Rock and Hard Places Read online

  My reasons for calling Martin over are not, initially, entirely journalistic: while there’s a hell of a picture waiting to be taken here, Martin also knows more about this kind of hardware than I do, and I’d be happier about life in general if I knew the thing wasn’t loaded.

  “No,” says Martin. “We’d have noticed by now. There’d be one less building around here, for a start.”

  Martin crouches in front of the kid, whose smile by now is almost wider than his face, prepares to shoot, and lowers his camera.

  “Bollocks,” he says, laughing.

  Problem?

  “It’s too good,” he says. “Do you really think anybody, anywhere, is going to believe I didn’t set this up? I’ll take it, okay, but you have to buy it.”

  THE VISIT TO Grbavica Stadium reaps an unexpected bonus: back in Trust, I mention it to someone, who mentions it to someone who knows something about football coaching classes that were run for Sarajevo’s kids throughout the siege, and a few days later I find myself sitting down to lunch with someone who played in a World Cup. Cool. Pedrag Pasic, known as “Paja,” represented Yugoslavia in the 1982 World Cup Finals in Spain. He first made his name as a striker with his hometown club, FK Sarajevo. Later, he moved on to FC Stuttgart, where his partner up front had been Jürgen Klinsmann. He returned to Sarajevo after injury ended his playing career in 1988.

  Paja could probably have got out of Sarajevo. He obviously had connections in Germany and, it seems to safe to assume, more money than most. And though these things matter less to most Sarajevans than the outside world has come to believe, Paja is neither ethnically Bosnian nor Muslim, hailing—like Radovan Karadzic—from the nominally Orthodox Christian Yugoslav republic of Montenegro.

  “Sarajevo,” Paja shrugs, “is my home.”

  Paja’s weekly coaching classes ran under cover in Skenderija Stadium, one of the arenas built for the1984 Winter Olympics—the upper rows of seats have been sandbagged and fortified, and were used during the siege as Bosnian army sniper posts. There’s about a hundred yards of open ground between the entrance to the stadium and the nearest buildings. I ask how on earth the kids had crossed it to get to football practice every week.

  “Quickly,” says Paja, and smiles.

  Back at Obala, I meet again with C.I.A. Enis does most of the talking, running through what is becoming a familiar list of influences, reasons and ambitions. They liked The Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine and Biohazard. They formed a band because it was a welcome distraction, even if they had to rehearse with acoustic instruments and then wait for a gig at a venue with a generator to see if any of what they’d come up with worked for real. They’d like to go and play outside Bosnia, and see if people will think they’re interesting for any reason other than where they come from. Lazily, I’m beginning to tick the answers off in my head in advance, when Erol, the other vocalist, says something horribly accurate.

  “It’s important that people understand what happened here,” he says, quietly. “I don’t think enough people do. But what we want to do is present ourselves to the world and show that we are normal, or as normal as we can be. I know what people think. People think we’re savages.”

  He’s right, of course. The western governments who fiddled while Sarajevo burnt sought to justify their indolence by suggesting that internecine violence was the natural state of the Balkan peoples, as if the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had started of its own accord, as if the overweening ambitions of one murderous barbarian in Belgrade and another bellicose mountebank in Zagreb had nothing to do with it.

  Wars are not natural disasters. Nor are they spontaneous occurrences. An operation as vast as the attempted genocide of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina requires planning—planning which could, and should, have been aborted by depositing a cruise missile through the letterbox chez Milosevic. It’s instructive to compare Yugoslavia to another European country which is a federation of linguistically similar but culturally different peoples with centuries of hostile history behind them, and to wonder what the world would think if the government in Westminster armed the English-born population of Wales and sent them on a rampage through the valleys, dealing murder and rape for the crime of being Welsh, and laid siege to Cardiff.

