The Prague Post Online: Tempo: Around Town

November 22nd, 2008

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Around Town

Musical mayhem

By James Scanlon
For The Prague Post
December 5th, 2007 issue

Against all the odds, outspoken Brit-Asian band Fun-Da-Mental made it to Prague last week, still immersed in the controversy surrounding the release of its most recent album, All Is War (The Benefits of G-had). Wrapped in a sleeve that shows the Statue of Liberty replaced with an image of a hooded Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib, it’s a disc that probably won’t end up in Dubbya’s Christmas stocking this year.

The trouble started when The Guardian ran a story highlighting some of the album’s lyrics, and related how two directors of the band’s record label, Beggars Banquet, had threatened to resign if the album was released. Soon word began to spread that Fun-Da-Mental was inciting terrorism by glorifying suicide bombers and likening Che Guevara to Osama Bin Laden.

Frontman Aki Nawaz said he only wanted to encourage open debate, but newspapers all over Europe ran sensationalist headlines. In fact, things got so bad for Nawaz that Labour MP Andrew Dinsmore called for him to be arrested under the Terrorism Act. On top of that, Nawaz said a journalist from the BBC, whom he refused to name, phoned him, saying, “You’d better be careful, I think MI5 is going to come for you.”

“I wasn’t likening Guevara to Bin Laden,” Nazar said in an interview in Prague. “It was their mission statements that I used. It was a juxtaposition in saying, ‘What is terrorism? Was Che Guevara a terrorist? Is Osama Bin Laden a terrorist?’

“We’d actually been talking about these two symbols of resistance long before the album. We were talking about it in debates at Oxford University and Cambridge University, in Finland and in Dublin. So I’ve got no problem. But I think Britain and America at the moment have a problem with viewing somebody as a resistance fighter.”

Sightings of All is War are incredibly rare — Nawaz says there’s an “unspoken ban” on the album. But, worse than that, the band’s workload has sunk dramatically, with promoters pulling out all over the place.

“It’s cost us dearly in terms of work,” Nawaz admits. “Before the album, we were doing about 70 to 80 gigs a year. Prague is only our fifth this year. Why was it that, during the punk era, bands would be quite controversial and all the promoters would say, ‘Yeah, come on, it’s your right’? I expected something similar to come back from the promoters and the music industry [for us], but there’s been nothing.”

“Everybody has been frightened off,” added the band’s beats master, Dave Watts. “It’s like Fun-Da-Mental were the terrorists. We’re not killing people; we’re talking about the state killing people. And we’re talking about resistance, and trying to understand what gets into the heads of people that are prepared to cross the line and give up everything in the defense of their family and their land.”

As half-expected, during the band’s blistering, manic set at Lucerna Music Bar, the U.S. flag was flung about onstage. At one point, it ended up wrapped around Nawaz’s head, with him frantically slapping at it in desperate frustration. Around him, the rest of the crew bellowed out, “War! War! War!” The intensity of it all was unnerving, to say the least.

Nawaz’s chief gripe (apart from Iraq, Afghanistan and a whole load of other foreign policy disasters) is that, “America always talks about self-interest and what is good for their strategic interests, not about the self-interest of people in other places.”

In conversation, Nawaz and his Fun-Da-Mental band mates come across as liberal, basically decent human beings who deplore violence. They may generate controversy, but they didn’t come to Prague armed with guns, baseball bats or broken bottles, like the recent groups of neo-Nazi extremists.

Still, the concert made its own kind of impact. By the end, one T-shirt spotted in the audience seemed to sum up the evening perfectly. It said, “Don’t panic, I’m Muslim.”

James Scanlon can be reached at tempo@praguepost.com

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