On Atlantic 92.5 in Casablanca the presenters promise the news in both English and French after every song, but it never seems to happen. "Atlantic - la meilleure radio!" Then "Black Eyed Boy" by Texas. "News! Music! Atlantic!" Now Wings. "La première radio: musique, info, éco, au Maroc." Fleetwood Mac.

Where is this news? Occasionally they imply its arrival in English with a French accent. Sometimes in a mixture of English and Arabic. And yet, instead of the news, just another jingle and a song about Paris. "La radio music and news . . . en France . . . violence . . . Café . . . Lounger." Then suddenly a crisp report in Arabic, from which I can pick two names: "Facebook" and "Goldman Sachs". Rendez-vous avec Atlantic! Someone assures me later that in Morocco you can find a radio station in any language you can understand, but it's harder than they make out. Most of the stations here are based in Casablanca or Tangier, and there are lots - Hit Radio Maroc, Chada FM, SNRT Chaîne Nationale, Aswat - and still many thousands of short-wave listeners to the World Service and Voice of America.

It's 5pm on Sunday in the Place Djemaa el-Fna, the main square in Marrakesh, and everyone is listening to the radio. The horse-and-cart drivers at the entrance to the square are tuned in to Atlas FM, playing at full distorted pelt Renato Carosone's "Tu vuò fà l'americano" ("smokin camels . . . whisky and soda . . .") while the horses stand perfectly motionless in the shelter of the Koutoubia Mosque that reaches 221 feet into the sky and hovers like the spaceship in Independence Day. I've learned to differentiate the voices of three imams. One at dawn, efficient, uncompromising. Another - softer - as the sun rises at seven, flaming its pink. And then, later, someone else, who comes on like an apology. I record the sound, but playing them back can hear mostly just birds: the fat cardinals and pigeons that sit at your feet with their beaks virtually open, fawning for bread and sweets.

In the traffic jams, each car plays its radio rather than a CD, and again the keen jingles follow every song, however short. Time is rarely mentioned, half- and quarter-hours never marked. A white Mercedes taxi seats ten people, getting in and out in rapturous reunions as the driver drums the wheel. A tramp, layered in several djellabas dozes on a bench, pulling his thin knee up beside him. As we travel out towards the mountains through the valley of the Ourika River to a weekly market, the first thing I see is the radio repairman - also working on three mobile phones, which he keeps in a box with some live chickens, as still as those horses, their feet knotted together with blue string like some weird extension of the man's electrical equipment.

And then, further up, well into the throng, the stalls that double as both barber and dentist, all tuned in to Aswat, broadcasting out of Fez. This is Arabic music - immense, imperturb­able. One barber waves a long-extracted molar at me by way of an advert. Like Jean Rochefort in The Hairdresser's Husband, he sways his hips and closes his eyes, as though rejoicing in the honour of some favourite saint.