Rock in a Hard Place: Saudi Arabia's underground heavy metal scene

8/7/2019 Rock in a Hard Place: Saudi Arabia's underground heavy metal scene

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Say you were born and raised in Saudi Arabia andwhen you got to a certain age you decided you

liked heavy metal music and wanted to starta band. You’d be asking for trouble, right?

by orlando CrowCroft

In A HArd

P l Ac e november 2010 e s q u i r e 1 1 3



As one of the only doom bands in Saudi Arabia, Grieving Ageare ying the ag for a genre known for slow and heavy songsthat can clock in at over fteen minutes. The band’s singer,thirty-year-old Ahmed Mahmoud (centre), is a veteran ofJeddah’s scene. But gigs in the kingdom are rare, and bandsoften travel overseas to play

Grieving Age and Wastedland (below right/ left) performing in

Egypt; and Creative Waste (below centre) in New York

1 1 4 e s q u i r e november 2010



e’ve been up And down

the roAd A dozen or

So timeS beore I realise

the scenery hasn’t changed.

Ahmed Mahmoud is driving his beat-up silver Mazda,

the stereo blasting industrial

German death metal and we’ve been shouting to

each other over the uzz o guitars and roar o the

vocals. “Where are we going again?” I ask. “HMV,”

Ahmed replies, mildly rustrated, and waves his

hand towards a nearby mosque.

This is Jeddah, the “liberal” heart o Saudi

Arabia, but that doesn’t mean HMV stays open

during prayers. Like everything else in the kingdom

— the malls, the shops and restaurants — it closes

its doors and kicks out the customers ve times a

day, every day. So we drive up and down the empty

our-lane highway that intersects the Pizza Hut and

Starbucks outlets o new Jeddah; up and down and

around the roundabouts, until we hear the call to

prayer sound out across the city and then subside

once more to silence. “Now we go,” says Ahmed.

We’d met hal an hour earlier at my fea-pit hotelin Jeddah’s old town, a collection o dusty souks

and broken buildings that sprawls along the city’s

industrial waterront, a long way rom the malls

and villas o the city suburbs. Ahmed arrived late,

wearing sawn o black jeans and motorbike boots.

He had a shaved head, long-ish beard and thick

glasses. His black T-shirt read, simply, Save Milk,

Drink Beer. He shook my hand and apologised or

making me wait, “Welcome to Jeddah,” he said, with

just the aintest touch o irony.

As rontman o GrievinG AGe, almost

certainly Saudi Arabia’s only doom metal band,

Ahmed is one o the stalwarts o the kingdom’s

music scene. Doom, a sub-category o heavy metal,

A th hah n bat down on ryadh’conct, tl and gla, a dozn yong mnlg amp and dm onto a makhft tag.

Gta a tnd, mcophon ttd, jokxchangd, and an atmoph of p-ggxctmnt hang n th a.

it anoth and-blown mm aftnoonn Jn 2009, and th momnt what t haall bn ladng p to. Not j t th wkof ppaaton, lt of nam, tckt andagmnt wth vn own, bt ya — a flldcad — of k, battl won and lot, poplthatnd wth jal, clandtn wbt and

ct codng tdo. stll th gg wnt on,and th cowd gw. Now, tonght, n ryadh,sad Aaba, t’ th fnal tt.

By th nd of th nght a dozn popl wll batd, th pmnt confcatd. Chagwll b lvd, angng fom dg dalng tosatanm and th lv of two yong mn wllchang fov. On, a sad ctzn, wll pndalmot a ya n jal and anoth, a 24-ya-old syan, wll b dpotd and bannd fom

tnng to th kngdom. All for playing music; more specifically, for playing heavy metal music.

november 2010 e s q u i r e 1 1 5



is epitomised by mercilessly heavy, slow

songs, some o which clock in at more

than teen minutes. Others — like those

by Caliornia’s scene veterans Sleep —

can last up to an hour. In the West, Doom

has a small, mostly stoned but very active,

ollowing. In Saudi it’s just small.

Not that it bothers Ahmed. His band

recorded its rst album two years ago

in a recording studio in Dammam, on

Saudi Arabia’s east coast, and is currently

working on a ollow-up. He has also

collaborated with two o the biggest

names in the genre, Sweden’s Katatonia

and England’s My Dying Bride, with the

ormer agreeing to produce and mix the

Grieving Age album or ree ater Ahmed

contacted them via the Internet. As we sit

in the two-storey caé attached to HMV

— divided so that women can sit upstairs,

men downstairs — Ahmed happily recalls

the experience o working with his heroes.“We are so happy and proud o the

record,” he says, in almost aultless

English that he regularly apologises

or. “Dan Swanö (rom Katatonia) did a

remarkable job mixing and mastering it.

