33 f
although I was happy to deal with the string section [none of whom could speak English and all of whom are top of the range musicians] on my own. The main point was for them to tell the story, speak about the journey, express what they’d seen and to bring it back to the western world to share their experience.”
“When I started the project with Nick, I asked him if he’d be interested in calling it ‘Abdullah Chhadeh & Nick Page’, he said no, that he wasn’t that keen for his name to appear (which is why he calls himself Dub Colossus and Dubulah). I said fine, but I’ve been working on my name and to me it’s quite crucial, so we figured out that it’s going to be called ‘Abdullah Chhadeh & Syriana’. We recorded a few songs and Nick suggested that we took them to Real World, who liked them and said they’d love to do an album with us. I said fine, on the basis that the whole project is called ‘Abdullah Chhadeh & Syriana’. They decided verbally (it’s all done verbally with Real World) to give me the money when I suggest that I’d like to go and record with a Syrian orchestra. Then I sug- gested to take Bernard, Nick, Toby and the film crew, they liked that idea and paid for that too.”
On their return from Damascus, they signed to Real World. “On the contract, it mentioned Syriana,” Abdullah told me. He claims everybody still agreed that the name of the band would be ‘Abdullah Chhadeh & Syriana’ and that this was just a formality. “Based on that trust, I went ahead and I signed the contract.”
manda Jones at Real World recalls things differently. “I would consider it a collaborative project which we called Syriana from the very beginning. It was brought to us by Nick, who we’ve known and worked with for many years,” she explains, when I catch up with her a few days after I’ve spoken to Abdullah. “The root into the music was our confidence that Nick could pull such a curious project together. Originally we did an experimental recording ses- sion at Real World studios, to see which direction it was going in; this was after their trip to Damascus and used some of the mate- rial they’d recorded there.”
A Abdullah tells me that he then received an email from Real
World stating that they’d like to remove his name from the band’s title and just call it Syriana. “This was a shock to me and led to a meeting with Real World, where we all agreed to keep the full title ‘Abdullah Chhadeh & Syriana’. Then a week later we received a letter from Real World saying, ‘We have decided to go with the name Syriana in America and Europe whether you like it or not, but we’ll be happy to release it under the name ‘Abdullah Chhadeh & Syriana’ for the Arabic market’.”
Again, Amanda Jones’ recollection of events is different. “My understanding is that Abdullah’s issue came when we had to roll out the whole promotional and live strategies and it was just a struggle between him as a solo artist, promoting Abdullah Chhadeh and promoting Syriana. So we had a lot of head-scratch- ing and discussion, mainly between the group. As a record compa- ny, our record was complete; Abdullah was a part of that record, he’s signed, he gets paid his royalties and he’s just one of a number of musicians who were on that project. My understanding was that he needed to continue to promote Abdullah Chhadeh and didn’t want to commit to the time to promote Syriana. We wrote to him on a number of occasions asking how he’d like to go for- ward, but we didn’t get any response from him.”
What about the Middle Eastern release? “If we can get the opportunity to release the record through a Middle Eastern record company (because it’s pretty difficult for us to do that through our own structure), we’d be interested to license the record to somebody and if they advised us about the way we pre- sented the name or the imagery, then we’d definitely be open to that discussion. We want to make the best commercial opportu- nity for the project.”
Abdullah says that he then wrote to Real World, reluctantly agreeing to continue touring with the group as Syriana. Amanda’s recollection is that he was only prepared to continue with the pro- ject if it was billed as ‘Abdullah Chhadeh With Syriana’. “He signed the contract that said he was part of a project called Syriana,” says Amanda. “I wouldn’t have wanted to do the project if it was an Abdullah Chhadeh project. What he should be doing is embracing this as one strand in all his different areas of work, because look- ing at the way the industry’s going, artists should be pursuing a number of different things. The days of the artist promoting a sin- gle CD release are over, they need to earn money on all sorts of different levels.”
As anyone who’s seen This Is Spinal Tap can tell you, band poli- tics can be a precarious and messy business. We listeners should just be thankful that, in the case of Syriana, we’ve already got an intriguing album and a dynamic live show out of the deal, so I don’t think we should be complaining.
www.syriana.org
www.realworldrecords.com/syriana F
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