Purists hated it above all for its casual tinkering with sacred phrases and Nusrat was accosted

Purists hated it, above all for its casual tinkering with sacred phrases, and Nusrat was accosted in the street with complaints The singer believed in it, however, and persisted. Nusrat's commercial acumen seems to have paid off, with the Real World album itself widely pirated within Pakistan, and a boom in remixed pop- qawwali rapidly ensuing. Subsequent re-renderings of "Must Must" include a version with heavy fuzz guitar, clarinet breaks and a female chorus; last year's big Asian hit, "Must Mast II", was replete with synthetic glockenspiels, Sergio Leone choruses, churning urns of disco funk and a minor spelling change in the title (apparently due to labyrinthine Pakistani copyright problems). The latest Real World model, Night Song, hit the shops this week, with a set of bite-sized love songs, not qawwalis, equipped with English titles and sensible modern-studio settings from the drawing board of Michael Brook to forestall complaints from religious purists.Whether fusion qawwali will consolidate its hold on the genre is difficult to predict, with other top qawwali stars, like the public, divided. Aziz Mian, the so-called "poet among qawwals", is avidly modernist, and worked last year with the London hip hop crew Fun-da-mental. The Sabri Brothers, despite a half-hearted stab at drum machines on one cassette, remain on the whole respectful of an audience they claim begs them not to experiment, though Real World are thinking of dragging them clapping and chanting into the 21st century with a remix job.

As for Nusrat, with the youth market under his capacious belt, the logical move seems to be squarely for the jugular of Western adult entertainment. Move over, Luciano, Placido and Jose - make way for the fourth and largest tenor.n `Bandit Queen' and `Prem Deewani' are out on the Oriental Star label `Night Song' is released this week on Real World. The singer was mesmerising - tall, thin and elegant in a floral shirt, with a voice exquisitely pure. And he was only the support act: David McAlmont, guesting with Ultramarine on their next single "Hymn", and sounding like the love child of Sam Cooke and an angel With a shy wave, he was gone. Tracey Thorn may not have McAlmont's star quality, but her voice is a rare and beautiful thing - rich, deep and cool, with a sadness pervading every lyric. For more than a decade, Everything But The Girl stumbled after a setting for that voice.

They were cappuccino kids in the much-hyped British jazz revival of the mid-Eighties, then big-band swingers, then MOR crooners. Now, under the influence of friends and collaborators in Massive Attack, they have found their answer.The basic approach remains the same - melancholy torch songs, with the velvet voice hovering over slow-changing chord sequences. But the setting has moved from bossa nova to drum `n' bass, with the adoption of trip- hop production and the skittish urban rhythms of jungle - not the nervous aggression of hardcore jungle, of course, but a toned-down version used as grit in the oyster of their sad pop songs.Live, they showed how close jungle can come to jazz. Drummer Martin Ditcham used cymbals and percussion to augment computer-driven breakbeats and samples, while the virtuoso session player Danny Thompson was dressed in black behind a double bass. Even when those two worked up a storm, as they did on a version of Massive's "Protection", Thorn was its calm epicentre She did not so much dance as sway awkwardly.

Her partner down the years, Ben Watt, was at the piano and semi-acoustic guitar."I'd like to say how much we're enjoying being successful at the moment," he said, thanking the half of the audience that had followed the band for years. The faithful were not au fait with the stop-start conventions of the new music - they applauded when the drums briefly dropped out half- way through "Walking Wounded" (title song of their new album for Virgin). Watt offered them solace with three too many of his mawkish solo songs and other oldies, of which only "I Always Was Your Girl" really suited the spacious new sound.Ultimately, Watt and Thorn were most at ease in the present. They closed with a thumping version of "Missing" - the sound of a band that has discovered an unexpectedly bright future.COLE MORETON. In the Afghan Whigs song "Crime Scene Part One", Greg Dulli asks "Do you think I'm beautiful? Or do you think I'm evil?" You're never quite certain, but the fun is in finding out. One moment you think you could take him home to meet your mum.

She'd adore him; he's immaculately turned out and always on standby with a spot of topical chit-chat to fill those awkward silences. "You've got all those mad cows roaming the countryside and they've all gotta be killed," he observes between songs, apropos of nothing. He's even ready with his own conspiracy theory: "I think Morrissey's behind it," he beams You'd have to be a right mad cow not to warm to him. But then you listen to the stories of love spurned and desecrated that lurk behind the power chords and anthemic singalongs, and you realise that this is music best approached with goggles and fire-resistant clothing. Despite its scorching soreness, Dulli's confessional writing doesn't ring hollow like Pearl Jam or Soundgarden - two bands who would sell their lumberjack shirts for his tunes He's got soul, you see. It's there in tonight's rousing version of "Going to Town", which he augments with a verbatim recital of the intro to Prince's "Housequake" (Madonna's "Into the Groove" pops up later too, just to keep us on our toes). The Afghan Whigs sweat passion, from the bewitching moan of the electric cello over "Honky's Ladder", to the carefully sustained crescendo of tolling guitars on "Faded". The band are as sharp as their suits and as seductive as their helter-skeltering melodies.