f32
the mind. “Wherever I go, I find my preconceptions being taken down. No matter what I read on the news or hear in the papers, the truth is that nobody knows the truth! All news is reported with agendas and I’m coming to realise that perhaps the only hope for humanity is compulsory travel!”
The three core members all contributed to the writing pro- cess, adding to and developing the basic compositions, brought to the party by either Nick or Abdullah. “I’m informed by ideas and pictures, while Abdullah’s informed by pure music,” Nick explains. “So with a track like The Great Game, Abdullah would write it with a view to being a quite heavy Arabic thing, whereas I would see it as a comment on militarism and the carve-up of the Middle East in 1921… but what we both agreed was that it was a stonking good tune!” A couple of tracks also feature the deep, powerful vocals of Lubana Al Quntar. “She’s an opera singer and the voice coach of the Conservatoire Of Music in Damascus. She’s got a phenomenal voice and we recorded her vocals in the Chhadeh family house.”
Cold War imagery runs through the project, with those twangy spy movie guitars in the mix and film from the era used as part of the back projections when the band play live. So what’s the Cold War got to do with Syria? “There were proxy wars going on everywhere,” explains Nick. “If you go to the Middle East, Syria was Russian-backed, as was Egypt, they all had T-34 and JST Tanks from Russia and obviously Israel was American-backed. The whole thing with Syriana was that it shouldn’t happen again, there shouldn’t be demonising of people, in order to persuade other people that it’s OK to hate them.”
T
As Nick notes, there is some precedent for adding twangy gui- tars to Middle Eastern pop, with a Hawaiian guitarist cropping up on a recording by Lebanese diva Asmahan as early as 1938 and Egypt’s Abdel Halim Hafez employing plentiful electric guitar twang in the ‘60s. Nick’s love of such twangy sounds originates in the theme tunes to the ‘60s spy films and TV series he grew up with and still loves – Syriana even do a cover of the theme to Ran- del & Hopkirk (Deceased).
hen in 2009 problems set in. “Abdullah, whatever his reasons, decided that he couldn’t commit to promoting the album,” recalls Nick. “I choose my words carefully, because I have nothing bad to say about Abdullah, I think he’s a great musician and he’s a nice guy really,
but I don’t understand what’s going on.” Bernard and Nick were left wondering where to go next. “We couldn’t replace Abdullah and wouldn’t want to try, so we decided to expand the project out. I think we would have done this anyway, because the idea was always to start small and then grow and end up with an orchestra. But instead we’ve gone for a pan-Arabic fusion, mixed with the whole Cold War theme and I’m quite enjoying it and looking forward to writing the next album with the new line- up.” Based on the live performance I witness, Syriana Mark II is lighter and freer sounding, without the dark intensity that Abdul- lah brought to the project, and they’re already performing new material.
So what of the missing Abdullah? When I speak to him a few
weeks later, it’s clear that he feels slighted. “I approached this pro- ject differently to the others that I’ve worked on, this time, rather than telling the story from a Middle Eastern point of view which I’ve already done on my other projects for the last ten years. I wanted it to come from the western point of view, which was the main idea of inviting Bernard, Nick and the others to come with me to Damascus,
Abdullah Chhadeh
Photo: Andrew Cronshaw
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100