112 esquire n o v e m b e r 2010

In A

HArd
Place
Say you were born and raised in Saudi Arabia and
when you got to a certain age you decided you
liked heavy metal music and wanted to start
a band. You’d be asking for trouble, right?

by orlando Crowcroft
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 As one of the only doom bands in Saudi Arabia, Grieving Age
are flying the flag for a genre known for slow and heavy songs
that can clock in at over fifteen minutes. The band’s singer,
thirty-year-old Ahmed Mahmoud (centre), is a veteran of
Jeddah’s scene. But gigs in the kingdom are rare, and bands
often travel overseas to play

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

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

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As the harsh sun beats down on Riyadh’s
concrete, steel and glass, a dozen young men
lug amps and drums onto a makeshift stage.
Guitars are tuned, microphones tested, jokes
exchanged, and an atmosphere of pre-gig
excitement hangs in the air.

It is another sand-blown summer afternoon

in June 2009, and this moment is what it has
all been leading up to. Not just the weeks
of preparation, lists of names, tickets and
arguments with venue owners, but years — a full
decade — of risks, battles won and lost, people
threatened with jail, clandestine websites and
secret recording studios. Still the gigs went on,
and the crowds grew. Now, tonight, in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia, it’s the final test.

By the end of the night a dozen people will be

arrested, their equipment confiscated. Charges
will be levied, ranging from drug dealing to
Satanism and the lives of two young men will
change forever. One, a Saudi citizen, will spend
almost a year in jail and another, a 24-year-
old Syrian, will be deported and banned from
returning to the kingdom. All for playing music;
more specifically, for playing heavy metal music.

e’ve been up and down
the road a dozen or
so times before 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 fuzz of guitars and roar of the
vocals. “Where are we going again?” I ask. “HMV,”
Ahmed replies, mildly frustrated, and waves his
hand towards a nearby mosque.
This is Jeddah, the “liberal” heart of 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 five times a
day, every day. So we drive up and down the empty
four-lane highway that intersects the Pizza Hut and
Starbucks outlets of 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 half an hour earlier at my flea-pit hotel
in Jeddah’s old town, a collection of dusty souks
and broken buildings that sprawls along the city’s
industrial waterfront, a long way from the malls
and villas of the city suburbs. Ahmed arrived late,
wearing sawn off 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 for
making me wait, “Welcome to Jeddah,” he said, with
just the faintest touch of irony.
As frontman of Grieving Age, almost
certainly Saudi Arabia’s only doom metal band,
Ahmed is one of the stalwarts of the kingdom’s
music scene. Doom, a sub-category of heavy metal,

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 is epitomised by mercilessly heavy, slow
songs, some of which clock in at more
than fifteen minutes. Others — like those
by California’s scene veterans Sleep —
can last up to an hour. In the West, Doom
has a small, mostly stoned but very active,
following. In Saudi it’s just small.
Not that it bothers Ahmed. His band
recorded its first album two years ago
in a recording studio in Dammam, on
Saudi Arabia’s east coast, and is currently
working on a follow-up. He has also
collaborated with two of the biggest
names in the genre, Sweden’s Katatonia
and England’s My Dying Bride, with the
former agreeing to produce and mix the
Grieving Age album for free after Ahmed
contacted them via the Internet. As we sit
in the two-storey café attached to HMV
— divided so that women can sit upstairs,
men downstairs — Ahmed happily recalls
the experience of working with his heroes.
“We are so happy and proud of the
record,” he says, in almost faultless
English that he regularly apologises
for. “Dan Swanö (from 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 life.
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 inflicting Justin
Timberlake records on it with the other. “I guess they just in 1993, and is spoken of with reverence
His life is a more-or-less constant to- find it strange that by younger members of the scene. Another
and-fro with Saudi Arabia’s censors. Few Jeddah stalwart is Wasted Land,
would be aware, when glancing at the
desert people are a five-piece death metal band that
well-stocked shelves of Jeddah’s HMV, creating such a appeared in a BBC story about Saudi
that every one of the albums here — from heavy controversial Arabian metal back in 2006. Then there
Celine Dion to Carcass — has been fought music. Maybe they is the renowned Saudi band, Sound of
over by this thirty-year-old metal-head.
It’s no surprise that he has witnessed the
still can’t believe Ruby, fronted by Mohammed Al-Hajjaj
and still playing and recording albums
Saudi music scene change dramatically that we don’t live almost fifteen years after their formation
over the last ten years. in tents anymore” in Dammam back in 1996.
“Man, things have changed so much” Nowadays there are more than
he says, shaking his head at the memory. thirty rock and metal bands that have
“Back in the nineties it was impossible to Pre-MySpace, fans in those scenes made themselves known to fellow
photography: Vanessa America/ Hasan Hatrash