He added his magic touches and evolved

the whole sound into something that we

never expected.”

Music is, quite literally, Ahmed’s lie.

He imports CDs and distributes them

to local music stores, and appreciates

the irony that while he is educating the

Saudi youth on bands like Metallica with

one hand, he is also inficting Justin

Timberlake records on it with the other.

His lie is a more-or-less constant to-

and-ro with Saudi Arabia’s censors. Few

would be aware, when glancing at the

well-stocked shelves o Jeddah’s HMV,

that every one o the albums here — rom

Celine Dion to Carcass — has been ought

over by this thirty-year-old metal-head.

It’s no surprise that he has witnessed the

Saudi music scene change dramatically

over the last ten years.

“Man, things have changed so much”

he says, shaking his head at the memory.“Back in the nineties it was impossible to

get CDs. The only way was to ask riends

or amily to bring them in rom Europe,”

he explains.

“But at the same time it was damn

valuable and you would just know it

by learning the hard way. Nowadays

everybody can have the whole

discography o a band with one click.”

The Internet may have removed some

o the mystique, but it has been invaluable

to the band scene in Saudi Arabia, and

is solely responsible or uniting Riyadh,

Jeddah and the Eastern Province.

in 1993, and is spoken o with reverence

by younger members o the scene. Another

Jeddah stalwart is wASted LAnd,

a ve-piece death metal band that

appeared in a BBC story about Saudi

Arabian metal back in 2006. Then there

is the renowned Saudi band, Sound of

rubY, ronted by Mohammed Al-Hajjaj

and still playing and recording albums

almost teen years ater their ormation

in Dammam back in 1996.

Nowadays there are more than

thirty rock and metal bands that havemade themselves known to ellow

ans in Saudi Arabia, with at least our

recording studios and probably dozens

more makeshit set-ups in bedrooms

and garages across the kingdom. Bands

come and go, suddenly appearing on

MySpace or on Saudi orums and then

disappearing just as quickly.

These bands occupy a strange place

in Saudi Arabian society. Playing music

is legal, but so many o the activities

associated with it are prohibited:

gatherings o more than ty people

and the mixing o men and women,

Pre-MySpace, ans in those scenes

had no idea there were bands in

other regions. Nowadays Ahmed has

developed contacts all over the country.

“I there was no Internet we wouldn’t

know anyone unless they were our next

door neighbour,” he says.

This didn’t stop bands rom making

names or themselves, and some o those

early guys have ended up as legends.

Hasan Hatrash, a journalist or Arab

News, the country’s largest English-

language daily newspaper, ounded classic

rock outt moSt of uS in Jeddah back pho

tography:vanessa

america/hasan

hatrash


“I guess they just find it strange that desert people are creating such aheavy controversial music. Maybe they still can’t believe that we don’t live in tents anymore”



or example. Then there are the other

obvious associations rightly or wrongly

attached to heavy metal music, such as

Satanism, alcohol, drugs, and subversion.

The upshot is that bands start o with

a MySpace site and might even record

an album. But then attention — rom

parents, riends or employers, as well

as the authorities — is such that they

subsequently back o, the site gets

outdated and the band slips into obscurity.

None o these actors worry Ahmed

though, as he ficks through the shelves o the considerable metal section and shoots

the breeze with the sta, most o whom

know him well. His concerns or Grieving

Age are more mundane: the guys are all

too busy with their work and their wives

and their jobs to rehearse. In act, he’s

not even sure why the outside world is so

interested in metal in Saudi Arabia.

“I guess they just nd it strange

that desert people are creating such

heavy controversial music,” he says, hal

joking, hal disappointed. “Maybe they

still can’t believe that we don’t live in

tents anymore.”

hiLe the more

LiberAL JeddAh

iS A breedinG

Ground for YounG

metAL bAndS, it’s

actually the east coast that is the engine

driving the country’s scene. The Eastern

Province is home to the SAudi rock

And metAL SocietY (SAMETAL)and has hosted six out o the eight

gigs held in Saudi Arabia over the last

ten years. The guys in Al Khobar and

Dammam have the benet o proximity

to Bahrain, Dubai and the Levant, all o

which have played host to Saudi bands

unable to nd venues at home.

Fawaz Al Shawa and Bader Husain

have been involved in the eastern scene

since it began, but tonight in the ve(ish)-

star Gul Pearl hotel in Manama, they

are an unlikely pair. Twenty-six year-old

Bader is a geophysicist with an ultra-

condent manner. He’s wearing a smart

dark suit and doesn’t seem at all out

o place in the hotel lobby, where we

sit surrounded by Western businessmen

drinking overpriced beers. Fawaz could

not be more dierent. The twenty-three-

year-old MBA student is wearing loose

jeans, a black Nasum T-shirt and speaks

with a pronounced American accent.

