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Natacha Atlas: Biography

Natacha Atlas (it's her real name) was born in Belgium, of Middle Eastern descent, with ancestral and family links to Egypt, Palestine and Morocco. Having moved around the world for most of her life, living in Brussels, Egypt, Greece and England, her experience of different cultures has most certainly influenced her music.

Natacha's first break came when she sang on Balearic beat crew !Locas club hit Timbal, and was drawn into the Jah Wobble circle, singing and co-writing with his just-forming band Invaders of the Heart. (She has recently worked with Wobble again, on the 2002 Wobble/Temple of Sound album Shout At The Devil). She also met Transglobal Underground, the London-based multicultural collective who, in blending electronica, dub, hip-hop and funk with Indian, African and Middle Eastern musical forms, were significant role models for today's world-dance phenomenon. The encounter was to turn into a long-standing, happy association. First guesting with them in 1991, she became, two years, later, a member of the core quartet of Transglobal, as lead singer and belly-dancer (the latter not some kind of limp tourist-pleasing wiggle but the real raq sharki). A couple of years later, it was the band's Tim Whelan, Hamid ManTu and Nick Page (a.k.a. Count Dubulah, now of Temple of Sound) who helped her to make her first solo album, Diaspora. In parallel with the success of her solo albums she remained a full-time Transglobal member, and Transglobals constituted her backing band, until they left Nation in 1999, and they have remained allies throughout her subsequent career.

Diaspora was released (in the UK by Beggars Banquet/Mantra, as are all her albums) in 1995. It combined the dubby, beat-driven global dance approach of Transglobal with the more traditional work of Arabic musicians, and the result was a critically acclaimed collection of songs of love and yearning. 1997's Halim followed, and then Gedida in 1999 , both intelligently and naturally fusing Middle Eastern and European styles, and delighting an ever-increasing audience in both territories. 2000 saw the release of The Remix Collection, in which material from the first three albums was given the treatment by a variety of remixers, including Talvin Singh, Banco de Gaia, Youth, 16B, Klute, the Bullitnuts, TJ Rehmi, Spooky and the Transglobals. Natacha's fourth album Ayeshteni was released in 2001. It bears, as its only English-language song, a particularly splendid example of how this singer can take on a classic and cast new light and excitement on it - a mighty rendering of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' I Put A Spell On You. 2002's album, The Natacha Atlas and Marc Eagleton Project's Foretold In The Language Of Dreams, was a considerable departure. No beats; a calm, shimmering album, involving a slightly smaller cast than usual, including Syrian qanun master Abdullah Chhadeh, whom Natacha married in 1999.

Apart from her own projects, Natacha remains very much in demand as a guest singer for the recordings and performances of a remarkably wide range of musicians, including Nitin Sawhney, Jocelyn Pook, the Indigo Girls, FunDaMental, Ghostland, Abdel Ali Slimani, Toires, !Loca Musafir, Sawt El Atlas, Franco Battiato, Juno Reactor, Dhol Foundation, Jah Wobble, Jaz Coleman, Apache Indian (on his chart hit Arranged Marriage), Mick Karn, Jean-Michel Jarre's Millennium Night spectacular at the Pyramids, Jonathan Demme's new film The Truth About Charlie, and David Arnold's film scores including Stargate and Die Another Day.

In 2003, she released Something Dangerous, a solo album of contrasts and collaborations, in which she zips Middle Eastern music straight to the heart of current UK pop, pulling in as she does so dance music, rap, drum'n'bass, RandB, Hindi pop, film music and French chanson. The success of her earlier work, both in the Middle East and in the West, including a top ten hit in France, has shown just how alluring a musical bridging of the divide can be; the exotic Arabic scales, rhythms and textures open up new horizons for 4/4-entrapped western pop and create possibilities for the enormous and varied Middle Eastern music scene to communicate outside itself. For a while, at least, there were signs of that happening in France when, alongside crossover success for rasinger Khaled and others, Natacha Atlas had a top ten hit with her Arabicised version of Mon Amie La Rose, and won Best Female Singer at the Victoire de la Musique Awards, France's equivalent of the Brits. Of course, at present the divide needs bridging more than ever before. As ex-President of Ireland Mary Robinson, who in 2001 appointed Atlas Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Conference Against Racism, put it:

"She embodies the message that there is strength in diversity, that our differences - be they ethnic, racial or religious - are a source of riches to be embraced rather than feared."