With high- fashion kudos and thrift- store panache, Belgian singer Tamino is a pop star for our times
If there was a ranking of the pop and rock world’s most eccentric backstage rituals, Tamino’s live performance prep would be up there with the greats. Yup ranking alongside Keith Richards’ requisite pre- show shepherd’s pie, Leonard Cohen’s reverent Latin prayer and the tendency of Madonna, at the peak of her Ashtanga yoga years, to arch her back and let her yoni feel the breeze. Before he walks onstage, Tamino pays specific attention to one standout feature in a body full of them. Well, two, really – the big, bushy eyebrows which hover above his eyes like sentient exotic caterpillars. ‘I brush them!’ he says with a laugh. ‘Before a show I tend to do that, with a brush my friend bought for me.’ Like a toothbrush? ‘Yeah!’
On a grey December day, the artist born Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad is sitting in the corner of a central London hotel bar which doubles as architectural selfie-bait. A vaguely east Asian interior garden has been constructed, with latticed trellis on the walls, dangling dreamcatchers and glass boxes filled with tufts of moss which bulge like an aerial view of a cartoon forest. The synthetic environment feels an odd match for the deeply felt, hypnotic music that the Belgian-Egyptian Tamino makes, a merging of Arabic music traditions and western baroque pop and indie which his quavering falsetto can elevate into moments of transcendence. At its majestic peak, Tamino’s singing voice flits between semitones seemingly effortlessly, taking cues from the classic vocal ornamentalists of the Middle East. Yet it also can recall the raw emotive heights of Jeff Buckley.
In Antwerp, where Tamino lives with his girlfriend of three years, his music is a cornerstone of pop radio. He was nominated for five awards at the country’s MIA Awards (the Belgian Grammys) for his rhapsodic debut album, Amir, which was released in 2018 and featured contributions from the Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood. But whether he’s headlining a stadium in his home country or playing to a couple of hundred fans in Manchester, as he did earlier this week, Tamino’s fans are uniformly devoted. He’s got used to hearing their stories of loss, mourning and survival, a communion inspired by the imagistic poetry that his music creates out of life’s extreme joys and sorrows. ‘Maybe because I’m sharing a lot during the concert, they feel like they can share a lot when they speak to me,’ he says.
At a sold-out show at London’s Scala last night, one thoughtful fan presented Tamino with a play of the dialogues between Hades and Persephone, a reference to Tamino’s aching ballad Persephone. The song, an abstracted retelling of the Greek god of the underworld’s union with his abducted bride over a minimal guitar line and sumptuous strings, evokes the knotty intricacies of a modern destructive relationship. ‘You’ve come to love/What you always will fear,’ Tamino intones in moody low vocals, before flipping into falsetto runs that soar above textural vocal layers. A couple of weeks after releasing the song and video in August 2018, Tamino received a DM from another artist fluent in infusing her music with mythos: Lana Del Rey. ‘Your voice is beautiful,’ she wrote. ‘Also, my sister has a photo book called Persephone.’
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Tamino says flatly. ‘I had to double check ten times. Is this her?’ Del Rey invited Tamino to support her at a special show at Dublin’s beautiful Malahide Castle last June, where he performed at golden hour as the sun cast a glow over an audience of 20,000. ‘She’s very down to earth and grounded,’ Tamino says. ‘She was friendly and warm to everyone in the backstage area. She was too kind, really.’ Tamino was barely out of nappies when he first sung into a microphone. At age three, he travelled with his family to Cairo to visit his grandfather, the famous Egyptian singer and actor Muharram Fouad. ‘It was just for fun!’ Tamino says of his debut on the mic. ‘But it was at his studio, so it was really interesting.’ Fouad died when Tamino was just five years old, but as a young music fan with an omnivorous appetite for sounds, he got to know his late relative through his many cassette recordings, listening to Fouad’s music alongside Nirvana, Tom Waits and The Beatles.
Tamino is a student of Middle Eastern music, and enthusiastically launches into a potted history of the golden age of Arab song, which produced stars like the singer and multi- instrumentalist Abdel Halim Hafez, and Umm Kulthum, who was known as ‘The Voice of Egypt’. ‘Umm Kulthum’s songs would be, like, an hour,’ Tamino says. ‘She would sing two or three songs, and that would be a full concert. [My grandfather Fouad] has beautiful music, but he was making a more popularised version of that, with songs of six minutes.’ Fouad’svocal modulations snuck into his grandson’s own singing style in a kind of cross- generational musical osmosis – the Arabic quarter- notes which Tamino sings today add subtle complexity to his more pop-leaning songs, and foreground the Middle Eastern themes of a song like his devotional ballad Habibi. When recording his debut album, Amir, Tamino recreated the Firka – the Arabic orchestra from the golden age – with the Brussels-based instrumental ensemble Nagham Zikrayat, an orchestra made up of Arabic refugees. Like a traditional Firka, the ensemble follows the pattern of Tamino’s voice to intuit what they will play, rather than rigidly sticking to the printed score in front of them.
