The literal translation of Farida’s stage-name ‘Mahwash’, conferred when she was designated an Afghan musical master, is ‘like the Moon’, but the figure facing me on the sofa is more like a great golden sun, at once dignified and full of mischief. We’re in a little corner of Afghanistan in north London, and she’s just arrived to promote a CD which will confirm her as her country’s quintessential voice. But Mahwash: Radio Kaboul will do more than that: it will also lift the curtain on a musical golden age which flourished briefly before the mujahedin – followed by the Taliban – snuffed it out. ‘I want the world to know about the music we had, and must not lose,’ says Mahwash. She was a noted singer at school, but family pressure forced her to stop when she went out to work. She got a job as a typist at Radio Kabul, was noticed as she sang at her desk, was quickly launched as a star, but soon hit the buffers. ‘I got married and became pregnant, but still went on singing, which gave great offence. Some members of my family were so opposed that they put poison in my food. Luckily I got to hospital in time, had an operation, and survived. It was clear that God didn’t want me to die so young.’ She tells me this gaily, as she does the tale of her sacking by the first Communist government, her reinstatement by the second, her continued career under tightening censorship, and her eventual flight to Pakistan, where she no longer dared sing. ‘Finally the UN offered to get me asylum, because as a female singer I was in increasing danger from the mujahedin.’ She chose to settle in her married daughter’s country, California, from where she tours the Afghan diaspora wherever family festivities demand her compelling voice.

But the new CD emanates from Geneva – hence the French spelling of its title – and there I find, in another little corner of Afghanistan, Mahwash’s backing group Ensemble Kaboul. Led by Khaled Arman, and including his father Hossein and flautist cousin Osman, these instrumentalists represent a further hot-line back to that golden age. Hossein was one of Kabul radio’s leading singer-composers, and Khaled started working there at fourteen, though his instrument at the time was the classical guitar.