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What provides the soundtrack to your travels when you are holed up in somegodforsaken place with the whoosh of bullets and the crys of the hungry?
I had a great experience last year on a houseboat on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, Indian Kashmir, in rather an altered state listening to Led Zep’s ‘Kashmir’ on my i-pod and feeling all was right with the world.
Otherwise its lots of Springsteen (‘Devils and Dust’ being a current favourite), some Ass-kicking Midnight Oil and something sublimely African or Arabian like Ali Farka Toure or Adel Salamah to chill out to.
How about you guys?Rarely travel with music these days, but will never forget the first time I went to Africa in ’93. I was stopping the night in Bunagana on the Uganda/Zaire border. The “hotel” was a small row of mudbrick shelters with corruated tin roofs. The “bar” was a room with a table.
I sat at that table for about three hours that evening, having just spent a day tracking Gorillas in the Virungas. I drank warm Primus beer and played chequers with the locals, while blasting out of the hotel owner’s wog-box was Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
It was a Tuesday night. I remember it like it was last week.
Ah, a real NGO. Devils ‘N Dust is popular with the angels.
Funny how many NGOs and journos depend on music to stay sane on the road.I got through the wars in the Balkans on an inflammatory mix of the Rolling Stones, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Tomaso Albinoni, U2, Itzhak Perlman, Beck (Loser), Paul Brady and too many others.
Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and Metallica carried me through the rage of the Intifada, while Africa don’t need no nasty foreign music because as Wild mentioned above, they have plenty of their own excellent musos.
The Afghan campaigns were helped with liberal doses of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Nothing like certain songs to give you nasty flashbacks, though.
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