Space commodity

Saloon Dubai's practice-starved musicians find some room.

Trevayne Fernandez: "There just aren't places to practise... This was just the right thing to do."

Dubai's practice-starved musicians find some room. Near the height of the housing bubble, Ian Svenonius, rock'n'roll's most eloquent Marxist, wrote an essay declaring that the new century's first fads in independent music - electro-clash and the folk revival - were the spawn of Alan Greenspan. The US Federal Reserve Chairman's ultra-low interest rates had fuelled a frenzy of real estate speculation that had emptied American cities of their bohemian populations and left those who remained with a daunting lack of affordable practice space. The musicians' response was to create two new genres of music that didn't require acoustic drums - the loudest and most neighbour-alienating component of most rock line-ups. In this, their aesthetic response to market forces inverted that of the punks in the 1970s, who took over abandoned industrial spaces and filled them with deafening squall. Rock, Svenonius argued, is an expression of real estate. To be a garage band, you need a garage.

Within this theory lies the silver lining of the property crash for the musicians of Dubai. While the boom-time mentality of the city might not have left much space for them last year, this year has brought lower property prices and the beginnings of a market in soundproofed practice spaces. The Thomsun Group, for example, has been running music stores in Dubai for more than 30 years and music schools for 10, but only began renting its rehearsal rooms to bands after school hours in January - arguably the property market's darkest hour.

Trevayne Fernandez, a bald, energetic Australian whose obsession with buying a piano wherever he goes has left him with instruments stashed all over the world, heads the education division at Thomsun Pure Music. He says the company decided to open up the practice rooms at its schools in the Wafi and Ibn Battuta malls in a spirit of public service. "There just aren't places to practise," he says. "There are one or two, and they are very expensive. This just feels like the right thing to do."

Of course, the decision was also good business. While Thomsun charges bands what Fernandez calls "peanuts" to rent the spaces - Dh100 an hour, which is normally split four ways - the bands that come have trouble resisting the gauntlet of guitars tantalisingly dangled from the store's curved display walls. Neil McCullough plays bass in a cover band of co-workers from the engineering consultancy Scott Wilson. (Their catalogue consists mainly of songs by The Clash and The Stooges.) Playing right into Fernandez's business plan, McCullough ended up buying a bass from the Thomsun store after he started practicing there in the evenings. The band's drummer, Douglas Cormie, signed up for drum lessons.

Thomsun may have profited from the band, but the band pretty much owes its existence to the store. Finding the ad on Dubizzle for the practice space was the impetus that turned the group -called Santalucia - from just an idea into a functioning band that does a pretty mean version of London Calling. "That was half the battle, trying to find somewhere to practice," Cormie said. There are a couple of other places to practise, they said, but they are more expensive and don't come with Thomsun's perk of supplying one free instrument per room. In theory, bands can pick any instrument, but Fernandez says they almost always pick drums, that impractical urban luxury that transforms music from something merely entertaining into something cathartic and unignorable.

This week at Thomsun's Ibn Battuta Mall outlet, one of Dubai's more established bands was subjecting its music to that very transformation. The Meerkats, a reggae-inflected indie act led by a tall, bed-haired Brit named Ben Jones and guitarist Ashley Adams (whom Jones refers to as "the pretty one"), have already made a name for themselves as an acoustic duo, opening for acts like Arrested Development and The Charlatans after playing together for less than a year. But their upcoming gig at Dubai's first Sound City festival in November, a three-day mega-event led by the Stone Roses' Ian Brown, seemed to require something more.

"Until now, we've been playing in my bedroom," Jones said. "It was just myself and the pretty one over there. We are just putting a full band together now." While a lot of his friends in the Dubai music scene rehearse in warehouses in the Al Quoz industrial area - a scenario with more than a few echoes of New York's SoHo in the 1970s - for the moment that requires more music-world connections than Jones has. So he believes the music school fills a large gap.

"You need somewhere where you can just plug in and play," he said. "Especially with the living situation here, you can't be having drum kits in your house because you'll get thrown out. We've been looking around, and this is the first place that we've found."
* Keach Hagey