Interview: Omar Souleyman

The four men onstage are playing their hit. It doesn’t sound like any hit I ever heard before – a kind of jacking Arab trance music with a pulse twice as fast as the one in your arm, tinny, blaring and squabbled over by boa-goading solos, flanged absurd and played, alternately, upon what sounds like a battered Casio keyboard and some kind of electronic lute. Stage lights switch right and expose the other pair: one, a pot-bellied poet, whispering improvised peels of verse into the left ear of the man they’re here to see, crowd rapt at his skull-to-ankle djellaba robe, his seventies bad cop aviators and the unwavering bristles of his thick, black moustache. He strides forth from the poet, barking metre aloud and it echoes back so that each of Omar Souleyman’s words banishes the next like street clamour competing for city air, those frantic solos still weaving in and out of the mix, the crowd half-maddened now, ‘Leh Jani’ hustling on.

Omar Souleyman says he’s the most famous pop star in Syria. “Number one,” he says through an interpreter, holding his index finger up and out towards me to make the point clear, a smile forming beneath the ’tache and the glasses he’s worn since injuring his eye aged six. Joined by his nose, the three most dominant features of Omar’s face form the outline of a pair of weighing scales. I stopped listening to what he was saying a while ago – the interpreter, however valiant her efforts, can only distil every 50, 60 words that Omar and his collaborators say down into two or three, so for large parts of the interview I give up on nuance and questions about the politics of ‘world music’, just nod when it seems right and gaze at those scales, weighing up Omar’s righteousness. The most famous man in Syria is sat in the back room of the Boston Arms, a hovel preserved by the desperate, daytime Irish drunk. I’m dubious. Again, I weigh him up. Fame must work differently in Syria.

“We started on a local level, among the people,” explains Souleyman. “Our music started as a hobby, with traditional folklore. I began singing when I was seven – people told me I had a beautiful voice,” he says, dodging further questions about his past and what he would be doing now if it weren’t for the music, jumping from the age of seven to the start of a career that “got serious in 1994”, when he started playing wedding parties.

“My family didn’t like it at first – they didn’t think it was a good thing for me to take up and they forbid me from playing the parties, but I kept doing them and started getting famous. Everyone knew my name and people were always asking for Omar Souleyman. That’s when we realised we could do it and after that my family were okay with it, and, thank God, in the last two years it’s all been positive.”

Now Omar, who’s 41, and his small gaggle play over 20 of those wedding parties every month. So far, only 20 of their releases have been studio recordings – the other 480 or so were all made live at some point in the last 15 years, duplicated onto tapes and distributed to the cassette kiosks across Syria that seeded Omar’s fame. The harsh, electronic tones arranged by composer and synth virtuoso Rizan Sa’id jar against the precious sounds of the Syrian classical tradition, and because of that Omar’s music enjoys a slow-grown folk-infamy that would be impossible to achieve in the UK, simply because things don’t stay invisible for that long here (the only recent example that springs to mind is donk, interestingly, though I doubt there’s much demand for Blackout Crew CD packs in downtown Damascus). ‘Leh Jani’ may have won Omar Souleyman TV coverage and hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits of late, but there’s something undeniably and irredeemably street about his troupe’s hysterically overdriven racket, dismissed by his home nation’s cultural cognoscenti, according to a recent Wire feature, as “music for taxi drivers”; as “nothing”.

Omar’s is a mongrel, villager music. He, like Rizan and regular poet Mahmoud Harbi (who chain-smokes onstage and is kept from this European tour by family problems) was born in northeastern Syria, far from its capital and closer to the borders of Turkey and Iraq. In a sense you could see their uniqueness derived as much from isolation as it is from being surrounded.

“We’re famous in all pockets of the Arab world,” Omar says, “and our music is a mixture of Iraqi, Kurdish, Turkish and Assyrian because the village we live in, the borders to all those different nations are nearby…”

“We haven’t been influenced by anyone,” fires back Omar when the question comes up. “There’s no big hero for us and we don’t listen to other music. We don’t copy anyone. We wanted to use all those influences so people would like us, but also because no one else has done it before.”

