Kabul Dreams in Karachi

After performing in Karachi, Afghan band Kabul Dreams is looking forward to teaming up with Uth Records.

KARACHI:

They take inspiration from the Beatles, Greenday, Radiohead and Travis. All three of them speak different languages and belong to three different parts of Afghanistan. Hence they sing in English. That’s how Kabul Dreams rocks.

Claiming to be the first Indie pop band of Afghanistan, the trio has Sulaymon Qardash on lead guitars and vocals, Mohammad Siddiq on bass guitar and backing vocals and Mujtaba Habibi on drums.

Kabul Dreams was on a two-day visit to Karachi where the three artists played live for two nights at Base Rock Cafe. Their live act was much more controlled and engaging than most of the local underground bands.

It was just a matter of saying “Yak, Do, Seh, Chaar” (one, two, three , four in Dari language) before the crowd got on their feet. The band performed some of their most popular tracks like “Sadae Man” (My Voice), “Song of Peace and Love”, “The Second Floor”, “Dream of All My Life” and “My Friend”. Apart from their originals, they also did renditions of some rock tracks like The Jets’ “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” and a few songs from Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

Though the band was created in 2008, their live performance is much more mature than many other bands in their beginning stages. Their compositions are fresh and their overall sound is just about perfect.

After the show, Kabul Dreams shared their success story with The Express Tribune.

“Getting an Indie pop band together in Kabul is a statement in itself. One of us speaks Pashto, the other one Dari and the third one Uzbek and yet we play together and make music in English,” said Mohammad Siddiq, who grew up in Pakistan.

Siddiq is happy with the growing scope of music in Kabul as in the past four years some other rock bands have also surfaced in the Afghan music scene. Though such bands are few and far between, people in Afghanistan have started to trust the art form.

“The media is booming again in Afghanistan. There are a lot of channels coming up and if you are confident about the quality of music that you are producing and if you knock at the right doors, you might get some corporate support,” Siddiq, who also works as producer at a radio station, told The Express Tribune.

Qardash, who works as news anchor in a Kabul-based television channel, is the youngest member of the group. Being a lyricist, he believes that the prevalent situation of Afghanistan has greatly affected his writings.

“The image that is being portrayed on television is not the real image of Kabul. There has been enough of negative portrayal of the peace loving people out there. Hence, whenever I write a song, I try to channelise those negative ideas in a positive manner so that we end up making songs about peace, love and romance because it’s a part of our culture,” Qardash told The Express Tribune.

Habibi, a silent member of the band who was the real rock star of the evening, had a mature look on his face with his pair of spectacles. When asked about his looks, his interpreter Qardash conveyed his answer: “We want to be rock stars for the sake of rock music but not for the sake of rock star lifestyle. I can have long hair and pierce my ear, but that’s not Kabul Dreams.”

Habibi idealises Mike Portnoy, the drummer from Dream Theatre and believes that if an artist is not making the songs about his surrounding, he is not really an artist: “You can’t stop that, it’s a natural phenomenon.”

Will Osama bin Laden’s death change anything for Kabul Dreams? “We are artists, not politicians,” Siddiq replied. But when asked whether they’ll write a song about it, he replied with a smile: “Had I been a Pink Floyd member and this place USA, then definitely, I would but sadly that’s not the case. We want to pursue a career in music.”

Kabul Dreams is looking for all the options now and a venture with Pakistan’s Uth Records is one of them. The band is heading to Turkey to record its first album which will be free to download like any Indie pop band in the world.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2011.