It was the 1980s. Iran was at war with Iraq. Officials were encouraging youths to go to the front defending their country. Residents of Iran dealt with planes that were dropping bombs on them. These bombs were made in the USA and the chemical ones were from West Germany. Iranians had strong revolutionary feelings. They had denied westernization just few years before that. In such a situation, to endorse the West and its culture was an unforgivable sin. However, somewhere at the heart of the anti-West propaganda machine, Iranian TV and radio, weird happenings were taking place.

I was told, nobody in the TV organization even knew who those tunes’ composers were and basically nobody ever questioned his music picks

For a long time, no singer appeared on Iranian TV or sang on the radio. They always used instrumental music in between or at the beginning of their programmes. In the mornings, there were educational programmes about physics, chemistry and biology. The afternoon was the time of war-propaganda and soldiers’ happy faces going to fight with an evil creature called Saddam Hussein were shown. At night, it was the news and stories of successes of Iranian army. Since Mozart and Beethoven’s pieces did not fit these subjects, and people were fed up with Iranian traditional music, they opted to utilize other things; electronic and ambient tunes.

All my years of primary school, I got up to the sound of a radio programme named ‘The Calendar of History’ (I really do not understand the point of waking up at 6 o’clock in the morning to learn history on the spot, though!). This programme started with the sounds of bells. The intro was the song ‘Time’ by Pink Floyd. Therefore, I can say the first band I knew was a psychedelic-progressive rock band. ‘Spiral’ by Vangelis was used for a programme about science. The opening scene had pictures of Newton and Einstein and that theme supported it. I always found these introduction-to-programmes very hallucinatory.

Sometimes interesting things occurred as well. There was a programme called ‘The Analysis of the Week’s Politics’ on Iranian TV and they occasionally talked about Germany and France helping Iraq in the war. The sound themes were works of Klaus Shulze and Jean Michel Jarre! Anyway, for years, we were surrounded by psychedelic tunes in our radio and television. Years later, I found out why those things happened.

One day, I was chatting with the owner of a teaching institute I was working at and he told me that he had a friend in Iranian TV, whose job was to choose the music for TV programmes. I asked my life-long burning question; did that guy knew what he had chosen for the TV or not? Then I was told that the gentleman knew exactly what he was doing. That his entire life had been spent on electronic music and he had plans to go to Europe and collaborate with Tangerine Dream. As I was told, nobody in the TV organization even knew who those tunes’ composers were and basically nobody ever questioned his music picks.

Apparently, the only instructions were to use something with no lyrics, and not too fast.

I am into electronic music now and, surely, I was influenced by things that I heard when I was a child. I never met that gentleman in the TV organization though; but he retains my respect.

In my opinion, what he did in that time, and in that situation, was priceless. Western music was supposed to be banned because it was said to be ‘tempting’people to forget Persian culture. Despite all this, nothing ever helped me to be acquainted with Western electronic music more than Iranian TV.

That was how we grew up…

Artwork courtesy of Mr. Sohrab Mohebbi