At this late-night Prom, world rock-folk fusion group Tinariwen give us their chilled-out and hypnotic “desert blues”, getting us to clap along to the beat, and even to dance. With an unusual line-up of five electric guitars, plus bass and percussion, the seven men also sing in call-and-response with each other, in the language of Tamashek; spoken by nomadic tribes across North Africa in Algeria, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso — the language of the Sahara.

The group was founded in 1979 as a grassroots voice of rebellion against Gaddafi’s oppressive government. (At the age of four, Tinariwen’s founder Ibrahim Ag Alhabib witnessed his father’s execution at the hands of the pre-Gaddafi government, during the 1963 uprising in Mali.) With very humble beginnings, the group achieved international recognition in the nineties, and has since performed all over the world; including, recently, at Glastonbury.

On a boiling hot night in the Royal Albert Hall, there seems something slightly perverse or inauthentic about the band’s dress, in long, thick robes that fully cover the face and body. They no longer live poverty-stricken lives in the desert, so why dress up like they still do? But there’s nothing inauthentic about their music, which has the effortless quality of singing round a campfire, built on the band members listening to one another and building a communal groove. Musically, their short songs are very simple: mostly based around just one chord, with simple melodic fragments, and unobtrusive, small-scale percussion of djembe and tambourine.

There is a question over the relevance of Tinariwen having their own Prom as part of “the world’s greatest classical musical festival”, as a non-classical group. Indian classical music has been a fixture of the Proms for many years; though east-Asian classical traditions (e.g., from China and Indonesia) remain weirdly unrepresented. Tinariwen’s music is rooted in North African folk music, which certainly has some relation to classical traditions. But when it’s a sell-out show of thousands, introducing new people to the BBC Proms, it’s probably a good thing.

Tickets for all 73 Proms are available from just £8 on the BBC Proms 2024 website.