From Madagascar’s Last Star to Somalia’s Love Songs: BBC Radio 3 Celebrates Valentine’s Day With Global Sounds

A Valentine’s Day edition of BBC Radio 3’s Music Planet brought together two remarkable musical traditions: the stripped-down guitar poetry of Malagasy tsapiky master Damily and the romantic heritage of Somali qaraami, curated by digital archivist Idel Rasheed.

A Guitar Alone Before Dawn

There is a star that appears just before sunrise, the last one visible as darkness gives way to light. In the Malagasy language, it is called ‘fanjiry.’ It is also the title of the latest album by Damily, the guitarist who has spent decades defining the sound of tsapiky, the fast, guitar-driven dance music of southern Madagascar.

Released on February 6, 2026, Fanjiry marks a radical departure for the musician. After years of leading full bands through village ceremonies, neighborhood dances, and celebrations across the island’s southwest, Damily has stripped everything back to its essence: one man, one guitar, one voice. For the first time in his career, he carries his compositions through singing, not as a trained vocalist, but as a natural extension of his playing and personal storytelling.

Kathryn Tickell, the English Northumbrian pipes player and regular presenter of BBC Radio 3‘s weekly world music program Music Planet, hosted an intimate acoustic session with Damily for the show’s Valentine’s Day broadcast. The pairing made sense. Tickell, an OBE-decorated musician whose own career has been built on deep roots in regional tradition, clearly recognized a kindred spirit in the Malagasy guitarist.

The Tsapiky Tradition

Tsapiky is not gentle music. In its typical form, it is a high-velocity, trance-inducing storm of electric guitars, rolling bass, piercing vocals, and relentless percussion. Originating in the area around Toliara in southwest Madagascar, it is traditionally performed at mandriampototse, the marathon ceremonies marking funerals, weddings, and other major life events. These gatherings can last a week, with musicians playing day and night.

Damily has been a central figure in this world for decades. Now based in France, he has helped carry tsapiky far beyond Madagascar’s shores. His discography stretches back years, including the live-recorded Fihisa from February 2025, captured during a traditional burial ceremony in the village of Tongobory while a cyclone raged outside. That album was raw chaos. Fanjiry is its polar opposite.

The new record was recorded over three days in April 2025 at Studio Black Box in France. Free of nostalgia, it draws on memories of village life in the 1980s, Radio Mozambique broadcasts, East African 7-inch records, possession rituals, and local healing practices. The album unfolds as what its creators describe as ‘an intimate territory where tsapiky naturally converges’ with a life lived across two continents. Nine tracks. No band. Just the guitar and the voice of a man who helped define a genre, now exploring its quietest depths.

Somali Love Songs and the Art of Preservation

The second half of the Valentine’s Day broadcast turned east, to the Horn of Africa. Idel Rasheed, curator and founder of the digital cultural preservation archive Waaberi Phone, selected three tracks from the Somali qaraami tradition for the program.

Qaraami is, in many ways, Somalia’s classical music. The word itself derives from the Arabic ‘qaram,’ meaning love. The genre emerged in the 1940s and flourished through the mid-1960s, rooted in pastoral folk dance but shaped by the urbanization of Somali cities. It is characterized by poetic lyrics, oud accompaniment, and extended melodic phrasing, with romantic love as its dominant theme. Abdullahi Qarshe is widely credited as the founder of the modern qaraami music genre, the first to set this poetry to composed melodies.

But qaraami is also a tradition under threat. New songs in the style are essentially no longer being made. Civil war scattered Somalia’s artists across the globe, and institutions that once nurtured the music were destroyed. That is precisely what makes the work of archivists like Rasheed so vital. Waaberi Phone operates as a digital platform dedicated to the preservation, revival, and development of Somali art and culture, gathering vintage recordings from vinyl, reel-to-reel tape, and cassettes that might otherwise be lost.

Why It Matters

Valentine’s Day radio specials tend toward the predictable. This one was anything but. By placing Damily’s solitary guitar meditations alongside Somali love poetry from the mid-20th century, Music Planet drew a quiet line between two cultures separated by thousands of miles but united by a shared impulse: the need to express love, loss, and longing through music.

The Somali cassette culture that Waaberi Phone works to preserve has its own poignant love story. During the 1980s and early 1990s, before mobile phones, Somali families in the diaspora communicated with relatives back home by sending cassette tapes instead of letters. These tapes carried love letters, prayers, gossip, and music across continents. They were often accompanied by muqalmad, dried camel meat, a staple of nomadic culture. The tapes and the meat arrived together, nourishment for body and soul.

Damily’s Fanjiry and the qaraami selections Rasheed chose for the broadcast share something essential. Both represent music that has been distilled to its core, stripped of spectacle, and left to stand on the strength of melody, poetry, and feeling alone. In a world saturated with noise, that kind of clarity is worth celebrating, on Valentine’s Day or any other.