The richness of Middle Eastern and Sufi musical traditions has been key to the development of western music. Jeff Buckley once said the devotional Islamic music of Pakistani legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan saved his life, and the music of the Armenian- American heavy metal band System Of A Down features Middle Eastern vocal lines and ouds, the 11-stringed Arabic instruments (Armenia is not in the Middle East, but shares many musical traditions with the region). The Lebanese-American surf-rock pioneer Dick Dale’s use of Middle Eastern music scales went on to inspire The Beach Boys. Dale’s propulsive reinterpretation of the Arabic folk song Misirlou, played with an electric guitar instead of the oud, gave rise to one of western cinema’s most iconic coalitions of music and sound when Quentin Tarantino used it in the opening of Pulp Fiction. Other Western artists have been less scrupulous. In the late Nineties, the canonical hip-hop producer Timbaland often relied on uncredited samples of popular Middle Eastern sounds to create his genre-expanding, futurist hip-hop and R&B. The opening strings on Aaliyah’s mega- hit More Than A Woman sample Alouli Ansa , a classic by the Syrian diva Mayada El Hennawy, and Timbaland’s iconic beat for Jay-Z, Big Pimpin’, lifted a beautiful melody by Abdel Halim Hafez. As the writer Hassan Ghanny notes in a Medium article, ‘It was the Middle East which underpinned all of these songs, and the labour of Levantine and Arab musicians of years past which helped line Timbaland’s pockets.’
Given Tamino’s ownership of his musical lineage against a background of Western erasure – he also often plays his grandfather’s Resonator guitar onstage – the singer has become a symbol of proud Arabic identity. ‘It is a blessing, because it’s not what I set out to be,’ he says. ‘I love Arabic music and I’m proud of my roots, so naturally they found their way into my music.’ Last year he played concerts in Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, and he’s aiming to play in Lebanon this year; he tells me that I ‘have to’ visit Beirut, one of his favourite cities.
Even so, the western media’s focus on his identity has given Tamino pause. ‘I wonder whether it’s a good or a bad thing,’ he says, suddenly pensive. ‘Maybe it’s not that good if it becomes the only focus. It can be used in a different way, which is kind of as the antidote to all the bad news we’re hearing of [Arab] regions. And then using that as, “Look, this is some good news!” I don’t want that to be the only reason why I’m invited on certain platforms. I don’t want people to go, “I don’t really like his music, but it’s important’” – he grimaces – “it’s important to show it.’” There’s something patronising about the idea that he would be used as to fulfil a diversity quota. ‘It’s true,’ he says emphatically. ‘Absolutely.’
As he sits in the bar, sipping bottled water as blissy house music plays, Tamino’s hair falls in perfectly unkempt Timothée Chalamet waves. He wears a plain black T-shirt with high-waisted dark grey Ann Demeulemeester trousers, which seem to be made from some kind of treated wool. I ask to touch the fabric, and they may be the softest trousers I have ever felt: the Platonic ideal of sunday-afternoon dressing. ‘It’s really good fabric,’ he says. ‘I love the flowyness.’
Tamino’s relationship with Ann Demeulemeester started back in 2017, when he was starting to get booked for European festivals on the back of his enchanting early singles Habibi and Cigar .Tamino’s thrift-store togs had worked fine for his early performances on BBC Radio 1 and for talent contests in Belgium (he won radio station Studio Brussel’s 2017 talent competition), but he decided that they wouldn’t cut it on bigger stages. ‘I didn’t want to have the stress of like, “Ahhh, I don’t have anything to wear for this important concert,’” he says. ‘That’s when we approached them.’
A six-foot 19-year old with a jawline that could slice butter? Demeulemeester promptly kitted Tamino out in their autumn/winter line. Helping grease the wheels was the fact that Tamino’smum is friends with a few of the female designers at the label – and they’ve known the singer since he was a child. ‘The head designer, Sébastien [Meunier] is really good,’ Tamino says. ‘I think what they’re doing is so cool. Ann has left the company but I think they’re continuing her legacy in such a beautiful way.’
What does he like about Demeulemeester’s clothes? He pauses for a moment, furrowing those hedge-like eyebrows. ‘I can only say that when I wear the clothes I feel fully like myself,’ he says. ‘I find it really important just to go about my day really feeling at ease, and definitely when I’m on stage. I’ve felt it before when I’ve gone on stage and I wasn’t really feeling what I was wearing. I didn’t like it.’