His head is shaved, he has a short beard,

and his quiet demeanour contrasts starkly

with Bader’s mile-a-minute enthusiasm.

As an Asian girl in a glamorous green

dress plucks out dated hits rom a goldenharp, I toy with the idea o ordering a

beer — this is Bahrain ater all — but

when Bader orders a Shirley Temple

and Fawaz an iced coee, I opt or tea.

The two o them have driven over the

King Fahd Causeway to see me, simply

because I happen to be in Bahrain or

the night. They’ve come equipped with

laptops, fyers, gig posters, pictures and

a DVD Bader made documenting the

rst metal show they arranged in Saudi

Arabia. He proudly tells me he has our

jobs: organising the metal scene is one

o them.

Fawaz Al-Shawaf(left), frontman ofCreative Waste, agrindcore outtfrom Saudi’s eastcoast. The bandplayed two showsin the U.S. in 2010,and will play the

Maryland Deathfestin 2011. Much of thecountry remains aconservative place(right) meaningfans (below) arelimited to a fewprivate gigs inrented halls orexpat compounds




Since its oundation by Sound o Ruby

bassist Kamal in 2003, SAMETAL has

become a ocal point or the Saudi metal

scene, providing inormation about bands,

recent releases and a popular web orum.

Fawaz and Bader have been involvedin SAMETAL since the early years, but

took over the running o the orum in

early 2008. Fawaz is also the singer o

creAtive wASte, Saudi Arabia’s

only grindcore band, and is trying hard

to popularise a genre made amous by

British grind legends Napalm Death.

Fawaz lights up when mentioning

Creative Waste, and rightly so — last

month the band played two shows in the

U.S., and has been invited to join the bill

on the Maryland Deathest next year.

He speaks o the rst SAMETAL gig

with a nostalgia that dees his years.

SAMETAL I and II, as the shows were

known, were the glory years or the

East Coast scene; a time when gigs

went ahead, new bands sprang to lie,

and the older guys started to dream o a

coming renaissance. Their eelings were

premature, as they would later nd out,

but as the pair pu away on Dunhill

cigarettes and laugh over Bader’s pictures

o the show, it is obvious how important

the events were to them.

“We just rented an empty room.

All o the equipment, even the cables,we had to borrow or buy. We set it all up

ourselves,” recalls Fawaz.

The laptop video ootage o SAMETAL

I shows the stage curtains open to reveal

the our members o Sound o Ruby.

They rst look down at their instruments,

as i nervous, then gaze out at the baying

crowd as the drummer starts a heavy

our-beat. In the background you can

see a set o grubby beige curtains, which

gives the impression they are playing in

someone’s ront room. The long-haired

singer smiles, sings his rst note, and

Bader can’t help but smile.

“I love this moment. I’ll never orget

it,” he says, staring intently at the small

screen. Ater a ew seconds, he points at

some guys head-banging in the crowd.

“Most o them are bald now,” he laughs.

Saudi bands basically have twooptions when they want to play live.

Either they rent a space on the outskirts

o town — a villa or a arm — or they

play at an expat compound, where laws

orbidding public gatherings and men

and women intermingling are more lax.

Four out o six o Saudi Arabia’s live

shows since 2001 have taken place in

the ormer, rom Dammamest, which

attracted just twenty-ve people, to

SAMETAL II, which saw 160 turn out or

an evening eaturing six bands.

That was 2005, and 2006 saw the rst

gig in Jeddah, titled Metal Resurrection,

ollowed by SAMETAL III, which

saw ve hundred people pack into an

expatriate compound in Khobar.

Shows ollowed in Riyadh in 2007 and

again in Khobar in 2008, and or a while

it began to look like things were really

changing. Then came Riyadh 2009, an

event that neither Bader or Fawaz want

to talk about, but one which has had

lasting implications or every band in

the kingdom. The bust-up o that gig,

the arrests, the attention it drew, had

everyone running scared — and still does.There have been no gigs since, and no one

really knows when that is likely to change.

The Riyadh show had come out o the

successes o Jeddah and the SAMETAL

gigs, and ans in the Saudi capital wanted

to give something back. The problem was

that in their enthusiasm they got carried

away. On that night, in the summer o

2009, the organisers sold some seven

hundred tickets, but the expat compound

only admitted our hundred. The three

hundred people outside who had paid 150

riyals upront were angry, someone called

the police, and the rest is history.

“Ater that incident I went online and

shut down everything, because I didn’t

want to get in trouble,” explains Bader.

