Pop Idols

But I was soon to learn that some dinosaurs can roar their way out of seeming extinction in a single moment. The person who taught me this was thirty-three-year-old Benazir Bhutto. As long as I could remember she had been the pro-democracy politician under arrest, house arrest or exile. Pakistan was Zia ul-Haq to me, after all; how could someone who spoke of replacing not just the man but the entire system ever be of relevance? Imagine then how my world must have turned on its head in April 1986 when Benazir returned to Pakistan a free woman, for the first time in eight years, and a million people took to the streets of Lahore to welcome her home.

Benazir’s triumphant return was one of several watershed political moments that marked my young life. My earliest ever recollection is of my father showing me his thumb, with a black mark on it, and explaining that he’d just been to the polling booth, and that the black mark, indelible ink, was to guard against anyone attempting to cast more than one vote. I was three and a half then, and the start of Zia ul-Haq’s dictatorship was just months away. I remember the day Benazir’s father was hanged, the day women’s rights activists marched on Islamabad to protest against misogynistic laws and were set upon by baton-wielding police, the day Zia held a referendum to extend his rule. So, the return of Benazir, after a decade of soul-wearying, dictatorial, oppressive political news was electrifying. For me, this is how it happened: at one moment she was far away, then she was in our midst and nothing was quite the same as before.

It seemed just that way with pop music, too. In the mid-eighties, in Lahore and Karachi (and in other pockets of urban Pakistan), groups of students came together in each other’s homes for jam sessions; the names of some of those students are instantly recognizable to anyone following the rise of Pakistani pop in the eighties and nineties: Aamir Zaki in Karachi, Salman Ahmad in Lahore, Junaid Jamshed in Rawalpindi. In 1986, Lahore’s Al-Hamra auditorium hosted its first ‘Battle of the Bands’, and the underground music scene cast off its subterranean nature. Some of the loudest cheers were reserved for a Rawalpindi-based group called the Vital Signs. But down south, in my home town, we paid little attention to ‘the provinces’ and so the Vital Signs remained completely unknown to me until that day in 1987 when I turned on the TV and saw the four young men singing in an open-top jeep.

Watching the video of ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ (‘Heart,Heart, Pakistan’ or ‘My Heart Beats for Pakistan’) today, I’m struck by the void that must have existed to make pretty boys singing patriotic pop appear subversive. In a bid to circumvent growing restrictions, TV producer Shoaib Mansoor had the idea of getting a pop song past the censors by wrapping it up in nationalism. Vital Signs and ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ was the result. The video, with its guitar-strumming, denim-clad twenty-something males, premiered on Independence Day – 14 August – 1987 and millions of Pakistanis, including my fourteen-year-old self, fell over in rapture.

Our reaction clearly wasn’t to do with their dance moves. The Vital Signs boys of 1987 seem ill at ease, their gyrations arrhythmic, their posture self-conscious. This is particularly true of the lead singer, Junaid Jamshed, but still, I was in love. They were clean-cut, good-looking and, most shockingly, they were nearby. They were Pakistani after all; one day you might turn a corner and run into one of them. This scenario started to seem even more thrillingly possible the day gossip raced through the schoolyard, telling us that one of the boys at school – a boy I knew! – was Junaid Jamshed’s cousin.

The first concert I ever attended was Vital Signs playing at a swanky Karachi hotel. It’s a safe guess that some of the girls present hadn’t told their parents where they were really going that evening. Mine was a co-ed school, and while all the boys and girls were entirely at ease in each other’s company, many of the girls had restrictions placed on them by their parents about co-ed socializing outside school hours. Almost no one’s parents were classified as fundo, but many were ‘conservative’ – the latter having more to do with ideas of social acceptability and ‘reputation’ than religious strictures.