Rock And Hard Places Part 3

Outside, a section of the street has been dug up and turned into a trench. It is still littered with ba.n.a.l testaments to the urban nature of Sarajevo's war: crushed soft drink cans and soggy pizza cartons. I wonder if the soldiers picked up their take-outs on their way to battle, or if they radioed their orders in from here, and if so, how much extra it costs to get a deep pan with added anchovy delivered to an active front line.

Martin thinks he's found his spot, and starts organising C.I.A. into something that looks like a photograph. He's just about to raise his camera when Enis, the ponytailed one of C.I.A.'s two vocalists, waves to stop him.

"Excuse me," says Enis.

Martin sighs the sigh universally deployed by photographers whose subjects have started having ideas of their own.

"I was wondering," continues Enis, "if we could do the pictures in that trench over there."

"I suppose so," shrugs Martin. "Any particular reason?"

"Well," says Enis, apologetically, gesturing at his bandmates, "that's where we met."

ESCAPE HAS ALWAYS been the most precious of rock'n'roll's renegade imperatives. As soon as the first guitar was electrified, it was identified as an ideal weapon with which to vent dissatisfaction with the world, as noisy as a gun, nearly as dangerous and almost as likely to get you arrested. Young people ever since have been forming rock'n'roll bands to escape homes, hometowns, families, expectations, tedium, frustration, poverty, the prospect of having to work for a living, or even just a vague, incoherent ennui which they have a hard time explaining, man.

In Sarajevo, they formed rock'n'roll bands to escape the literally inescapable: the three-and-a-half-year siege of the city by the motley a.s.sortment of drunks, hillbillies and thugs trading as the Bosnian Serb Army. The siege of Sarajevo-a city surrounded by steep, ridged hills that might have been designed as cover from which cowards could wage war against civilians-began in April 1992. In late 1994, a new independent radio station called Radio Zid broadcast a request for demo tapes from local bands. They received submissions from twenty-five groups they'd never heard of. Something was clearly afoot.

Something still is. I've come to Sarajevo at the behest of my friends at The Serious Road Trip, unarguably the world's most rock'n'roll non-governmental organisation. They'd been telling me for months that there was much here to interest an itinerant rock journalist, and they weren't kidding. Every Sarajevan still the silly side of thirty seems to be in a band, or to have several dozen very good friends who are in bands. Or to have been in a band once. Or to be thinking about starting one. Or to be very keen for me to come and spend a few hours being deafened by enthusiastic renditions of their material in some tiny, sandbagged rehearsal s.p.a.ce in some disused bas.e.m.e.nt of some shrapnel-shattered building.

It would be enormously gratifying to be able to report that the quality is as startling as the quant.i.ty, and that as soon as the smoke lifts, Sarajevo will be hosting an A&R gold rush to rival the boom years of Seattle or Manchester. It would please me no end to be able to write that Sarajevo is an El Dorado of rock'n'roll genius, mostly because the musicians in Sarajevo's bands are, by and large, decent people who've put up with more than enough, but at least partly because most of the musicians in Sarajevo's bands boast military service histories that would make the Dirty Dozen look a bunch of simpering lightweights.

The truth is that Sarajevo's is a fairly typical European rock'n'roll culture, comparable with those of Berlin, or Stockholm, or Tel Aviv, where genuine brilliance only fitfully upstages big fish/little puddle mediocrity, and where earnestness is having a real field day at the expense of wit. In fairness, n.o.body pretends otherwise. Everyone agrees that Sarajevo's favourite song of Sarajevo's war was written by Americans (Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name," which, as one local musician puts it, "was the 'Blowing In The Wind' of this war"). Everyone also points out that the difficulties of procuring guitar strings and plectrums in a city where you couldn't take food and water for granted would have hobbled The Beatles at their most fecund.

Sarajevo's rock scene today revolves around three venues. Trust, across the street from Veliki Park on Sarajevo's main road, Marsala t.i.ta, opened in late 1995, and is now a popular meeting place with fine coffee, a tiny balcony on which bands play twice a week, and a pool table. Trust's patrons have a tendency to hastily invent something called "Bosnian rules" on the rare occasions that I look like I'm going to win, insisting that the black has to go in off one cushion, or into the same pocket as my last coloured ball, or be potted left handed or, in one desperately fought frame, all three.

Kuk-the Bosnian word for "hip"-is a short walk away up Kralja Tomislava. Kuk is a low-slung, circular room that was originally built as a morgue attached to the nearby university, but was turned into a nightclub during the 1950s. Kuk was commandeered by the Bosnian army shortly after the siege began, and handed back, minus all equipment and fittings, in 1995. Since then, under the supervision of The Serious Road Trip, Kuk has been refurbished as an exhibition hall, music therapy centre and rock venue, the intermittent availability of PA sytems permitting.

