Idir, would you say that the idea behind your new album - your third to date - is to build some sort of bridge between Berber music and other cultures?
My ultimate goal in making this album was to share my music with all kinds of people. I wanted to appeal to music fans with radically different sensibilities. But it's true that the album is not necessarily perceived in that way. It's presented more as a sort of artistic 'tribute', other musicians and singers performing my work. Of course, it goes without saying that I never dreamt I deserved anything on this scale. What I really wanted to do on the album is set up a kind of exchange with singers and musicians from totally different backgrounds. The people who agreed to get involved with the project were given the choice of sitting down and writing a track with me or recording their own adaptation of one of my songs - they were totally free to adapt it in anyway they wished, as long as the song didn't lose too much of its original soul in the process.

You said that you deliberately chose to work with a lot of up-and-coming artists on your new album ...
Yes, I chose to work with groups like Zebda, Gnawa Diffusion and the singer Manu Chao, people whose careers are really on the verge of taking off and who don't have any major hang-ups about their identity. I wanted to work with singers and musicians who were able to focus on expressing artistic emotion above anything else. I mean Zebda, for example, could go round presenting themselves as "Kabyles from Toulouse", but what's really important about the group's work is the way in which they communicate with French audiences. I prefer to focus on things like that, rather than trying to slot people into pigeon-holes which don't have anything to do with putting emotion across in the music. The album also features a lot of other singers and musicians who have hugely successful careers behind them, people like Maxime Leforestier, Gilles Servat and Dan ar Braz. The only thing I have any regrets about is not having been able to work with major French stars like Cabrel, Goldman and Bashung. Unfortunately, their hectic touring and recording schedules meant they just weren't available at the time.

Throughout your career, you've always insisted on the fact that you belong to a cultural minority. Would you say that your new album is an attempt to share your identity - that's to say, both your cultural identity and your music - with wider audiences and give it a place in 'universal culture'?
Yes, that's exactly how I feel. I feel the need to share my cultural tradition with others by giving it a new dimension. You know, when you're a foreigner living in France, you inevitably suffer from a disease called identity. I mean, I belong to this part of Algeria called Kabylia. That's where I was born. And the problem I have living in France is this: should I try and hang onto my Kabyle identity or should I try and get in touch with the French side of myself - the Monsieur Dubois/Dupont lurking somewhere in the bottom of my soul? I'm not happy about the idea of taking French nationality just for convenience sake. For a start, I don't feel that would be a very honest thing to do as far as you French people are concerned. Living as a Kabyle in France I always have this conflict of dual identity going on in my head … But anyway, to get back to the subject of the new album, what I really wanted to do was experiment with fusion and osmosis rather than get caught up in juxtaposing different musical sensibilities.

So that was the idea behind teaming up as a trio with Breton folk stars Dan Ar Braz and Gilles Servat on the song "Illusions"?
I could never have imagined making this album without them. You know, a lot of people have spent a lot of time intellectualising about the historical relationship between the Kabyles and the Celts. For me, the strongest thing in the relationship between the Kabyles and the Celts is the musical affinities between us and the fact that we are both minority groups. I was also completely bowled over by Dan's guitar playing when I saw him in concert with Alan Stivell at the Olympia. As for Gilles Servat, I've always followed his career with keen interest. Brittany is a region, which is really close to my heart because it's a region which has always fought to maintain its cultural identity.

Idir, you shot to international fame with "A Vava Inouva", a song which became an instant hit outside your native Kabylia ...
I sang "A Vava Inouva" for the first time back in 1973 when I left my home - in a little village in Kabylia - to go to university in Algiers, where I was going to study geology. I remember I'd written this lullaby for Nouara (Ed: a famous Algerian diva) who was supposed to be coming to perform the song on Radio Algiers. Well, anyway, I happened to be hanging about in the radio corridors when Nouara was meant to turn up and then someone came up and announced Nouara couldn't make it. I had to step in and replace her at the last minute, performing the song myself. And that's how my career began really. After that I was invited into the studio to record a B-side - that was "A Vava Inouva" (My Little Father) - a song where I took the chorus from an old legend. "A Vava Inouva" describes, in a very naïve kind of way, the ambience of traditional evening get-togethers up in the Djurdjura Mountains. Anyway, the song turned into an overnight hit. I was doing my military service at the time and I remember sitting in the army barracks at Blida and hearing my record being played on Radio France.

