The queen of Iranian pop
QUESTION Did Iran have any notable rock groups before the revolution?
The increasing pace of Westernisation in Iran in the late Fifties brought a demand for more cosmopolitan popular music.
From the mid-Sixties there emerged a style of Iranian pop music combining traditional Iranian rhythms with Western instruments — drums and guitar — and a glamorous pop star culture.
The most popular pop star of the era was Faegheh Atashin, better known by her stage name Googoosh.
The most famous rock singer was Farhad Mehrad. A former member of a beat band called the Black Cats, he was the first Iranian musician to record original (Western-style) guitar-based ballads.
There were also alternative acts such as Fereidoon Foroughi and Kourosh Yaghmaei creating works that combined Iranian vocals with blues and psychedelic rock, and Abbas Mehrpouya, who fused Ananda Shankar- style funk with Fela Kuti-inspired Afro beat.
Another popular singer was Shahram Shabpareh, leader of a garage band called the Rebels, and a solo singer in the Seventies singing hard rock and funk.
The day after the Iranian revolution, on February 11, 1979, the Farhad song Vahdat (Unity) was broadcast on Iranian TV ‘in honour of revolution and freedom’. Shortly afterwards, Western music was banned.
Googoosh and Farhad remained in Tehran and didn’t release any music until 1993. Shahram Shabpareh left for the U.S. In 1993, after 15 years of silence, Farhad was granted permission to release his first album Khab Dar Bidari (Sleep While Awake) which became instantly popular.
Since 1997, there has been some relaxation of Iran’s cultural policy. Women are still forbidden to perform, but Googoosh was allowed to perform outside Iran in 2000. her comeback tour was a spectacular success, beginning with a sold- out concert at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto on July 29, 2000, and ending in Dubai in March 2001.
Male rock bands and singers such as Arian and O-hum are allowed to perform, though their lyrics are censored. The Persian power metal band Angband is the first to sign to a Western label, Pure Steel records of Germany.
A. L. Yasmin, London W6.
QUESTION Is abortion in England technically illegal, carried out only as an exception to the general prohibition?
UK abortion law dates from 1861 and states that a woman who seeks to ‘procure her own miscarriage’ using ‘poison or other noxious thing’ or ‘any instrument or other means whatsoever’ is to be ‘kept in penal servitude for life’.
The Abortion Act 1967 was a groundbreaking amendment; introduced by David Steel as a Private Member’s Bill, and backed by the Government, it came into effect on April 27, 1968.
Rather than making abortion legal, the amendment instead created an exception which means that in certain circumstances a woman who has an abortion isn’t punishable. The procedure itself remains a criminal act.
The 1967 Act states that ‘a person shall not be guilty of an offence under the law relating to abortion’ if two doctors agree in ‘good faith’ that:
IN PREGNANCIES up to 24 weeks carrying on with the pregnancy would pose a greater risk to the mother’s physical or mental health or to that of her existing children or family.
The PREGNANCY poses a risk of grave permanent physical or mental injury to a women, or a risk to her life.
OR THERE is a substantial risk that the child will be born with severe physical or mental abnormalities. There is no other medical procedure that requires the same legal authorisation from two medical professionals.
Sarah Westwood, Birmingham.
QUESTION Apart from Helen Keller, has anyone born deaf-blind achieved great things?
MARIE HEURTIN was born deaf-blind in about 1885. When she was ten, her desperate parents brought her to La Sagesse de Larnay in central France, where an order of Catholic nuns managed a school for deaf girls.
She was described as having ‘a scared look and the alarmed agitation of a lunatic’. An heroic nun, Sister Marguerite, took it upon herself to educate the girl and Marie went on to learn Braille, use a typewriter, sew, knit, learn history, geography, how to tell the time, and become a teacher and guide other girls who entered the Larnay Institute, which still operates today. her story was made into a terrific 2014 film, Marie’s Story.
Robert Smithdas was born on June 7, 1925, in Brentwood, Pennsylvania. he contracted cerebrospinal meningitis aged four and became deaf-blind.
Assisted by individualised instruction and speech therapy, Dr Smithdas thrived in scholastics and, after graduating in 1945, he was accepted to the Industrial home for the Blind and earned a fellowship to St. John’s University in New York. he graduated with honours in 1950 and later attended New York University, where he became the first deafblind individual to earn a master’s degree.
In conjunction with his work at helen Keller National Centre, he was an advocate for deaf-blind education and employment. Smithdas was also an author and poet and was named Poet of the Year in 1961 by the Poetry Society of America.
his published works included two poetry collections: City Of heart (1966) and Shared Beauty (1983). In Shared Beauty, he wrote: ‘I call it Life, and laugh with its delight, Though life itself be out of sound and sight.’
Celebrated U.S. broadcaster Barbara Walters considered Smithdas her ‘most memorable interview’. he died in 2014.
Barbara Giles, Droitwich, Worcs.
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