The best-loved of the three clubs is Obala, which opened in 1993 in what had been an academics' cafe by the river, not far from Sarajevo's shattered library. There are two ways into Obala. One is to walk along the footpath and go in through the front door. Until recently, this was an option only for the foolhardy or the very, very fast. The more trodden route starts a few blocks back on Vase Miskina-the pedestrian arcade that winds through the old city's market district, Bascarsija-then winds up alleys, down side streets, through a derelict building, across a playground and enters Obala through an emergency exit. Such circuitous detours are now second nature to every Sarajevan. Ida, the unfeasibly attractive translator I've borrowed from The Serious Road Trip, explains that the route we've just taken would not have been observable from the hills, and would therefore have been safe from snipers.

And mortars?

"Well," she says, "those can get you anywhere."

The people who run Obala are justly proud of the fact that they closed only five times during the entire siege, and that the place was nearly always full, even when the chronic shortages of pretty much everything and attendant inflation pushed the price of a beer up to fifteen deutschmarks (5.50, or thereabouts) and a shot of whiskey to eight, making Obala nearly as expensive a night out as any bar in Copenhagen. When the sh.e.l.ling was especially bad, the Obala DJs would crank the music up so loud n.o.body could tell how close the explosions were. Every band in Sarajevo cut their teeth as a live act in here. On the nights that Obala staged concerts, they tell me, the place was so full that people stood out in the halls.

I'm shown round Obala by Adis, one of the club's founders. He also plays drums in a band called Z.O.C.H., which, I am gleefully informed, is an acronym standing for Zlatom Optocene Cune. Zlatom Optocene Cune, I am even more gleefuly informed, is Bosnian for "Gold-Covered d.i.c.ks." I file this phrase alongside the only other Bosnian I have managed to retain-the vivid admonishment "Popi govno," which means "Drink s.h.i.t." As luck would have it, I have interrupted Adis in the middle of a Z.O.C.H. rehearsal in one of Obala's back rooms, and he invites me to sit in on the rest of it. He dusts off a sandbag for me, tells me to make myself comfortable and apologises in advance for the volume.

"If it's any help," he grins, tapping at his snare, "we did this to Bono when he came here in January."

While I wonder how loud sound has to be before the human eardrum implodes, Z.O.C.H. crash and clatter their way through half a dozen songs of proficient enough grunge ordinaire, before we return to the club to talk. The members of Z.O.C.H. are all in their late twenties and early thirties, older than other Sarajevo musicians, and perhaps more realistic than most about their situation.

"Everything here stopped in 1992," explains Soba, the guitarist, who says he was an officer serving in a Special Forces unit until his demobilisation last December. "It's impossible to do any proper recording. There are hardly any facilities, and what producers there are have never heard of Steve Albini, for example. We can't talk to them, never mind work with them."

At present, the only outlet for Bosnian rock'n'roll is Radio Zid, who released, in early 1995, the only available recording of Sarajevo bands-a roughly-recorded live CD called Rock the Under Siege Rock the Under Siege, which featured such local luminaries as Sikter, Protest, Gnu, Bedbug and the rather gloriously named Hindustan Motors, among others. Z.O.C.H. were not featured on Rock the Under Siege Rock the Under Siege for the same reason they're not featured on Radio Zid: they've been banned by the station. This is ostensibly due to the graphically s.e.xual nature of some of Z.O.C.H.'s lyrics, but I get the impression that the real reasons might be more personal-Sarajevo's rock scene is as hopelessly riddled with petty jealousies and rivalries as anywhere else's. for the same reason they're not featured on Radio Zid: they've been banned by the station. This is ostensibly due to the graphically s.e.xual nature of some of Z.O.C.H.'s lyrics, but I get the impression that the real reasons might be more personal-Sarajevo's rock scene is as hopelessly riddled with petty jealousies and rivalries as anywhere else's.

"It's hard," shrugs Soba, "but we do what we can. We've been somebody here, you know, and it doesn't mean a lot. We want to go and play in other places now. Anywhere. Except Serbia, obviously."

Whatever merits Sarajevo's rock groups possess, variety is not one of them. They are exclusively male, and almost as exclusively keen on riff-heavy guitar rock, heavily in hock to Green River, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and the Seattle grunge lineage in general, though Nirvana's stock in Sarajevo has fallen rapidly since Kurt Cobain's suicide, which elicited some sorrow, but little sympathy ("When I heard about Kurt," one drinker at Trust tells me, "I had just finished a shift at the hospital, and run home through the sh.e.l.ling, and . . . well, for f.u.c.k's sake, you know?" There is no mistaking the disgust in his voice).

