You had to play with words like that." The song was a hit. It was a song about disliking school - "Though what I actually said was that I got tired walking down the road to school. He recorded his first cassette at 14, without even telling his father. I'd start off on banjo playing rock or whatever was popular at the time, and then switch to accordion and play rai." Rai means "opinion" and Cheb (or young) Khaled, as he was first known, was opinionated from the start. "We were Five Stars - like the Jackson Five - and we were influenced by Moroccan styles. The son of "a flic - a policeman", he started singing and playing at weddings while still a schoolboy, with his band Cinq Etoiles. Oran is the Algerian sea-port, close to the Moroccan frontier, where Khaled Hadj Brahim was born in 1960. That was always my lucky instrument - I grew up with the accordion back in Oran." I play percussion, mandolin and accordion. "I've been to every minute of every session and I've played on it more than before. "This is the first time I've really got into an album," he says. It includes an Egyptian string section and two of his childhood heroes, the pianist Maurice El Medioni and guitarist and singer Blaoui Houari, who "hadn't met up for 40 years until I got them together", says Khaled. Since then his albums have mixed rai with anything from hip-hop to funk and reggae, although his new album - again produced by Was - sees Khaled going back to his roots, with a fresh, more acoustic set influenced by his early days in Algeria. He followed it up with the French-language pop ballad Aicha, another massive hit. Khaled's stirring, sensual vocals on Didi proved that a song in Arabic could be a French bestseller. And, like the blues, it sticks to anything - jazz, rock, reggae or flamenco." But in Algeria it was sung by the shepherds in the days when we were colonised by the French. "Rai is like the blues," says Khaled, "that was sung by the slaves. Produced by Don Was (of Was Not Was and Rolling Stones fame), it was a rousing blend of western R&B and rai - Algerian dance music. Khaled's global breakthrough came in 1992 when his song Didi sold more than 1m copies across Europe, north Africa, the Middle East and Asia. No wonder he says: "I think that God loves me a lot." Khaled is the man who brought north-African music to a new audience in Europe, shaking up the pop scene in France and becoming as influential as Bob Marley in the process. You'd never guess that he is "the king of rai", and one of the greatest celebrities of the Arab world. I n his black jeans and striped shirt, Khaled resembles the stocky boss of some Algerian trucking company.
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