After a crackdown on western and 'indecent' music in Iran, help is at hand in the unlikely form of Chris de Burgh, writes Saeed Kamali Dehghanin Tehran
Late last year, Iranian pop music took a huge step forward. Well, it made some progress at any rate. It was reported from Tehran that Chris de Burgh would, this year, become the first western artist to play in Iran since the Islamic revolution in 1979; Morrissey has also expressed his desire to play there. More excitingly for Iranian musicians, de Burgh plans to collaborate with a local group, Arian, with whom he has already recorded a song. Admittedly, "local band plays with foreign star" isn't a story elsewhere, but in Iran it is a breakthrough. Arian is one of a handful of Iranian bands granted an official permit to perform, but getting their music heard in Iran remains a struggle.
Over the past year, the government of President Ahmadinejad has been cracking down on rock. Concerts in Tehran have been cancelled despite prior approval. Western and "indecent" music has been banned from state-run TV and radio. Albums have to be vetted before release by the Islamic Guidance Ministry - run by Mohammad Hossein Saffar, a hardline former member of the Revolutionary Guard - which has been clamping down on what it feels to be unsuitable music. De Burgh's visit aside, Iranian musicians feel that Ahmadinejad's government is putting more pressure on them than since the early days of the revolution.
"If you want to put a concert on in the UK, all you have to do is see the hall management and get a licence from the local authority," says Mohsen Rajabpour, Arian's manager and a promoter of hundreds of shows inside and outside Iran. "In Tajikistan, you need to get permission from six different ministries. In Iran, it's somewhere in between, but it takes six months to get permission."
Even for Rajabpour, who works with sanctioned organisations, putting on shows can vary from problematic to impossible. He notes that when Mohammad Khatami was president in 2004, the government permitted the release of 700 albums, a flow that stopped when Ahmadinejad took power in 2005.
The golden age of Iranian pop was in the pre-revolutionary years. The female singer, Googoosh, was a huge star in the 1970s, bridging the gap between Iranian music and western pop. Her career in Iran ended in 1979, when female soloists were banned; it resumed only when she emigrated to California in 2000. She was not alone: other 1970s stars chose to leave Iran rather than endure bans by the government of Ayatollah Khomeini. The most popular destination was Los Angeles, where a scene nicknamed "Tehrangeles" sprang up.
In Tehran itself, the pop scene fell silent - a silence finally broken in 1998, when a pop clip by Khashayar Etemadi was shown on state-run TV station IRIB, to the huge surprise of viewers.
"It was really an unrepeatable, unique event," recalls Etemadi. "As people heard it, so many called in to the station that they had to show the clip six more times that night."
It had taken two years to win official approval for the song, and it was the start of a thawing of official attitudes towards pop, a thawing that intensified when Khatami became president in 1997. But rebuilding the Iranian music scene was hard.
"Having no pop music for 20 years was like missing a leg for two decades," says Rajabpour. "Suddenly they gave us a leg and said: 'Okay, run!'. How can you run?"
But run is what Rajabpour did. The Arian concert he put on in 2000 was the first by a mixed-sex group since the revolution. Not that the group had it easy. In Isfahan they were beaten up backstage, and in Bandarabbas they were told that the female members could only play behind a curtain.
Arian proved to be trailblazers though. "It was strange to see girls in a band, but it gradually became normal and people got used to it," says Arian's female guitarist, Sharareh Farnejad. "After we started playing, many other mixed bands flourished. But the trend is being restricted again."
Nevertheless, music continued to flourish even after Ahmadinejad came to power. In 2006, the singer Benyamin Bahadori's album, 85, was inescapable in Iran, and crossed over to international success, selling an estimated 12 million copies. An underground sprang up too, risking arrest by organising secret concerts in makeshift venues such as underground car-parks. Despite the DIY nature of the scene and the risks involved, some of these bands have picked up large audiences by singing about an Iran that officially sanctioned musicians ignore.
"Wake up, God, I've had things to tell you for years/ Wake up, God, I'm a junkie but I have things to tell you," sings the rapper Hich-Kas, whose popularity has spread through a home recording released online (myspace.com/hichkas21).
If de Burgh does visit Iran this summer, will anything change? After all, he's unlikely to sing anything that will foment unrest on the streets of Tehran. But one can't help thinking: wouldn't it be interesting if Morrissey, a man who can't seem to avoid controversy, ended up being the second western singer to play in the Islamic republic? Now there's a prospect.
