Desert sounds

The Bedouin Jerry Can Band, raucous rock stars of the Sinai, are on a mission to share their extraordinary music with the outside world.

As the sun sinks over an expanse of grimy sand and desert scrub, a group of Bedouin squat patiently around a wood fire. Pick-up trucks and battered cars roar past on the Sinai coastal highway behind them, hurrying to the nearby town of al-Arish to break the Ramadan fast. The smell of roasting meat drifts up from a breeze-block shelter below, the sun finally slips below the horizon, and after a date and a sip of water the men hurry off to pray, throwing their chequered headcloths on the sand as prayer rugs. A table-sized dish piled with rice, bread and hunks of roast chicken arrives, spoons are considered and cast aside, and everyone digs in with their hands. For the next several minutes, the only sounds are of contented chewing.

The silence is uncharacteristic; this is dinner with the Bedouin Jerry Can Band, the raucous, boisterous rock stars of the Sinai Desert. But, as the menu suggests, they have few of the trappings - record deals, publicists, stylists, pro motional tours - of their pampered western counterparts. Their hits are centuries-old songs and poems; their audiences fellow Bedouin and local people; their venues desert encampments or rooms in oasis towns. Their home-made instruments are most extraordinary of all - the simsimiyya, an ancient Egyptian five-stringed lyre, the rebaba, a wood-and-wolfskin single-stringed fiddle, the maghrouna, a double pipe, the ney, a desert flute, and an idiosyncratic array of percussion - tablas, clay jugs, an ammunition box and the eponymous jerrycans, petrol containers scavenged from the war debris that litters the North Sinai Desert.

Unlike the more famous Touareg desert band Tinariwen, the Jerry Can Band have made few concessions to western sensibilities. This is no guitar-led "desert blues" influenced by Hendrix or Robert Plant, but a harder-edged sound deeply rooted in its environment. "To understand our music, you have to understand this place," says the lead singer, Goma Ghanaeim, as he hands out tiny glasses of sweet tea made over the fire. "Even our instruments are made from desert materials."

"The Bedouin are like fish, and this desert is our water - we can't live outside it," explains Ayman Hassane, the slight, clever-faced jerrycan percussionist. "But we don't want to be isolated. Here in Sinai we live at a crossroads, and we need to share our culture." The band's first album, Coffee Time (a reference to the grinding and drinking ritual that is at the heart of all Bedouin gatherings), is an attempt to do that, as is their first international show in London this month, part of the Barbican's "Ramadan Nights" season.

Hassane is right; the triangle of land that the Jerry Can Band crisscross to play at summer weddings, tend livestock or visit their fellow Suwarka tribespeople in the desert has a fraught history. Successively controlled by the Ottoman empire, Britain and Egypt, the desert is still scarred from the Egyptian-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 and a 15-year Israeli occupation that ended in 1982. The band's rusted jerrycans and ammunition boxes - some still with their Hebrew labelling - are reminders of a time many of the Suwarka were forced into exile in the Delta towns of mainland Egypt. "Our sheikh Ayeed Abu Gerir even died there," says Ghanaeim, "and we still visit his tomb every year."

But the band insist their choice of percussion is not a political statement. "The jerkans [jerry cans] were there, and we just found they sound good," says Hassane in a matter-of-fact way. Indeed, the Sinai Bedouin, who have relations in the deserts of Israel and Jordan, hold themselves slightly aloof from national conflicts. They have a mistrustful relationship with the Egyptian central government, which suspects them of running guns to and from Gaza, smuggling hash from Israel and Lebanon and, most recently, of having had a hand in the bombings of beach resorts in Taba, Ras Shaitan and Sharm el-Sheikh. In the subsequent crackdown, hundreds of Bed ouin and their families were rounded up, beaten and imprisoned. As we pile into a car to visit the rest of the band in al-Arish, Ghanaeim says that the situation has improved. "Now, the government are worried about unrest," he explains, "and they've told the police to be polite to us." As the packed car inches towards a roadblock on the outskirts of al-Arish, the young policemen assiduously greet us with a courteous "salaam aleikum". Everyone replies with exaggerated gravity, then giggles as we drive away.

