when three musicians from northern Mali - Aliou, Garba Touré and Oumar Touré (they're not related) - fled to the capital, Bamako, after the Islamist group Ansar Dine took control of the region, apparently banning music among many other things. The three met in Bamako, recruited drummer Nathanael Dembele, and it all started from there. "The band was born from war and sent into exile," Aliou points out, "so the second album is called Résistance. That’s the word to describe us keeping going, and building on what we said on the first album."

Aliou says that the situation in Mali is now different from 2012: "It is getting better, so the lyrics we wrote are all about that. Not just in Mali, but outside Mali. And the way we wrote music changed with the way things were going on around us.”

Some things do not change in the world of Songhoy Blues. The essential message of the group's music remains the same: communicating the pure joy of music. Aliou says that they find it very hard to describe the kind of music they make: "Some tracks, when you listen to the new album, they sound really, really rock. Some tracks sound blues. Some tracks sound folk. To us, world music doesn’t make sense. It’s an industry thing. African artists play rock as well, they play blues as well. Blues is from there, rock is from there, reggae is from there, hip hop is from there. So how come people call African music world music? Why not African rock or African hip-hop or African reggae?”