get CDs. The only way was to ask friends
or family to bring them in from 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 of a band with one click.”
The Internet may have removed some
of the mystique, but it has been invaluable
to the band scene in Saudi Arabia, and
is solely responsible for uniting Riyadh,
Jeddah and the Eastern Province.
had no idea there were bands in
other regions. Nowadays Ahmed has
developed contacts all over the country.
“If there was no Internet we wouldn’t
know anyone unless they were our next
door neighbour,” he says.
This didn’t stop bands from making
names for themselves, and some of those
early guys have ended up as legends.
Hasan Hatrash, a journalist for Arab
News, the country’s largest English-
language daily newspaper, founded classic
rock outfit Most of Us in Jeddah back
fans in Saudi Arabia, with at least four
recording studios and probably dozens
more makeshift set-ups in bedrooms
and garages across the kingdom. Bands
come and go, suddenly appearing on
MySpace or on Saudi forums and then
disappearing just as quickly.
These bands occupy a strange place
in Saudi Arabian society. Playing music
is legal, but so many of the activities
associated with it are prohibited:
gatherings of more than fifty people
and the mixing of men and women,

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 Fawaz Al-Shawaf
(left), frontman of
Creative Waste, a
grindcore outfit
from Saudi’s east
coast. The band
played two shows
in the U.S. in 2010,
and will play the
Maryland Deathfest
in 2011. Much of the
country remains a
conservative place
(right) meaning
fans (below) are
limited to a few
private gigs in
rented halls or
expat compounds

for 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 off with
a MySpace site and might even record
an album. But then attention — from
parents, friends or employers, as well
as the authorities — is such that they
subsequently back off, the site gets
outdated and the band slips into obscurity.
None of these factors worry Ahmed
though, as he flicks through the shelves of
the considerable metal section and shoots
the breeze with the staff, most of whom
know him well. His concerns for Grieving
Age are more mundane: the guys are all
too busy with their work and their wives
and their jobs to rehearse. In fact, he’s
not even sure why the outside world is so
interested in metal in Saudi Arabia.
“I guess they just find it strange
that desert people are creating such
heavy controversial music,” he says, half
joking, half 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 of the eight
gigs held in Saudi Arabia over the last
ten years. The guys in Al Khobar and
Dammam have the benefit of proximity
to Bahrain, Dubai and the Levant, all of
which have played host to Saudi bands
unable to find venues at home.
Fawaz Al Shawaf and Bader Husain
have been involved in the eastern scene
since it began, but tonight in the five(ish)-
star Gulf Pearl hotel in Manama, they
are an unlikely pair. Twenty-six year-old
Bader is a geophysicist with an ultra-
confident manner. He’s wearing a smart
dark suit and doesn’t seem at all out
of place in the hotel lobby, where we
sit surrounded by Western businessmen
drinking overpriced beers. Fawaz could
not be more different. 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 from a golden
harp, I toy with the idea of ordering a
beer — this is Bahrain after all — but
when Bader orders a Shirley Temple
and Fawaz an iced coffee, I opt for tea.
The two of them have driven over the
King Fahd Causeway to see me, simply
because I happen to be in Bahrain for
the night. They’ve come equipped with
laptops, flyers, gig posters, pictures and
a DVD Bader made documenting the
first metal show they arranged in Saudi
Arabia. He proudly tells me he has four
jobs: organising the metal scene is one
of them.