Ten minutes later, we are installed at the band's favourite street cafe in a sandy alley. Suddenly, everyone is talking all at once, mobile phones chirp 15 different ringtones, two more musicians ride right up to the table on a battered motorbike, a mustachioed history professor from Suez Canal University is summoned "for the intellectual questions", and waiters weave in and out of the throng bearing shisha pipes and rounds of tea, Turkish coffee and herbal drinks. The (male) camaraderie is overwhelming: there are shouted disagreements, roars of bronchial laughter, and much palm-slapping, hugging and even Bedouin nose-kissing. I realise that the ebullient sound of Coffee Time is an echo of the sheer excitable pleasure the band take in each other's company.

When the noise dies down a little, I suggest that the siren call of modernity - mobile phones, satellite television, education, urbanisation, imported pop from the Gulf - threatens Sinai's traditional music. A clamour of wounded disagreement erupts. The professor shouts above it all, banging on the table. "[The medieval Arab philosopher] Ibn Khaldun said the Bedouin is the mother of civilisation. We will never leave these traditions."

"This is why we prefer to play live," explains the maghrouna player Medhat el-Issawy more calmly. "The music is tied in to all of our customs - like coffee-grinding and hospitality - and when we perform we can try to convey all of these things together." I ask them if they listen to western music and if they would ever, like Tina riwen, exchange their simsimiyyas for guitars. The answer is a disgusted group tut, Egyptian for "never". "Why would we?" asks Ghanaeim. "People want to hear our own songs, on our own instruments, and we want to play them."

The endearing chauvinism is the band's own, but it suits their manager, Zakaria Ibrahim, perfectly. Ibrahim, a musician and founder of the Mastaba Centre for Folk Music in Cairo, has spent the past 20 years working to preserve and promote Egypt's musical heritage, and has a heartfelt belief in "authenticity". In a country addicted to mass-produced Arabic pop, he is swimming against the tide. As we drive back into central Cairo from Sinai, we pass a heavily airbrushed billboard of Egypt's premier pop star, Amr Diab. Although the image is decorously cropped just below his muscular shoulders, clearly Diab is wearing nothing but a couple of thong necklaces and a smouldering scowl. He looks about 22.

"Look at this man!" yelps Ibra him. "He's really in his late forties, a few years younger than me. But this is what the market wants." As he oversaw Jerry Can's first forays into the music business, however, Coffee Time ended up being recorded in the same lavish, Gulf-funded Cairo studios used by Diab himself. He acknowledges the irony with a smile. "I can't escape the market for ever. Jerry Can needs it, too."

That night, the band perform a Ramadan concert in a medieval Mameluke wikala, a towering traders' hostel arranged around a central courtyard. Its golden stone galleries are light years away from the scruffy sand of al-Arish and the desert, and the polite audience of expats and middle-class Cairenes is different, too. Sitting on stage in front of a beit sha'ar (a black goat-hair tent) with their coffee pots, the band suddenly look unsure. But as soon as Hassane knocks out an intricate, fluttering beat on his jerrycan, they are transformed. To the sharp, bright sound of the simsimiyya and Ghanaeim's chanted vocals, they bound about the stage, robes and headcloths flying, brandishing tasselled camel sticks and a three-foot coffee-grinding pestle and fencing with home-made swords.

Their energy and the rousing beauty of the songs are irresistible - the usually solemn Gha naeim grins, the players shout encouragement to each other, and the audience claps along. As they come to the end of "Ya el yaleladana", an exultant love song to a recalcitrant Bedouin girl, it is clear that, despite their music's deep roots in the Sinai Desert, it can travel anywhere.

The Bedouin Jerry Can Band play at LSO St Luke's, 161 Old Street, London EC1, on 16 October as part of the Barbican Centre's "Ramadan Nights" season. For more information visit: www.barbican.org.uk