I unearth only one band who don't look and sound like they should be haunting the coffee shops of Seattle in silly beards and plaid shirts: Beat House Project, an unabashed techno act from the name down. Sarajevo's dance scene appears pretty well dormant-the first rave in the city was staged by Radio Zid the week before I arrived-although the bleak, otherwordly, electronic atmospherics of Ma.s.sive Attack and Portishead have touched many a nerve. Most ascribe this torpor to the fact that, in Sarajevo, ecstasy is as rare as non-smokers-and even if you can find a tablet going spare, you won't get much change from 200 Deutschmarks. Beat House Project have a litany of funny stories to tell about the peculiar difficulties of making music like theirs in a city where, for long periods, there wasn't any electricity. They have some less amusing anecdotes concerning the five wounds that the trio collected between them during the war.

Sarajevo's conversion to loud guitars and inchoate screaming about alienation is a relatively recent development. Zelimir Altarac-Cicak, the veteran Bosnian journalist, DJ and promoter, explains that tastes started shifting dramatically with the beginning of the siege.

"Before the war," he says, "only pop music."

The sort of anodyne europop he's talking about was generally sung in Bosnian-or, as the language was known before the war, Serbo-Croatian-and is best exemplified now by the work of a singer-songwriter called Muha, a shy and painstakingly polite man in a beret and an overcoat, who looks and sounds completely unlike someone who wrote his last alb.u.m in hospital, recovering from wounds sustained in the defence of his city while fighting with a Special Forces unit.

"But now," confirms Zelimir, "everything is rock'n'roll, everything is noise."

Aida Kalendar, one of Radio Zid's indefatigable volunteers, puts it another way.

"You do not," she says, "spend the whole day being sniped at and sh.e.l.led and then go home and listen to Blur."

The Moron Brothers are another typical Sarajevo rock group. In fact, The Moron Brothers are just typical Sarajevan youth, or even just typical youth. They're friendly, funny, like a drink and are gratifyingly excited about being interviewed by someone who has met Eddie Vedder twice. And then . . .

"I met Doma, the ba.s.splayer, in the army," says Tela, the Moron Brothers' guitarist. "I'd rather not say which unit, because, well, you know, we don't know what's going to happen next."

The Moron Brothers formed in 1993, and have averaged one gig a month since.

"We already owned most of our equipment," continues Tela. "We got strings and things like that from friends outside. It was just good to have something to do. Musicians were lucky that way. It helped to be able to get together and sing about . . . well, everything we didn't have during the war. In fact, about everything, and anything, except the war. We'd had enough of that."

ON THAT COUNT, The Moron Brothers are speaking for an entire city.

Six months since NATO's criminally overdue airstrikes ended the siege, Sarajevo is still palpably exhausted by its long ordeal. n.o.body has yet bothered to take down the hand-painted "Pazi-Snajper" ("Danger-Sniper") signs that hang at the city's exposed intersections. Many of the metal barricades and tattered blankets that were erected and hung to deter and distract the killers in the hills are still in place. I've also noticed that quite a few people tie their shoes strangely, threading the lace straight down one side and straight back up the other, without crossing them over. I initially a.s.sume that this is some obscure craze, like the wallet-chains or baby pacifiers that occasionally become regrettably popular with the kids back home, but when I mention it to someone, they say no, people used to do that so it would be easier to get their shoes and trousers off if they were hit. More than once, I'm nearly run over by cars coasting silently downhill, according to frugal wartime habit, with their engines switched off.

My other narrow failure to become the single most pathetic casualty of the Bosnian conflict occurs in the monumental ruins of the library. The library, or what's left of it, totters near the spot where, on June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist called Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. This a.s.sa.s.sination preceded a train of events-world war, lopsided peace, world war, cold war, collapse of communism, rise of nationalism-that may well have happened anyway, but the symmetry is eerie. It's as if the echo of Princip's pistol, gathering momentum down the decades, somehow rebounded on its point of origin, magnified a millionfold. Along this street, the 20th century began and ended.

The library is-or was-a magnificent Austro-Hungarian building, a repository of thousands of priceless doc.u.ments, books and treasures. It was destroyed in August 1992 by Bosnian Serb Army incendiary sh.e.l.ls-a deliberate act of vandalism, a cultural genocide to serve notice of the attempted human one to follow. As I walk out onto the remains of the first floor balcony above the entrance, I hear an enormous crash immediately behind me. When the dust settles, I see a lump of exquisitely carved ceiling masonry lying on the floor. It has missed me by about three feet.