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 Putting on gigs
in Saudi Arabia
is a complex
arrangement. The
bands have to find
a venue — usually
an empty hall or
private villa — then
build a stage,
borrow equipment,
sort out the sound,
sell tickets and
organise the
bands. All of this
has to be done
without provoking
attention from the
authorities, who
have a tendency to
crash the party
Since its foundation by Sound of Ruby
bassist Kamal in 2003, SAMETAL has
become a focal point for the Saudi metal
scene, providing information about bands,
recent releases and a popular web forum.
Fawaz and Bader have been involved
in SAMETAL since the early years, but
took over the running of the forum in
early 2008. Fawaz is also the singer of
Creative Waste, Saudi Arabia’s
only grindcore band, and is trying hard
to popularise a genre made famous 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 Deathfest next year.
He speaks of the first SAMETAL gig
with a nostalgia that defies his years.
SAMETAL I and II, as the shows were
known, were the glory years for the
East Coast scene; a time when gigs
went ahead, new bands sprang to life,
and the older guys started to dream of a
coming renaissance. Their feelings were
premature, as they would later find out,
but as the pair puff away on Dunhill
cigarettes and laugh over Bader’s pictures
of the show, it is obvious how important
the events were to them.
“We just rented an empty room.
All of the equipment, even the cables,
we had to borrow or buy. We set it all up
ourselves,” recalls Fawaz.
The laptop video footage of SAMETAL
I shows the stage curtains open to reveal
the four members of Sound of Ruby.
They first look down at their instruments,
as if nervous, then gaze out at the baying
crowd as the drummer starts a heavy
four-beat. In the background you can
see a set of grubby beige curtains, which
gives the impression they are playing in
someone’s front room. The long-haired
singer smiles, sings his first note, and
Bader can’t help but smile.
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“I love this moment. I’ll never forget
it,” he says, staring intently at the small
screen. After a few seconds, he points at
some guys head-banging in the crowd.
“Most of them are bald now,” he laughs.
Saudi bands basically have two
options when they want to play live.
Either they rent a space on the outskirts
of town — a villa or a farm — or they
play at an expat compound, where laws
forbidding public gatherings and men
and women intermingling are more lax.
Four out of six of Saudi Arabia’s live
shows since 2001 have taken place in
the former, from Dammamfest, which
attracted just twenty-five people, to
SAMETAL II, which saw 160 turn out for
an evening featuring six bands.
That was 2005, and 2006 saw the first
gig in Jeddah, titled Metal Resurrection,
followed by SAMETAL III, which
saw five hundred people pack into an
expatriate compound in Khobar.
Shows followed in Riyadh in 2007 and
again in Khobar in 2008, and for 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 for every band in
the kingdom. The bust-up of 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 of the
successes of Jeddah and the SAMETAL
gigs, and fans 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 of
2009, the organisers sold some seven
hundred tickets, but the expat compound
only admitted four hundred. The three
hundred people outside who had paid 150
riyals upfront were angry, someone called
the police, and the rest is history.
“After 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
life, and I didn’t want problems because of
the fault of others.”
“They got reckless, it has to be said,”
Fawaz agrees as he snaps the laptop shut
and motions to the waiter for the bill.
“I don’t have a problem with people
trying to do it; it’s just whatever they’re
doing is affecting what you started.
It affects 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 of their
best ever shows. The six-piece death
metal band had left by the time the police
arrived, but Majed admits that things
have not been the same since. Not that it
was the first time his band had had a run
in with the authorities.
Majed, an English teacher by
profession, hails from 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 with
his band when the police busted up a gig
and arrested one of their members. The
cops quickly realised that the show was
not the den of iniquity they first thought,
and let him go. “They were searching for
drugs and alcohol, but we don’t allow any
of that into our shows,” he explains.
Given that the genre has attracted
such infamy for its use of satanic
iconography and violent references,
it seems obvious from the outside why
Saudi Arabia remains so paranoid
about heavy metal. But the bands are
universally dismissive of the view that
their music is contrary to Islam. When
I’d questioned Ahmed about this,
he sounded frustrated, as if he’d been
asked the same question many times
before. “Metal has nothing to do with
the religion. Music is music, what has
religion got to do with it?”
Majed also thinks the publicity and
accessibility afforded by the Internet
has been a mixed blessing. On the one
hand, he is able to promote his band
to metal fans 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
of 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 stuff like that “Metal has nothing to do with the religion.
gives them an excuse to act against us.
They see these people on the Internet
Music is music, what has religion got to do
and they say: ‘This is metal music, this with it?”
is what you guys believe in: Satanism
and upside-down crosses.’ I mean, what But it is also true that, until last hold back the tide forever. It could be
the f***? That’s not metal. It’s these year, very few people had actually been some time before SAMETAL IV, V or VI,
people who cause the problems,” he given significant jail time for playing but as long as the bands keep playing,
explains, angrily. or organising shows in Saudi Arabia. continue to develop their talent and,
And Majed is right. It is a cruel Even in Riyadh, the two organisers like Creative Waste, get recognition
irony that every time there has been were jailed and deported for allowing outside of the Arabian Peninsula,
a crackdown in Saudi Arabia it has the mixing of sexes at the show, not for anything is possible.
because bands or individuals have made organising the show or playing music, “Things are changing right now,”
too much noise. In Riyadh, it was the both which were actually perfectly legal Fawaz told me as we got up leave the
over-selling of tickets, in Jeddah it was within the confines of a private venue. Gulf Pearl Hotel in Bahrain; me back
because the religious police had heard This ambiguity, of course, is both a to Dubai, him and Bader back across
about the show on the Internet. Old blessing and a curse for Saudi Arabian the twenty-seven kilometre King Fahd
school veterans like Hatrash have musicians — it means that they never Causeway to a country that can often
been dealing with this same problem for know how far to push until it is too late. seem like another planet — even if it is
years — he was arrested in the 1990s for Saudi Arabia is far too complex just an hour away. “A lot of people don’t
organising a show in a local restaurant. to second guess how things will map think so but it’s happening. Everything
Attention has always caused trouble for out, but Fawaz is optimistic about the from gas stations to parking meters,” he
the Saudi metal scene, and so they are future. Sure, right now, metal bands are said, and then looked me in the eye, his
left walking a fine line between wanting keeping their heads down, but there voice getting quieter, his manner even
to play and promote their music, and not are progressive forces in play in Saudi more sincere. “Saudi Arabia is changing,”
wanting to draw attention to themselves. Arabia, and the conservatives cannot he said. “I can feel it.”

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