  I wonder whether this would look like “the inevitable result of age-old ethnic tensions”—to paraphrase the conventional wisdom on Bosnia—or like there was a dangerous fruitcake in residence in Downing Street. The Irish writer and commentator Conor Cruise O’Brien, who should certainly know better, articulated the prevalent attitude when he wrote in 1992 that “There are places where a lot of men prefer war, and the looting and raping and domineering that go with it, to any sort of peacetime occupation. One such place is Afghanistan. Another is Yugoslavia, after the collapse of the centralising communist regime.” It’d be interesting to learn how he’d feel about that last sentence if the words “Yugoslavia” and “communist” were removed and replaced with “Ireland” and “British.”

  The language used to describe the Bosnian war was riddled with perjoratives: the three sides were invariably divided, by media and diplomats alike, into “Serbs,” “Croats” and “Muslims.” It would have been just as accurate, and just as silly, to talk about a conflict between Bosnians, Croats and Christians, or between Serbs, Bosnians and Catholics. It’s hardly surprising that Sarajevans are given to wondering, bitterly, how long the siege would have been allowed to continue, had it been a nominally Muslim army in the hills blazing away at the citizens of an ostensibly Christian European city.

  “Have you heard about our new Bosnian anthem?” someone asks me one night in Obala. “It’s called ‘Too Many Muslims, Not Enough Oil.’”

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON, I’M walking along Marsala Tita with Faris Arapovic, with whom I’d got talking and drinking the night before at Kuk. Faris, it turned out, is the drummer in one of Sarajevo’s better bands, Sikter. Today, I’ve been round at his family’s flat, where he’s shown me a video of Sikter playing in front of 100,000 people at Milan’s San Siro stadium the previous July. Several Bosnian bands had been invited to appear at the concert, headlined by Italian megastar Vasco Rossi, but only Sikter had been able to make it, as they’d been in Amsterdam at the time, while the other groups were marooned in besieged Sarajevo.

  As we walk, I notice a vast column of smoke winding up into the cloudy sky from a couple of miles away in Grbavica, where I’d been the day before. I wonder if there’s some kind of trouble.

  “Don’t know,” says Faris.

  If there is, Faris has probably seen worse—his family’s flat overlooks the spot where, in August 1992, sixteen people were blown to pieces when two Serb mortars hit a bread queue. If Faris had got up that morning when he’d been supposed to, he’d explained earlier, he’d have been queueing up with them.

  “They must be burning rubbish,” he says, squinting towards Grbavica.

  Possibly. They were going to have to do something with all that junk that had been tossed out of the windows. But that’s a lot of smoke for a bonfire. We bump into Jim, whose office is across the road.

  “Bit of Barney Rubble in Grbavica this afternoon,” he says.

  It seems that an attachment of Bosnian Serb Army troops from Vraca, the suburb up the hill from Grbavica, had decided they weren’t going to take the Dayton Agreement lying down. They’d taken a slap at the Bosnian police who were moving into the area, and the Bosnian police had fired back. IFOR, evidently intent on showing both parties who was in charge, had despatched Apache helicopters, which had clobbered the building occupied by the marauding Serbs. Hence the smoke.

  “Well, there you are,” says Faris, triumphantly. “I told you they were burning rubbish.”

  4

  YASSER, I CAN BOOGIE

  The Prodigy in Beirut

  MAY 1998

  A STORY STRAIGHT OUT of the “What could possibly go wrong?” file, and indeed everything pretty much did, except that it all sort of worked out eventually.
And so it should have: it was a good thing that The Prodigy decided to do this. For all that the rock’n’roll tour is mythologised as a devil-may-care bacchanal, it is, in the main, a tediously hidebound ritual, in which, year in and year out, the same bands play the same venues, in the same cities, to the same crowds, get reviewed in the same publications, are asked the same questions on the same radio stations, and wake in the same hotels before being herded aboard the same bus to do it all again at the next stop down the track. This routine, like all routines, is a function of laziness—the reality is that once any band reaches a certain stature, they can play more or less anywhere they like, so long as they’re occasionally willing to take a slightly relaxed attitude to getting insured and/or paid. They also find, when they do make the effort to steer their caravan off the beaten track, that the audiences tend to be much more excited (you don’t even have to go to a picturesquely screwed-up recent war zone to prove this—I grew up in Sydney, and well recall the disproportionate adulation showered upon anybody who deigned to come all that way to play at us). It’s a valuable and important cross-pollination: the band are exposed to new influences, new ways of understanding their own work, and those who come to see them get to feel like that they are citizens of the pop culture universe, rather than observers squinting through telescopes.

