How weddings led to global success for Omar Souleyman

"I really wasn't prepared to see so many people," Souleyman says through his translator from his current, temporary home in Turkey, where he's planning a move to his next safe base.

"I looked out and there was a sea of faces and all these bodies, dancing with such passion to my music. Then, after I'd finished, crowds came up to me and told me how special my music was and asked for my autograph. It was all so different to anything I'd ever experienced before."

Souleyman wouldn't exactly have been an innocent abroad back then in 2011. Since he released his signature song Khataba in 2005 he has become a sensation in the Arab world and beyond.

Not everyone has approved. More serious students of Middle Eastern music have expressed doubts about the roots in the Iraqi and Turkish traditions that Souleyman claims. But in the nightclubs of Damascus, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, dancers couldn't get enough of Khataba and the other songs Souleyman and his musicians - keyboardist Rizan Sa'id and Ali Shaker, who plays saz or Arabic lute - brought with them.

There wasn't a lot of music around Tel Amir when Souleyman was growing up, he says. Life there - it's far closer to Iraq and Turkey than it is to the Syrian capital, Damascus - sounds pretty tough.

It's essentially farming country but, as Souleyman says, the local river, where he used to fish as a boy, dried up due to a complete lack of rainfall. Musical instruments, even basic ones, were few. Still, the young Souleyman loved to sing, mostly to himself.

Music remained a hobby into early adulthood until someone heard him singing and invited him to perform at a wedding.

His reputation spread. Cue one of the oft-repeated statistics about his early career: he is said to have made 500 albums before breaking out of Syria. In truth, these were recordings of the mostly 20-minute spots he sang at wedding receptions that he gave the happy couples as souvenirs of their big day. These cassettes were then duplicated and found their way into souks and, especially, taxi cabs.

Without, it seems, any promotion on his own behalf, Souleyman's gritty voice and impassioned songs, with their rough-hewn accompaniments from Shaker and Sa'id, became the soundtrack to life in the area around Tel Amir, known as the Jazeera, and in due course were belting out of taxis across the Arab world.

The appeal appears to be cross-generational. Everyone dances the dabke, the ancient forerunner to line-dancing, that Souleyman's music provides the beat for and when Mark Gergis, an American resident of Iraqi descent, heard Souleyman's raw, almost fierce take on this tradition, he had to share it with a wider audience.

Gergis briefly hooked Souleyman up with the Sublime Frequencies label and, when this arrangement soured, Souleyman was able to secure new representation in America, leading to both recordings and live appearances in the west. Bjork and Damon Albarn have endorsed Souleyman, the latter with a remixed track, the former with a collaboration that Souleyman says was flattering. And festivals such as Glastonbury, Central Park Summerstage in New York and France's Eurockéennes de Belfort followed.

Souleyman seems a little bemused by his transformation from labourer and part-time wedding entertainer to globe-trotting trance music sensation.

"I've never learned to play an instrument," he admits. "To begin with, I didn't write my own songs. I had basic ideas I would get poets in my neighbourhood to help me develop. All I want to do is make people who come to hear me happy, have a party with them for 50 minutes or an hour, and if they want to say hello afterwards and buy a CD, that's even better. I'll happily sign them all."

Omar Souleyman plays The Arches, Glasgow, on Saturday