Interview: Hamed Sinno, frontman of the Arab world’s hottest indie band
Mashrou’ Leila rehearse before a concert at the Byblos International Festival, Lebanon, in August. Sinno, centre, is at the microphone
by: Harriet Fitch Little
Financial Times
Hamra Street, west Beirut’s main urban artery, is choked with SUVs and clapped-out taxis, its pavements crowded with students from the American University. In search of a spot that might be conducive to last-minute interview prep, I recall an episode fromHomeland, the popular American CIA drama, which depicted this same street as a dusty, lawless outpost populated by Hizbollah fighters and downtrodden locals. This egregious stereotyping, combined with the revelation that the scene was actually shot in Israel, provoked such a local outcry that even the minister of tourism threatened to sue the producers for their depiction of the Lebanese capital as “a city of Kalashnikov and war”.
When Hamed Sinno arrives (on time, on foot) at the café just off Hamra Street where we have agreed to meet, I remind him of the incident. He gives an exaggerated roll of his eyes (brown, with the potential to be described as “puppy dog”) and reminds me of the payback: the street artists hired to decorate a set with “authentic” Arabic graffiti for the show’s most recent season scrawled variations on “Homeland is racist” on the buildings. Showmakers only learnt of the creative sabotage when viewers posted screenshots on social media.
It is the kind of protest that appeals to Sinno. Muslim, gay and the lead singer of Mashrou’ Leila, arguably the Arab world’s most influential independent band, he has been obliged to do battle with the region’s stereotypes in complex and often confrontational ways. In Lebanon, his authenticity is scrutinised by a watchful public: when we meet, it is his hair that’s up for debate. He bleached it recently, and strangers on social media are accusing him of “deciding to become whiter”. Abroad, his religion and sexuality put him at the overlap of a Venn diagram whose existence is rarely broadcast. As he put it at a concert in Washington DC in June: “This is what it looks like to be called both a terrorist and a faggot.”
Sinno poses at the Assembly Hall at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, August © Dalia Khamissy
The offshoot of jam sessions after classes at the American University, Mashrou’ Leila (the name means “night project” in Arabic) formed in 2008. Aside from Sinno, the lyricist and vocalist, the band consists of Firas Abou Fakher (guitar, keyboard and musical arrangement); Haig Papazian (violin); Ibrahim Badr (bass) and Carl Gerges (drums). It might be described as “poppy”, were it not for the gravitas of Sinno’s keening vocals and the melancholy of Papazian’s classical Armenian violin.
They have made politics their platform. Their lyrics, written by Sinno, address Lebanon’s militarised society, its corruption, gun violence and religious divides. They are socially subversive, sometimes playfully so — the video for their hit “Fasateen” (“Dresses”) starred Gerges as a runaway bride in full make-up and a wedding dress. On others, indignantly: “Tayf” (“Ghost”) tells the true story of a police raid on a local gay-friendly club in 2013, during which those arrested were forced to strip and be photographed naked. Translated into English, the lyrics read: “I poured tears — neon — on swollen pupils/ Till the fezzes came to take us, to prisons, to castrate us, to make medallions … ”
The band’s insistence on only singing in Arabic, and on couching their criticisms of Lebanon in terms that don’t lionise the west, has won them a passionate fan base of so called “Leilaholics” who pushed their newest album Ibn el Leil (Son of the Night) to the top of the country’s iTunes chart on its release last year. The international audience for their music is also growing. I meet Sinno during a brief window of home leave: in June and July, the band was touring North America; this month they’re in Europe, with shows in Germany, France and Norway.
This is what it looks like to be called both a terrorist and a faggot
Sinno at a concert in Washington DC in June
Sitting across from Sinno, I am struck by how little he resembles his onstage persona. At the Barbican in London last November, where Mashrou’ Leila launched Ibn el Leil in front of a sellout crowd (the concert was broadcast live across the Middle East), the 28-year-old was a formidable frontman. Dressed in black sequins, he rocketed between the kitsch and the darkly fantastical — dancing like he was being exorcised, limbs shaking and feet tapping out strange patterns; poised and mournful, then playfully camp.
In person, Sinno is serious, almost scholarly. When I say that he does indeed look like Freddie Mercury — the shorthand descriptor that journalists often reach for — he launches into an enthusiastic lecture on Mercury’s ties to Islam and the east. “It’s the first instance of post-colonial queer rock,” he tells me, genuinely enthused but also teasing — he knows that it’s his chevron moustache, not his post-colonial politics, that prompts the comparison.
