Amira El-Noshokaty registers a phenomenon of hope August has seen the rise of the teen band at Al-Sawy Culture Wheel. Qas we Laz' (Cut and Paste), 30th February, Resonance and the Friends Group are but a few embodiments of the phenomenon, supported by the Sawy stage alone. According to Mohamed Salah, the cultural centre's public relations director, "The rule is to help talents through their first few steps, which is the goal we've been aiming for since we were established. In an evening entitled Rock Mania last Tuesday, Hazard and Resonance drew in a large audience. Haytham Ahmed and Mohamed Hassan, the fresh secondary school graduates who first conceived of the latter, have their own musical theories. "We have been studying guitar for the past year and a half and we wanted to perform our own genre by playing a mixture of three guitars at a time," Ahmed explained. Hassan added, "All other bands play only chords and solo guitar, but our band uses a combination of three guitars -- the outcome is superb." Featuring English rock covers as well as original songs, the group of six have picked English as the language in which to perform. "With our emphasis on the guitar," Hassan goes on, "we figured English lyrics would be a good match, since it's difficult to sing Arabic words to anything other than Oriental instruments. Regardless of its being the language of our education, English in an Arab country makes us unique." Determination makes for an admirable enthusiasm, all the more touching in the light of the obstacles the young musicians face. With parents concerned over musical activities shifting the emphasis away from education and society at large feeling indifferent if not inimical to rock, it was no mean task to maintain their drive. "At that point," Shaher Sherif, Resonance bassist, recalls, "Al-Sawy was our only hope." This seems to confirm Salah's point: "Age and experience are not among the Wheel's considerations." Rather, artists are asked to complete a form explaining their project, then perform before a committee examining their ability to play and the soundness of their lyrics, and censoring out swearwords, violence or other vulgarities: "Any form of metal is prohibited." Once approved, the band is provided with free advertising and media coverage -- with 1,000 flyers, 10 posters and four billboards for each artist; the bands also receive 50 percent of the net profit, with a minimum of LE500. For their part the Friendship Group, playing Western chamber music using percussion and brass, insist that they are "not a band". Mohamed Helmy, a founding member who has just completed his formal studies at the Conservatoire, had played at the Opera House along with his colleagues, participating in national and international events, when, four years on, they were overtaken by the desire to reach out to an audience "beyond scholars and musicians". They wanted to play for "the people outside the Opera House", and Al-Sawy is providing them with the opportunity to do just that. Naming themselves after "a day that does not exist in reality", on the other hand, according to 17-year-old band member Ahmed Abul-Yazied, 30 February -- the imaginary day to which their Arabic music is dedicated -- promises peace, security and the good of the world, while Qas we Laz', the youngest of the new teen bands, came into being when Ismail Seliman, 15, was approved for full sponsorship by Al-Sawi. Nor do the teen bands lack for an audience. For fans like Farah Mohab, 14, "they rock". According to Menna Hossam, 17, "They sing our favourite songs and their lyrics resemble the way we talk. It's never too early to have your own band -- whatever you play, you know your friends will listen." The problem is, rather, divorce from the music industry, which, according to Resonance band members, "turns art into a commodity", lowering the standards and excluding originality. As drummer Maged Faltas suggests, however, only boycotting such music could raise the general standard again: "Indirectly we have our share of guilt: though we despise this kind of song, we tend to listen to it." They will not play for a living, the Resonance band members agreed, because they want to play what they like, when they like to, and the current circumstances make this less than profitable. Young bands -- often singing in English and doing covers of foreign music -- took Egypt by storm in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but by the end of the 1970s, the open-door policy had both made original Western music easily available and gave way to an influential new class of nouveaux rich patrons with different, more local and lower quality tastes. Many local bands stopped performing. Salah feels that Al-Sawy is helping reverse this tendency by covering production and performance costs. Will the teen bands persist? That remains to be seen.
