There was a Spanish-sounding phase-each song is a phase-that went on for weeks before it turned, quite suddenly, into a Michael Jackson phase.
Sometimes there were previews to events we’d read about in the paper. One morning, my bleary-eyed father insisted I had the same videogame he had heard all night long. Some nights, there would be nothing but the sounds of videogame violence. We were among the first to hear his latest songs. They made the notes distinct and available to judge. Often the sounds were clearer when we stood beside pipes. Sometimes he’d be at it all night, listening and re-listening and repeating a portion again and again until I could internalise it while doing whatever it was I did on the other side. Once in a while we’d stop everything and listen to the sounds he composed next door. We discussed the possibility of recording these songs and putting them up for sale, but the market has consistently undervalued muffled soundtracks.
#Adnan sami before crack#
He’s doing something new, my father would say delightedly, pointing at the crack in our wall (caused by vibrations from Sami’s renovations), some evenings. When the songs began, it was like having your very own musician. At 2 am, there would be a gentle but unmistakable sound of a nail being driven into the wall behind us, for example. For months, we heard sounds when we least expected them. But who can get used to a jackhammer when it is used only a few feet away? When I confronted the man using it, he apologised and said that he was doing this for Adnan Sami. Whining drills, clinking hammers, raspy saws-they fall into the background. When flats are being done up, you become familiar with all kinds of noises. I learnt of his intent to live there on a particularly quiet afternoon, and this I learnt through sound. Then, after getting to know him the same way most of us get to know celebrities, he moved next door. Some said he lost 110 kg, others conjured 130. You’d remember them: gorgeous women fall in love with and then betray him, and they weep because he literally fills their dreams. We found home in the oddest things.Ī few years later, with distance crunched, Sami’s videos became a kind of joke. We heard Sami’s album, a collaboration with Asha Bhosle, in sappy nostalgic silence. It was autumn, a time when it is cold and beds are harder to roll out of. A homesick friend brought by a cassette with a cheesy cover. My first acquaintance with the singer was a decade ago when I was a student in New York. On some days it has sent across a little conversation, but mostly there has been music, which is exactly the sort of relationship a musician and his listener should share.
His home and mine are on either side of a wall that conducts sounds as if it wasn’t there. Then, abruptly, silence.Īdnan Sami’s walls have ears: mine. And for years changed tune in step with the state of his career and marriage. The sounds began even before he’d moved in next door.
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