  For me, this turned out to be the first of several trips to Beirut, which is now immovably lodged very near the top of my list of favourite places to visit. There is no wearier cliché in the travel writer’s lexicon than “land of contrasts,” but Beirut is exactly that, to degrees both tragic and hilarious, a city of materialist decadence and observant abstemiousness, of cheerful hedonism and holy fury, of affable, pluralist civilisation and vicious, sectarian barbarism: an accurate municipal coat of arms would feature the cocktail and the Kalashnikov.

  YOU WOULD IMAGINE that anybody who has served in Lebanon’s armed forces for as long as the sentry in the airport baggage hall clearly has would have seen just about everything, but right now he couldn’t look more amazed if his rifle turned into a snake that spoke Gaelic. He stares at Keith Flint, and at Keith Flint’s twin-blade mohawk haircut and earrings and nose-ring and tongue-stud and tattoos, stares unabashed and unblinking for minutes on end, as Keith talks to a film crew from Reuters and tries to ignore him.

  “I don’t really know anything about Beirut,” Keith is telling the reporter. “It’s somewhere to play, isn’t it?”

  Keith shrugs, finally, and turns to the gawping soldier with a slight, pained grimace. “Alright?” he asks. The sentry walks away, shaking his head.

  TURNING UP IN this part of the world in funny outfits and confusing the natives is a British tradition dating back to Richard the Lionheart, but an interesting perspective on The Prodigy’s visit to Lebanon is provided by a local fan quoted on the front page of the following morning’s Beirut Daily Star: “This is the greatest thing ever to happen in the Middle East.” The report does not say whether or not twenty-year-old Rania Attieh was subsequently incinerated by a lightning strike.

  Beirut, on first acquaintance, is at once as dismal as a ruin and as optimistic as a building site, which is because just about all of Beirut is either a ruin or a building site. Beirut, all the storybooks say, was a beautiful town. Few of the houses, churches and mosques that earned it this reputation survive. Those that do are scarred with shrapnel pocks and bulletholes as tragic and pathetic as acne on a handsome face.

  Beirut has been the definitive and archetypal victim of the sort of war that has become bafflingly fashionable in the latter half of this century: the sort of war where one bunch of a country’s inhabitants decide they don’t like one or more other bunches of the same country’s inhabitants. Everyone then spends years demolishing everything that might have made the place worth fighting over in the first place. Then, when there’s hardly anything left standing up, the squabbling parties realise that not only have the neighbours they didn’t like not gone anywhere, nobody’s got a roof or running water either, and the country is now run by people who didn’t even live here when it all started (in Lebanon’s case, Syria and Israel).

  My parents’ and grandparents’ generations were wrong about a lot of things, but they had this one pretty much sorted out: if you’re going to have a war, have it somewhere else. If you lose, at least you’ve still got what you started with. What every one of Beirut’s barely countable squabbling factions did, in effect, was held a gun to their own temples, announced “Everyone do as I say, or this guy gets it,” and pulled the trigger.

  “So . . . what went on here, exactly?”

  We spend the day before the gig wandering Beirut’s noisy, dusty, crowded streets with those of the touring party who can be bothered. These include the invited press contingent, which is myself, and Mat Smith and Steve Gullick from the New Musical Express. Last time we’d all been away together, it had been to Sarajevo to see U2. Next year, we hope to go to Mogadishu with The Spice Girls. We are accompanied this warm afternoon by blue-haired and somewhat unfortunately named Prodigy guitarist Giz Butt. Giz wants to know why, according to the morning’s paper, there was a gunfight a few blocks from our hotel last night. We all slept through it. Four men were wounded.