Sinno says that the band had no aim when they started playing together in 2008, other than to write Arabic-language music that didn’t frame itself as “oriental”, “the opposite of the west” or (he scowls) “fusion”. “A big problem with the industry has been this obsession with identity,” he says. “This idea that music from Arabs, hence Arab music, has to sound ‘Arab’ and that it is essentially the opposite of the west is ridiculous.”
The sound of their self-titled debut in 2010 was upbeat. Over the course of three subsequent releases (El Hal Romancy in 2011, Raasük in 2013 and Ibn el Leil), the production has become more ambitious, the sound more complex and, in places, more anthemic. The band’s performances have expanded accordingly. For their most recent show in Lebanon, they appeared on top of huge light cubes, footage of night-time hedonism in Beirut flashing on the screens behind them. Sinno took to the stage wearing a set of Icarus-inspired wings.
Taking notes on his mobile during concert rehearsal. In the background is a picture of his great-grandfather © Dalia Khamissy
He describes the band’s style with reference to emotion rather than to genre: “You know that Joy Division song, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’? The thing about that song is that you always want to jump when you listen to it but it’s also heartbreaking. And I think that sentiment is a rather comfortable space, not only for me personally to write in but also for the band in general to compose in.”
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This summer’s US tour was a significant career milestone — confirmation that Mashrou’ Leila now commands an international fan base who will pay up, turn up and even do their best to sing along. But it was also a trip heavy with politics. On the night of June 11 Omar Mateen, an American Muslim, carried out the deadliest mass shooting in recent US history, when he opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The next day, while the country mourned and Donald Trump reiterated his pledge to close US borders to all Muslims, Mashrou’ Leila had their highest-profile booking of the tour: a studio set at National Public Radio in Washington DC. Footage from the event shows Sinno rubbing his knees nervously as he introduces the band. “We don’t really have mass shootings in Lebanon,” he says, softly spoken, American-accented. He announces a set change in tribute: they are to open with “Maghawir” (“Commandos”), a song about gun violence and machismo.
After Orlando, Mashrou’ Leila went from being a well-regarded touring band to a news item on the national agenda. “Queer, Arab, and onstage after Orlando” was the headline in The New Yorker. Google searches for Sinno’s name peaked. In Canada the following month, he was invited to lead the parade at Toronto Pride, carrying a banner that read: “We march for those who can’t.”
Sinno rehearses before Mashrou' Leila's concert at the Byblos International Festival © Dalia Khamissy
“It was a strange time for us,” he says. The media coverage provided unanticipated publicity for Ibn el Leil, which, by peculiar coincidence, had a lot to say about partying and bereavement — Sinno’s lyrics chart the year and a half he spent “killing a lot of brain cells” in nightclubs while mourning his father’s death. But for every positive article online there were the comments posted in response to be reckoned with, which he describes as “not just Islamophobic but all-round white supremacist — if they’re going to try and insult you they’ll say you belong in an oven”.
Such attacks hit Sinno on a personal level. His parents both lived in the US when they were younger (his mother was a PhD student, his father worked for medical research group the Mayo Clinic and lived in the US for long enough to obtain citizenship). Sinno, who has a US passport through his father but has only ever lived in Beirut, says he grew up imagining the US as his parents once saw it: a country that offered greater freedom, a place he might one day escape to. “Being confronted with all of [the online hatred] meant coming to terms with the fact that moving [to the US] is not a much better option than being in Lebanon.” His pessimistic conclusion: “Nowhere is safe.”
Sinno grew up in west Beirut, and still lives there with his mother when not on tour. Their apartment block neighbours the palace of former prime minister Saad Hariri, a geographical inconvenience that means it is boxed in by army checkpoints and surveilled by officious guards. Twenty-eight years have not inured him to the unfairness of the set-up. His advice for Lebanon’s fractious ruling classes: “Don’t live in a residential area. Go and sit in the mountains and ruin your own lives.”
