Timeframe: When Fish Roundabout was our musical playground as kids

Omar Bin Al Khattab Street, one of the roads that meet at the roundabout, is still flanked with a variety of music shops

Fish Roundabout was once synonymous with music. Chris Whiteoak / The National

Deira’s Fish Roundabout is a tribute to a pivotal aspect in UAE history and trade: fishing.

The roundabout is so named for the sculpture at its centre, which features two fish with their tails intertwined. Water spouts from their gaping mouths and their eyes bulge at the bustle of surrounding traffic.

Fish Roundabout is one of three dozen historical buildings and sites recently selected for the second phase of Dubai’s heritage architecture preservation project.

As teenagers, when Fish Roundabout was mentioned, we rarely thought of marine life or the country’s history of fishing and pearl diving. Music was instead what came to mind.

Omar Bin Al Khattab Street – one of the rounds that meet at the roundabout – was flanked with music stores, and for a long time, this was one of the few places that sold instruments and offered rehearsal spaces. Granted the offerings were nowhere as high-shelf and diverse as they are now, with only a few select brands such as Ibanez and Cort being up for grabs. Yet, they were coveted all the same.

Fish Roundabout was where we’d go play guitars and try out effects pedals until shopkeepers would point out the exit, saying if we weren’t planning on buying anything, we couldn’t stick around. I couldn’t blame them, we probably had them strung on their last nerves as we blasted amps and played our best, not-so-musical, interpretations of System of a Down and Rage Against the Machine riffs. Once when we were kicked out from one shop, we simply went next door and repeated this chaos.

Fish Roundabout in Deira is a tribute to the UAE's history of fishing. Wam

It got to a point where proprietors swooped on us as soon as we entered the shop, asking what it was we were looking for. We pretended we were weighing up our options over which guitar or drum kit to buy, despite the fact that no-name Stratocaster copies were all we could really afford. Our band’s drummer, meanwhile, had a tin-timbered tabletop kit his uncle had given him.

Fish Roundabout was where we could play on real instruments, on real amplifiers. Of course, getting there was an issue to begin with. While the band’s drummer lived in Karama and our vocalist in Riqqa, me and the other guitarist of the band lived in Sharjah. At 15, neither of us drove and we didn’t really have taxi money. We’d hail Dubai-bound cars on Etihad road and offer to chip in for fuel costs if they took us as close as they could to Fish Roundabout. It often took a number of hitchhikes to get there. But really none of us wanted to hang out in malls, Fish Roundabout was the cool place to be.

I’d like to think that it was because of us that one of the shops at Fish Roundabout saw fit to open a rehearsal space upstairs, which was really a storage room. They must’ve figured if we were loitering and making noise anyway, they might as well make some money from us.

Razmig Bedirian at 16 with his cherished Ibanez. Razmig Bedirian / The National

This first rehearsal space we had access to transformed us from four people who’d get together in each other’s homes, plugging into mediocre stereo systems for amplification, into a semblance of a band. We huddled in that space, which featured a real drum set and two guitar amps, as our vocalist, bless him, sang at the top of his lungs so he’d be heard. The space was so small we could barely move. We played out of time, and often with guitars that we didn’t even know were out of tune.

But the experience was cathartic. It was in this small space where we’d exorcise our adolescent demons and woes.

Eventually, after a summer job as a shopkeeper, I managed to save up for my first proper guitar: an Ibanez. The band’s other guitarist, too, had managed to save up some money, and we went to that very same store that most staunchly kept us from trying out gear and insisted that this time, we were really going to buy a couple of guitars. It was our version of Julia Roberts as Vivian going shopping in Pretty Woman.

The band, over the years, split up. Most of us travelled to pursue education abroad and we fell out of touch. I’ve garnered several other close musical relationships since, but those times and antics at Fish Roundabout are some of the fondest and most formative memories I have related to the electric guitar.

Even now, as several other shops have opened around the city, from malls to more boutique outlets, Fish Roundabout continues its musical legacy with plenty of shops on both sides of Omar Bin Al Khattab Street.