  “Hezbollah and Amal,” explains someone from the gig promoter’s office. “They fight like this all the time. Who knows why?”

  Giz and a couple of other members of the band have brought portable tape recorders with them, on which to collect the sounds of Beirut. We can look forward, therefore, to the next Prodigy album making extensive use of samples of car horns and people yelling about their carpets.

  THE PRODIGY ARE not the first western pop act to visit Beirut since Lebanon’s seventeen-year civil war ground more or less to a halt in 1992, but they are, by some distance, the most interesting and most contemporary. The people of Beirut, as if they hadn’t suffered enough, have spent the years since independence enduring such meagre musical pickings as epically tedious German heavy metal time-wasters Scorpions and pensionable crooner Paul Anka. Later this year, they can look forward to performances by Julio Iglesias and Joe Cocker, unless they reach the not unreasonable conclusion that a return to internecine slaughter might be preferable.

  It would be an exaggeration to suggest that The Prodigy’s visit to Lebanon has been motivated by any deep-seated sense of history or empathy with the suffering. The Prodigy have come here for the same reasons they’ve previously gone to Poland, Macedonia, Russia, Iceland, Hong Kong and other places off the path usually beaten by touring bands.

  “It keeps it fresh,” says Liam Howlett, The Prodigy’s songwriter and keyboardist. “You don’t hear of many mad gigs anymore. You hear about Oasis going to America, you know, and that’s boring. I know U2 do their share, but nobody else does.”

  A few hours before showtime, Liam and Keith are lounging about, picking at a small room-service banquet in Liam’s suite at the Lancaster Hotel. The Lancaster, a new building a short walk from the seafront, is a good sign: you don’t build a hotel like this if you think there’s a meaningful chance someone’s going to knock it over again. The Lancaster gleams and sparkles and has obviously been constructed in anticipation of a return of the glory days; my suite downstairs is bigger than my flat back in London.

  Liam and Keith didn’t go out today. Despite Liam’s professed hunger for new frontiers, they seem completely indifferent to their surroundings.

  “We get involved this much,” says Liam. “Do we want to go there? Yes. Is it safe? Yes. Right then, let’s do it.”

  It’s nine months since I went to U2’s concert in Sarajevo. They’d gone to Bosnia on a self-appointed mission of solidarity with the people of a city that had been walled off from western pop culture for three and a half years. They’d slashed ticket prices, talked up the healing properties of rock’n’roll, displayed a commanding knowledge and understanding of local politics and history, and gone round for tea with the president. The Prodigy aren’t even holding a press conference. />
  “I find it very hard to understand politics,” admits Keith. “I like to go to places and just take them in at a surface level.”

  Last night, I’d been telling Keith about U2’s Sarajevo show, and trying to get him interested in the idea of taking The Prodigy to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they are massively popular. “We’ve been,” Keith said. No, I said, they hadn’t. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had so many Sarajevan friends bending my ear about whether The Prodigy would ever go and play there. “I’m sure we have,” Keith had insisted, distractedly. Eventually, I’d suggested that maybe it had been Zagreb or Llubljana. Easy enough mistake to make if you spend your life on tour, I guess, though it would be a bad idea to make it while actually in any of those cities. “That’s it,” Keith had said. “The one starting with L.” Someone else later explained that The Prodigy’s Balkan show had been in neither Croatia nor Slovenia, but in the Macedonian capital of Skopje.

  “It’s funny being here, though,” muses Keith, looking out the window. “Because it’s like a joke, this place, isn’t it? If you go on holiday and stay somewhere shitty, you come back and say it was like Beirut, don’t you?”

  I’m sure Brian Keenan did.

  “Who?”

  Hostage. Him and John McCarthy. You know.

  “Fucking hell. Was that here?”

  The really frightening thing is that I know that Mat from the NME has had exactly this same conversation with Keith already today. Despite Keith’s fearsome appearance, there’s something of the mildly batty but loveable maiden aunt about him.