The wider fashion world has been quick to follow. Tamino starred in the Missoni menswear SS19 campaign (Gisele was his womenswear counterpart) and spent his 21st birthday shooting in New York with photographer Harley Weir. ‘I don’t have ambitions in [modelling],’ he says. ‘But the things that have happened naturally in the fashion world, I do appreciate them. I love to go to fashion shows. I go to Ann, and Yohji Yamamoto as well. That’s also one of my favourites. It’s crazy – you’re wearing art.’
Yet Tamino’s most memorable look came from wearing hardly anything at all. In the video for his 2018 single Tummy, he appears as a nearly nude pharaoh swarmed by followers, wearing a chest plate and liquid eye make-up styled like the Eye of Horus, the Ancient Egyptian symbol of royalty and protection. Oh, and he’s covered in gold body paint which took 90 minutes to apply to every crease and crevice of his skin. He looks like a cross between Rameses II, a living-statue busker, and a Quality Street wrapper. ‘I find it a very funny image,’ he says. ‘When you talk about Egypt, it’s logical that people [think of] ancient images – the Pyramids, the pharaohs. Of course, that’s not what Egypt is today.’ The aim of the video was, in part, to poke fun at lazy stereotypes of Egyptian culture.
Amidst Tummy’s figurative lyrics of bugs, angels and ‘flying in the sky like cupid’, the song is also unapologetically about sex, which is appropriate given that, in the video, his bare flesh is smothered by anonymous hands in a kind of orgiastic ecstasy. ‘It’s referring to the return to the animalistic when you’re involved in a sexual act,’ he says, with a shy smile creeping onto his face. Sounds fun! ‘Yeah, it is,’ he says, before laughing. ‘You lose all your pride, all your dignity in a way, because you’re not really controlling human consciousness.’
Yet beyond bodily pleasures, the song taps into feelings of inadequacy that might be relatable for any listener who’s felt undeserving of their partner or like an imposter at work. ‘It’s like you must […]/ Have a lust/For making something of me,’ he sings as orchestration swells. ‘Sometimes you feel like you’re not worth certain gifts you’ve been given,’ he says. ‘And that could be anything, you know?’ It’s a startlingly humble pronouncement from a star on the rise, an admission of self-doubt that is bred out of most musicians in media training and cautioned against by coddling publicists. How often does that feeling rear its head? ‘It’s not ever gone and it’s not always present,’ he says.
Tamino’s struggles are expressed even more plainly in the ominous ballad Indigo Night , where rippling strings evoke the turmoil of a mind that won’t quieten. In a music video inspired by the mind-bending surrealism of Egypt’s 1940s Art et Liberté movement, he sings with desperation: ‘Why can’t I sing along with some feeling, or some meaning?/It feels like I’ve always been blind.’ He wrote the song in a period of personal upheaval, when he moved from the quiet city of Antwerp to the relative bustle of Amsterdam, at the age of 17, to study at Amsterdam Royal Conservatory, one of Europe’s most prestigious musical colleges.
‘For me it’s a song about awakening,’ he says. ‘I had moved, and for me it was a big, big step. I was not at ease and feeling a bit apathetic. A bit indifferent to everything that was happening.’ He’s since learned coping mechanisms for low points. Meditation is helping him feel more at ease in his skin; he starts each day by listening to Waking Up , the mindfulness app from the neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris. And he often returns to his favourite book, the Lebanese- American philosopher Kahlil Gibran’s collection of prose-poems, The Prophet. ‘There’s one [passage] that’s been really important to me,’ he says. ‘It’s like that you show your love of life through work: “work is visible love”. I think that’s really beautiful.’
Before setting off on a US tour this spring, Tamino has a couple of months of downtime in Antwerp. He recently bought a house in a multicultural area of the city, where he lives with his girlfriend, and he’s continuing to study Arabic, with the help of the Duolingo app. ‘Every time I do something that brings me closer to this culture, I feel good,’ he says. ‘It feels like a reconnection.’ He’s also working on new music as well as continuing to learn the oud, which he’s been studying with the help of a Syrian teacher in Antwerp. ‘It’s actually the ancestor of the guitar,’ he notes of the oud. ‘It’s beautiful.’ It can feel today like international relationships between cultures are especially fractious, when politicians across the world run on campaigns to strengthen borders and put up walls. The cross-cultural conversation embedded in Tamino’s music may not solve the problems of an increasingly divided world, but it might offer a roadmap of how music can inspire honest and respectful cultural exchange. But that’s for Tamino’s audience and critics to decide. His own goals are rather more humble. ‘Fame is not an ambition of mine,’ he says. ‘But just to be able to do this, and play in venues all over the world, and meet people…’ he trails off, smiling. ‘I think it won’t get better than that.’
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