And you've chosen "A Vava Inouva" as the first track on your new album. But this time round the song is a duet with Scottish singer Karen Matheson (from the group Capercaillie) …
Yes, that's right. I saw Karen in concert twice. The first time she was performing with "l'Héritage des Celtes" at Le Zénith in Paris and then I saw her again, more recently, appearing at the "Bretagnes" festival at Bercy. Karen's voice just knocked me out both times. I remember bringing up the idea of recording with her one day ... And I must say it turned out to be a brilliant idea!
After experimenting with Celtic fusion, your album moves on to Africa, featuring a wonderful duet with the Ugandan singer Geoffrey Oryema - a singer who, like you, is now living in exile in France ...
Yes, you know, of all the duets on the album, I'm particularly fond of that one. I guess Geoffrey and I have had roughly the same experiences of living in exile. He left his homeland 23 years ago in really difficult circumstances. It's funny, but it turns out that we'd both written songs called "Exil" (c.f. Geoffrey Oryema's third album). Geoffrey's song has these lyrics: "I'm lucky to have two countries/I'm partly from here, partly from there..." Geoffrey does these vocalisations on the song in Acholi (the language spoken in northern Uganda) and he also goes back to his roots using the lukémé - that's an instrument a bit like the sanza only without the sound box.

On your new album you also experiment with electro music courtesy of Fred Galliano. And there's a hint of Malian influence too, isn't there?
Galliano was very up front and honest with me, you know. He said he felt like he knew very little about North Africa or Algerian music. So he suggested using my melodies, but 'filtering' them through African rhythms and electronic music. He ended up going out to Mali and getting Ramata Doussou Bagayoko (the daughter of Nahawa Doumbia, a singer he's already worked with) to record the vocals. I felt really comfortable with the way in which he used the Malian guitar and Ramata's vocals, which actually remind me quite a lot of the songs sung by old women in Kabylia.

And then there's the adaptation of Maxime Le Forestier's classic "San Francisco" ...
… which becomes "Tizi Ouzou" on the album. I'm really grateful to Maxime for this new version of the song - he's turned it into a homage to the Berber singer Matoub Lounès, who was murdered in June '98. On "Tizi Ouzou" Maxime sings the chorus in Kabyle. The chorus was specially adapted for him by Brahim Izri who was born in the same village as me. With this song Maxime does not just pay tribute to Matoub, he also speaks out on behalf of our minority culture which Matoub devoted his life to defending.

And you must also be rather proud of blazing a trail with new bands such as Gnawa Diffusion and the Orchestre National de Barbès ?
Yes, of course I am - and all the more so because Gnawa Diffusion and the ONB are an important part of the new generation of Maghrebin musicians living and working in France. For me, Amazigh Kateb - lead singer with Gnawa - really represents the future of this kind of music. Amazigh (the son of the famous author Kateb Yacine) is an extremely talented young man. He's also a committed rebel who believes in fighting injustice and resisting all forms of abusive authority. I'd had this song "Révolution" sitting around in the back of a drawer for a while and I felt it was just perfect for Amazigh. As for "Tiwizi 2", the track I recorded with the ONB, that's a song I'd written around a traditional 'mode'. That's one of my greatest strengths, you know, writing traditional-sounding tracks - people are always listening to my music and saying "Oh, that's been around for centuries, you know!"

Idir, you've only recorded three albums in your 30-year career, but you seem to have spent an incredible amount of time on tour. And yet you've never really received mainstream media coverage. How do you account for that?
Well, I'd say things have always come to me, rather than the other way round. I'd say fate has had a hand in it all too - people came to me and suggested I recorded this album, it wasn't me who tried to get the whole thing up and running. I'm quite quiet and unassuming really, and it's not easy to survive in the music business, especially when you've based your career on three albums like I have. I'm convinced that luck has played a large part in my career. Perhaps I've just been lucky with putting out the right songs at the right moment. I've always made a bad militant, a bad brigadier, but I'm good at recounting things that happen to people in everyday life.