He was Saddam Hussein’s favourite singer and his music is said to be the only thing, apart from football, that unites the divided country that is present-day Iraq. After a decade in exile, Ilham al-Madfai dreams of singing once more in Baghdad, once security improves. In the meantime, the man whose current album is simply called The Voice of Iraq has been taking his soulful music with its message of hope and reconciliation to appreciative Western audiences.

Last month he played at Glastonbury to a rousing reception which ended with a sizeable contingent of the audience belly-dancing in the mud, while he sang Iraqi songs in a language few, if any of them, understood. “They were shouting out: ‘We’re sorry, we’re so sorry,’” he says. “I had to stop singing because I had tears in my eyes.” This weekend he appears at the Womad festival, the annual three-day celebration of world music on the riverbank at Reading. There he will sing such songs as Mawtini, which has become the unofficial Iraqi anthem, and his most recent composition, Florence, written for the French journalist, Florence Aubenas, who was kidnapped in Iraq in January.

A haunting ballad, Florence is typical of Ilham’s accessible fusion of Iraqi and Western musical influences, with lyrics that translate as: “Florence, Let the Baghdad sun be soft on your face/ Let the water of the Tigris be soft on your lips/ Let the palms of Iraq keep you company and the sky of Mesopotamia be your guard in your loneliness/ Forgive us and come back to your home.”

Happily, Aubenas was released after a five-month ordeal in June. “But the situation in my country is still very bad,” Ilham says in perfect English. “Of course I want to go back. It’s my home. But I talk to relatives there every day and only this morning they were telling me about another suicide bomber. In your country it is shocking that this happened. But in Iraq it happens every day.”

An imposing man, Ilham currently lives in Jordan, a few hours’ drive from the border he still regards as too dangerous to cross. “I had already left Iraq but I went back to visit family just before the first Gulf war,” he says. “I was trapped there for three years.” Saddam, it seems, was reluctant to lose a potent symbol of Iraqi unity and counted himself as a big fan. Summoned to have dinner with one of Saddam’s sons, Ilham was told: “Your cassette never leaves my father’s side.”

He tells the story with obvious embarrassment: his anti-Saddam credentials are impeccable and he originally left Iraq after Saddam’s henchmen tried to recruit him as a spy in 1979. “I told them they could kill me right now, but I wasn’t going to do it. I packed my bags the next day.”

He was born into a Kurdish family in Baghdad in the early 1950s. His father was a provincial governor who opposed him becoming a musician. But he began playing a Western guitar at school and was soon performing Anglo-American pop songs with his band, the Twisters.

Sent to Britain in the late 1960s to study engineering, he instead spent most of his time playing at the Baghdad Café on the Fulham Road. While in London, he met the likes of Paul McCartney and Georgie Fame, who advised him to stop imitating Western styles and rediscover his cultural roots. “So I started introducing Iraqi instruments like the qanoun (zither), the nai (flute) and traditional percussion alongside the guitar and the bass, and singing in Arabic but with a modern beat.”

Back in Iraq by the early 1970s, he was dubbed the Baghdad Beatle thanks to a nearperfect imitation of McCartney’s voice. The authorities banned him from TV and radio for polluting Iraqi culture with Western influences, which made him a greater hero to Iraqi youth. The Ministry of Information estimated that he sold two million cassettes (mostly bootlegged) in one year alone.

He recalls the period in his song Bazringosh, which evokes a lost world of Baghdad café society. “Along the Tigris there were many such places,” he says. “Baghdad was a beautiful city full of music and clubs and dancing. People would come and listen to us and go crazy.”

But though freedom eroded under the Baath party throughout the 1970s, things took a dramatic turn for the worse when Saddam took power in 1979. Ilham felt he had to leave. At first he returned to Britain but when, after a two-year battle, he was refused asylum, he drifted around the Middle East, before settling in Abu Dhabi.

He’s not optimistic about the future of Iraq and he’s deeply unhappy about the presence of foreign troops. If he has a message, it is to voice the needs of ordinary Iraqis. “All we hear is what the politicians and the insurgents have to say. Nobody is listening to the ordinary people who live and work every day in Iraq and carry on their lives throughout all of this.”

One of his loveliest songs is called, simply, Baghdad and pays tribute to the city. “How long the wounds will take to mend is an impossible question to answer,” he says sadly. “But I would like to think that one day I will go back and Baghdad will rejoice with music once again. Insh’allah.”

The Voice of Iraq is out now on EMI. Ilham al-Madfai plays Womad on Sunday (www.womad.org 0118-939 0930)