The music that Omar’s group play – their “jacking Arab trance music” – is a newly electrified take on a traditional style known as ‘Dabke’, which is also the word given to its accompanying dance, a jig sped up by Sa’id’s Korg synths that herd rows of men and women into line, sometimes sexes separate, sometimes together, but always holding hands, their bodies bound in a unison jerk.

The use of raver electronics to extend, rather than sabotage, the Syrian musical tradition is what sets the outfit apart from both high-minded traditionalists and the Westernised pop they hold in so much scorn. The equipment also harbours practical advantages, the keyboard’s built-in sampler allowing three people rather than six to make the trek from village to village for the next wedding party.

“Once someone tried to play a trick on Omar,” Rizan says. “They gave us the address of a party 200km away and asked us to play. When we arrived, we knocked on the door and the guy standing there was completely confused. ‘There’s no party here,’ he said. We were annoyed, but people started to hear that Omar Souleyman was in the village and we went out and there was a whole crowd waiting for us. They all heard Omar was there because people had been talking – they all recognised his style, his look.”

I turn my gaze back towards Omar, who’s sat flanked by Rizan and Mahmoud’s sub for this tour – that pot-bellied poet Zuhir Maksi. He leans back and nods sedately, his aviators reflecting everything back out towards the room and once again my eyes hang awkwardly between the lenses and the moustache, unable to detect recognition in either. I ask about copycats.

“People hear all the music we put out and they listen to how it’s played. ‘What are they doing? What are they doing?’” says Zuhir, the poet turning mimic.

“They listen to what the words are about and then they copy it,” interjects Omar. “Sometimes they take our songs, sing the same words, dress up like me, make a video and then they play it on television and there’s nothing we can do about it because we don’t have copyright laws in Syria.”

Isn’t that flattering in a way, I ask him?

“Yes,” he says, grinning again. “It makes me more famous.”

Omar Souleyman TV Clip

Behold the trappings of Omar’s fame in the above clip. Dancing girls! Lecherous, sword-flaunting sheikhs! A man dragging a pair of obstinate goats, presumably intended for imminent slaughter! My dubiousness vanishes as eyes burst at the rainbow of gaudy Arabic titles, advertising logos and a number – 095627233 – that frame the clip. I wonder who’s manning the phones at the other end of those digits? In the midst of it all is aviatored, unflappable Omar, the calm in the mirage.

“My stance on the stage is different from other musicians,” Omar explained to fellow Pigeon Luke Turner recently.

“I don’t like to move, I don’t dance. I don’t go down off the stage. During a wedding, the people make a circle, holding hands. I stand in the middle, but I don’t dance, my words and the music make people dance.”

There’s not much hand-holding a couple of days later when Omar makes his London debut, but there is movement, dancing, which is rare enough for shows in the capital. Rizan, Omar, Zuhir and the fourth along for this European jaunt, a beaming, bullet-fingered bazouk player called Ali Shaker, are joined onstage by two Arab men with video cameras and a loose medley of people who I recognise from the interview as associates of Sublime Frequencies. The label specialises in going beyond the trite representations of world music drip-fed into western consciousness to track down the sound of distant streets, but rarely could their efforts have been greeted so warmly. The two men onstage put down their cameras and take each other by the hand, jerking their bodies to cheers from those massed, getting sweaty at the pits.

I remember what the interpreter told me two days previous about how “surprised and shocked” Omar and his gang have been by the response thus far from this foreign continent and “how they’ve met with an audience that they love and that loves them, even though they don’t understand the words”.

What are the words about?

“They speak of love, and sadness, and happiness,” comes the staggered response from behind glass lenses.

“They’re probably the same as English words, but the music is different.”

More raucous. Less sappy.

“Yes. That’s just our way over there and the way we work here is the way we work at our weddings at home.”

I size him up one last time, this squat, stony-faced, Syrian wedding singer hidden behind his weighing scales.

Can you dance the dabke, Omar?

“I can dance the dabke,” the interpreter interprets.

Omar smiles. Do I doubt him? Would I dare?

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