“I’d just got married, I had my job and my

lie, and I didn’t want problems because o

the ault o others.”“They got reckless, it has to be said,”

Fawaz agrees as he snaps the laptop shut

and motions to the waiter or the bill.

“I don’t have a problem with people

trying to do it; it’s just whatever they’re

doing is aecting what you started.

It aects everyone.”

reeze of the dYinG

were one of the bAndS

on the biLL in Riyadh and,

despite the outcome, guitarist

Majed counts it as one o their

best ever shows. The six-piece death

metal band had let by the time the police

arrived, but Majed admits that things

have not been the same since. Not that it

was the rst time his band had had a run

in with the authorities.

Majed, an English teacher by

proession, hails rom Jeddah, but when

I speak to him over a crackling phone line

he’s in Dammam, working as a teacher.

Eighteen months ago he was playing withhis band when the police busted up a gig

and arrested one o their members. The

cops quickly realised that the show was

not the den o iniquity they rst thought,

and let him go. “They were searching or

drugs and alcohol, but we don’t allow any

o that into our shows,” he explains.

Given that the genre has attracted

such inamy or its use o satanic

iconography and violent reerences,

it seems obvious rom the outside why

Saudi Arabia remains so paranoid

about heavy metal. But the bands are

universally dismissive o the view that

Putting on gigsin Saudi Arabiais a complexarrangement. Thebands have to nda venue — usually

an empty hall orprivate villa — thenbuild a stage,borrow equipment,sort out the sound,

sell tickets andorganise thebands. All of thishas to be donewithout provoking

attention from theauthorities, whohave a tendency tocrash the party




their music is contrary to Islam. When

I’d questioned Ahmed about this,

he sounded rustrated, as i he’d been

asked the same question many times

beore. “Metal has nothing to do with

the religion. Music is music, what hasreligion got to do with it?”

Majed also thinks the publicity and

accessibility aorded by the Internet

has been a mixed blessing. On the one

hand, he is able to promote his band

to metal ans anywhere; on the other,

it means any idiot with a webcam can

speak to the world. One such example,

that made headlines earlier this year,

was a young man who appeared on

MTV wearing a subversive T-shirt

telling a reporter about the suppression

o the metal scene in Saudi Arabia.

“People see that and they think we’re

all like that. The authorities have always

hated metal music and stu like that

gives them an excuse to act against us.

They see these people on the Internet

and they say: ‘This is metal music, this

is what you guys believe in: Satanism

and upside-down crosses.’ I mean, what

the ***? That’s not metal. It’s these

people who cause the problems,” he

explains, angrily.

And Majed is right. It is a cruel

irony that every time there has been

a crackdown in Saudi Arabia it hasbecause bands or individuals have made

too much noise. In Riyadh, it was the

over-selling o tickets, in Jeddah it was

because the religious police had heard

about the show on the Internet. Old

school veterans like hAtrASh have

been dealing with this same problem or

years — he was arrested in the 1990s or

organising a show in a local restaurant.

Attention has always caused trouble or

the Saudi metal scene, and so they are

let walking a ne line between wanting

to play and promote their music, and not

wanting to draw attention to themselves.

But it is also true that, until last

year, very ew people had actually been

given signicant jail time or playing

or organising shows in Saudi Arabia.

Even in Riyadh, the two organisers

were jailed and deported or allowing

the mixing o sexes at the show, not ororganising the show or playing music,

both which were actually perectly legal

within the connes o a private venue.

This ambiguity, o course, is both a

blessing and a curse or Saudi Arabian

musicians — it means that they never

know how ar to push until it is too late.

Saudi Arabia is ar too complex

to second guess how things will map

out, but Fawaz is optimistic about the

uture. Sure, right now, metal bands are

keeping their heads down, but there

are progressive orces in play in Saudi

Arabia, and the conservatives cannot

hold back the tide orever. It could be

some time beore SAMETAL IV, V or VI,

but as long as the bands keep playing,

continue to develop their talent and,

like Creative Waste, get recognition

outside o the Arabian Peninsula,

anything is possible.“Things are changing right now,”

Fawaz told me as we got up leave the

Gul Pearl Hotel in Bahrain; me back

to Dubai, him and Bader back across

the twenty-seven kilometre King Fahd

Causeway to a country that can oten

seem like another planet — even i it is

just an hour away. “A lot o people don’t

think so but it ’s happening. Everything

rom gas stations to parking meters,” he

said, and then looked me in the eye, his

voice getting quieter, his manner even

more sincere. “Saudi Arabia is changing,”

he said. “I can eel it.”

“Metal has nothing to do with the religion.Music is music, what has religion got to dowith it?”


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Rock in a Hard Place: Saudi Arabia's underground heavy metal scene