“When he sees what reaches them he gives them more of it, he works it, he refines it, he embellishes it.” Crowds called out for line repetitions and she obliged, meaning a song could last between 45 and 90 minutes. “She acted like a preacher who becomes inspired by his congregation,” the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz once said. She performed to large audiences without a microphone and improvised virtuosically. Her voice was a contralto, the lowest type for a female, and had enormous power. “When I first heard the way she would dance down through the scale to land on a beautiful note that I couldn’t even imagine singing, it was huge: somebody had blown a hole in the wall of my understanding of vocals.” Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant said that he was “driven to distraction” on hearing Umm Kulthum’s voice while in Marrakech in 1970. Photograph: CPA Media Pte Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo Soon she was making twice as much money as the biggest stars of Cairo’s art scene. Record labels competed over her and she negotiated shrewdly to increase her fees and fame.

She gradually learned to dress with style and worked with the best artists of the age, despite a reputation as a demanding collaborator. While her voice was admired in the homes of Cairo’s elite, she was mocked for her rough country attire and behaviour. It took Umm Kulthum time to find her feet in the big city in the early 1920s. Freed from the limitations of gender, her talent shone and she attracted the interest of noted musicians, who invited her to Cairo. Her father dressed her in a boy’s coat and black Bedouin headdress, leaving only her eyes and mouth visible. Joining the family ensemble, her powerful voice proved a novelty but also, as a woman performing religious songs, provocative. Her father supplemented his income by singing religious songs with his son and nephew, and his daughter would mimic them, later reflecting that she first learned to sing “like a parrot”. Umm Kulthum was born in a Nile delta village in about 1904 to an imam and his wife. It responds to a question posed by the ethnomusicologist Virginia Danielson, who wrote a biography of Umm Kulthum: “Is it possible that 50 years in Arab societies, where women appear to outsiders to be oppressed, silent and veiled, could be represented by the life and work of a woman?” And not just a woman, but one whose possible lesbianism and rejection of gender norms raised a few eyebrows in her lifetime. The musical depicts Egypt during a period of cultural fertility and seismic sociopolitical change. “My whole message,” says the show’s producer, Mona Khashoggi, “is to promote our rich culture of classical Arabic music in the west.” Umm Kulthum & the Golden Era will dramatise the singer’s life in English with her music sung in Arabic. Despite that, she remains relatively unknown in the UK a one-off show at the London Palladium on 2 March aims to change that. There is no western counterpart to Umm Kulthum, no artist as respected and beloved as she is in the Arab world. Maria Callas called her “the incomparable voice”. She really is.” Shakira and Beyoncé have performed dance routines to her music. Despite singing complex Arabic poetry, she influenced some of the west’s greatest singers. Umm Kulthum recorded about 300 songs over a 60-year career and her words of love, loss and longing drift reliably from taxis, radios and cafes across the Arab world today, 45 years after her death. Outside, couples smoke shisha on plastic chairs, dwarfed by two immense golden busts depicting the singer known variously as “the star of the east”, “mother of the Arabs” and “Egypt’s fourth pyramid”. Violins swoon and a monumental voice surges from a doorway in Cairo’s Tawfiqia neighbourhood. Y ou hear the Umm Kulthum cafe before you see it.

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