Lebanese Night

"I was very lucky to have been invited to perform with my band in Beirut, right at the end of the war in the early 90s'. I was told then that I was very popular in Lebanon and a lot of people derived comfort from listening to my music as the bombs rained down and the bullets flew. People were telling me that, during the war, a lot of people would go down into their basements and listen to music, and I was one of the top favourites the radio would be playing. People would take tapes down and the music, quite often my songs, would give them comfort, I guess, under fire. We, I suppose, in a stable society, find it very hard to believe what it's like living in a war zone. Anyway, about two years ago, I again went back to Beirut to do a concert and on two nights in a row we, me and the band, went to this one restaurant - which I mentioned to somebody recently from Beirut and they said 'Oh! This is Al...something or other'. They knew the restaurant because it's on a terrace on the first floor with waterfalls and flowers. It was a beautiful starry night and it was jammed full of young people; beautiful girls, good-looking guys, all of them mainly seemed to be in their 20s. And we sat at this big table with what they call their meze - where they bring lots and lots of different dips that you put your pitta bread in, and you drink the fabulous wines that they make in the Lebanon - under the stars. And it was so romantic and so beautiful - but what really struck me was that virtually all those people in there had lived through those war years, from maybe being born during or infants during. And it got me thinking when I got home about what it's like - and this is a familiar theme for me, I have to say - growing up in a war zone, and about how the fights that adults bring upon each other are also brought to the children for their lifetimes, in many ways, in the trauma that's involved. What kind of a legacy is that to leave our children? The things that we love the most and are most precious to us are our children - and yet we leave them with these legacies of hatred and war, we instill in them these dreadful things as part of their growing up culture, as part of their belief and background. So it's not specifically about what happened in Lebanon; it's about war zones everywhere. For example, the Israeli/Palestine problem, the situation in the North of Ireland where we have infants going to school in the Ardoyne and having things thrown at them and abuse hurled by adults. I mean what is that telling them? How bad is that? Not just specifically those places, but anywhere where children are brought up in atmospheres of hatred and war. And that's what 'Lebanese Night' is all about. And, indeed, half-way through you'll hear a major Middle Eastern star, a girl called Elissa, singing those sentiments in her own language, about growing up in theatres of war. She sings and the words mean 'What is left for the children of war?' What I like particularly about it is the irony in one of the lines in the chorus: And did you go to your bed with a sweet lullaby and the sound of the guns in the night? Did you dance in the fields? Did you run for your life from the hell that came down from the sky?' These are normal, everyday things that children live with in these places; going to bed with bombs going off in the distance, playing in the fields with jets overhead firing down on you and dropping stuff."