Jonny Greenwood names the song that started his love of Arabic music

The song that got Jonny Greenwood into Arabic music is “Qouloulou”, sung by the Egyptian Abdel Halim Hafez in the 1959 film Sharia el Hob. He picked it because it's the first Arab song that I played to myself over and over again.¹ He was talking to Lee Gardner and Matthew Byars of Essential Tremors, WYPR's music podcast, in a six-minute segment that WBUR's Here & Now aired today.

He first heard the music 20 to 25 years ago through his wife Sharona's family. Her father is from Iraq and her mother is Egyptian. His strongest early memory is of visiting her grandmother, who watched Arabic films all day on a battered old television whose colours were broken.

What caught him in “Qouloulou” is the opening, where the rhythm is so ambiguous that there is no telling where the first beat of the bar falls, something XTC often did too, and then the way the percussion and the passion build. He was surprised at how romantic the music is, with yearning and lost love its commonest subjects. His favourite thing was trawling markets for records and CDs with mysterious names, one thread leading to the next. It's just a whole universe in itself, Arabic music.¹ He puts it beside Indian or African music, as daunting as it is exciting.

Radiohead listened to that kind of percussion a lot, he says, and it shaped Jarak Qaribak, his album with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, out since June. The two were frustrated, as he said in June, by modern updates of Arabic songs, where what often happens is just a four to the floor kick drum is put on and it becomes a sort of this banging techno thing.¹ They wanted to keep the subtlety of drums that are often no more than a tambourine and a side drum, and use more contemporary sounds to do it.