There are almost certainly other near misses-Grbavica on the day of its handover finally seems like too interesting a thing to pa.s.s up, and we figure if we stick to the footpaths and don't go barging into closed flats and opening cupboard doors, we should be fairly safe from mines and b.o.o.by traps. Photographer Kennedy and I go to visit the ravaged suburb with Chris Watt of The Serious Road Trip, also visiting Sarajevo for the first time, and Jim Marshall, a Scot who spent most of the siege in Sarajevo with the Road Trip and now works for the Office of the High Representative (OHR). Jim offers to take us to see Grbavica because "I want to see where those f.u.c.kers were shooting at me from" (they hit him once, wounding him in one leg).

Grbavica is unbelievably creepy. There isn't an undamaged building in the suburb, and few blocks lack the scars of fires, some of which have been deliberately lit over the last few weeks by Serbs determined that the Grbavica that they hand back to Bosnia should be of as little value as possible.

These sorts of scenes were supposed to have faded from history along with 1945-vintage newsreel footage of liberated Europe. The buildings all look like they're waiting for demolition teams to come back from lunch and finish the job. Trenches fortified with rusty hulks of wrecked cars connect the high-rise ruins. A steady drizzle of clothes, books, furniture and other household flotsam flutters from balconies and windows: the possessions that the departing Serb population didn't want to carry. Some of this stuff is being flung overboard by people who were evicted from these apartments before the war and are now returning, some of it by opportunists hoping that perhaps the original owners are dead, or refugees, or emigrants, yet more of it by looters. From below, it's as if the wrecked buildings are vomiting their diseased, hungover innards into the streets.

These blocks of flats were notorious throughout the siege as high-rise Bosnian Serb Army positions-not for nothing did the expanse of trunk road that runs past Grbavica on the other side of the river become internationally infamous as Sniper Alley. As recently as two months ago-which is to say two months after the signing of the Dayton Accords-a rocket-propelled grenade launched from one of these buildings. .h.i.t a crowded tram, killing one person and wounding several others. We climb up the dark, damp staircases to the top of one of them for a sniper's-eye view of Sarajevo. Even without a telescopic sight, it's sickeningly easy to imagine how simple a job it must have been for whoever sat up here with his rifle. I look out over the city, and the people walking around it, through the windows and the holes in the walls that he fired from, and I wonder what he's doing now.

Grbavica's princ.i.p.al landmark-there's about enough of it still standing upright to qualify as such-is its football stadium. Before the war, it was the home ground of Zeljeznicar FC, one of two teams from Sarajevo that used to compete in the Yugoslavian League. This afternoon, it looks like it's just hosted an especially exuberant Old Firm derby, right down the splintered Celtic FC mirror in what used to be the bar. Sc.r.a.ps of shrapnel litter the terraces and the stands are spotted with bulletholes. On on the concourse behind the burnt-out snack bar, Martin finds a spent Bosnian Serb Army mortar casing.

The pitch is on fire. Half of it, anyway. The blaze has been started by troops from the NATO-led United Nations Implementation Force (IFOR) patrolling Bosnia's peace. It's a reasonably risk-free way of clearing any mines that might have been laid in it by thoughtful Serbs as they departed.

"How big a bang will they make if one goes off?" asks Chris, worriedly.

"Not that big," says Jim. "We're okay."

Martin has noticed something infinitely more distressing. At the end of the pitch that isn't ablaze, the goalposts are still standing, and around those goalposts, some kids are playing football. Martin sprints off towards them, waving his arms and bellowing frantic warnings in strangled, Scots-accented Bosnian. They ignore him.

"That's the most frightening thing about this city," says Jim. "It's full of people who just aren't scared of anything anymore."

Outside the stadium, there are more children clowning around in the rubble. These children are, as children will, playing at soldiers, which in these wretched surroundings is both saddening and kind of funny. One of them has found himself an even more impressive souvenir than Martin's mortar round. This kid is maybe eight or nine years old, and he's equipped with all the usual kids-playing-war stuff-a yellow toy pistol tucked into his tracksuit bottoms, a black toy rifle in his right hand-but it's what he's got slung round his neck that has attracted my attention: a khaki, and very real, rocket-propelled grenade launcher. As any primary-school-age boy would, he looks utterly delighted with it.

My reasons for calling Martin over are not, initially, entirely journalistic: while there's a h.e.l.l 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.

"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks," 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 cla.s.ses 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 Jurgen 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 a.s.sume, 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 cla.s.ses 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 rehea.r.s.e 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 att.i.tude 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 t.i.ta 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. .h.i.t 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 b.u.mp 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.

Ya.s.sER, 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 baccha.n.a.l, 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 att.i.tude 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. 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 baccha.n.a.l, 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 att.i.tude 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 cliche 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 munic.i.p.al coat of arms would feature the c.o.c.ktail 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 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, n.o.body'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 b.u.t.t. 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 alb.u.m 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 c.o.c.ker, unless they reach the not unreasonable conclusion that a return to internecine slaughter might be preferable.