To say these five people speak for all the disconnected political changes in an entire region, it’s almost racist
Walking north, we arrive at the American University of Beirut. Sinno signs in with his alumni number, bargains with the guard on my behalf, and we are granted access to the campus — 60 acres of manicured lawns and shaded walkways sloping down to the Mediterranean. Students nudge each other as we walk by. Sinno has attained a level of local fame that means he is stopped in the street daily, by fans (which he likes) and by people who just know him as a famous face and want a selfie (which he finds “kind of mortifying”).
For all their celebrity, the band remain unsigned. They have either self-funded or crowdfunded their albums (for Raasük they raised $66,000 via a campaign with the politically loaded hashtag #occupyarabpop) and they organise their own tours.
Sinno would like a record contract — he has no time for what he disparagingly terms “the mystique of the underground” — but the many meetings the band has had have hit roadblocks: requests to censor lyrics and album art (which, he emphasises, have come from western labels as often as local ones) or for the band to promote themselves in ways he describes as “ridiculous”. Usually that means wanting them to brand themselves the poster boys of sectarian co-operation in Lebanon: Sinno and Badr are Muslim, Gerges is Christian, Abou Fakher is Druze and Papazian is Armenian. They have staunchly refused. Sinno is “not pious”, he says, and neither are his band mates, so the platform would feel contrived. (His understanding of Islamaphobia also downplays the significance of creed: “[It’s] less about Islam and is more about race.”)
But they can only control the narrative up to a point. What does Sinno think of the “voice of Arab youth” label often ascribed to the band? “The sound of the Arab spring!” he booms back at me, impersonating a BBC newsreader. Predictably, he doesn’t like it. Yet there are good grounds for describing Mashrou’ Leila as a protest band. In 2010, they landed their first big gig at the prestigious Byblos Festival. On learning that the then prime minister Saad Hariri was in the audience, Sinno took the opportunity to sing “Al Hajiz” (“The Checkpoint”), a song whose lyrics were inspired by his experience of being stopped and searched by the army on his way home and whose chorus chant of “You f***er” was addressed to the premier. (Hariri didn’t flinch.)
Hamed Sinno before their concert at the Byblos International Festival © Dalia Khamissy
In April this year, when the Jordanian government cancelled a concert at the Roman amphitheatre in Amman, citing values that were at odds with the site’s “authenticity”, Mashrou’ Leila stirred up such an outcry that Jordan revoked its decision, albeit too late for the concert to take place.
So, why not the sound of the Arab spring? “There are thousands of people in prison in Cairo for publishing articles, for making art, for making music,” Sinno says. He is uncomfortable with the thought that “five boys in Beirut” — a relatively liberal city in a country that wasn’t directly involved in the Arab spring uprisings — might be considered representative of the wider region’s struggle. “To take one band and say these five people speak for all the disconnected political changes in an entire region, it’s almost racist,” he says.
It’s not that Sinno doesn’t care deeply about the politics. He says it was “amazing” to learn that “Al Hajiz” had gone viral in Palestine, and that their music was being played in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution. But he worries about making any claims to be a spokesperson for others. He doesn’t want to play into the media’s tendency to tell only the uncomplicated stories. It’s similar to the problem that he was wrestling with during the wave of post-Orlando interviews: how do you act as an ambassador for your society when you’re also one of its most critical voices? “Essentially, what you’re resisting is a simplification at both ends.”
The conversation turns to Sinno’s experience heading up the parade in Toronto — the first Pride event he had ever attended. Announcing online in July that he would be carrying the Orlando banner, he wrote: “The closest I’ve ever been to [a Pride parade] was screaming outside the Hobeich police station [referring to recent anti-homophobia protests held in Beirut] … I will be the proudest person at that march, equal parts queer, Arab and Muslim.”
It was a Pride that was criticised by many for being “too political” after a Black Lives Matter demonstration stalled the procession, protesting the presence of police floats in the parade. But for Sinno it was a model for what should be happening everywhere: multiple identities coexisting and sometimes clashing; militancy and solidarity side by side; a push back against “pink-washing” (the co-option of the LGBT movement for corporate or political gains). In short, proof that avoiding “simple stories” doesn’t mean sitting around hand wringing. “Was it disruptive? Yes it was f***ing disruptive, but that was the point,” he says. “To see all that stuff happen at one parade was really heart-warming.” Slipping instinctively back into social theory, he comes close to something that I might cautiously describe as a statement of intent: “As the world progresses we allow ourselves to complicate the narrative more and more because certain milestones have been reached. Let’s complicate the narrative.”