Venue season to end in extraordinary style!

Published on 12th June 2008 in Ents

Selby Town Hall's most successful season to date ends in fittingly flamboyant style with one of the most extraordinary acts ever to have performed at the venue.

The Bedouin Jerry Can Band are a collective of semi-nomadic musicians, dancers, storytellers, sufi singers and coffee-grinders from the settlement of Abo El Hossain in the Egyptian Sinai desert.

Blending Simsimiyya (traditional five-string Egyptian lyre) with desert flutes and reed pipes, the band perform infectious Bedouin rhythms on junk percussion including ammunition boxes and jerry cans, scavenged from the former battlegrounds of conflicts fought across their homelands during the Six-day War of 1967 and the subsequent Israeli occupation of Sinai.

As well as enchanting the audience with the sounds and stories of their homeland, The Jerry Can Band will also be happy to grind, roast and serve fresh Arabic coffee during the show!

Getting British visas has not been easy for these tribesmen. Most of them have no passport and had to have their teeth examined in Cairo to ascertain their age for British visa requirements. Alas, one of the older members, the poet Admaan, is unable to leave at all, on account of all his teeth having fallen out.

Unlike the more famous Touareg desert band Tinariwen, The Jerry Can Band have made few concessions to western sensibilities - their hits are centuries-old songs and poems; their audiences fellow Bedouin and local people and their venues, desert encampments or rooms in oasis towns. This is the genuine article - music in its absolute purest form.

Chris Jones, Town Council arts officer, said: "This is one of the most astounding shows that we have ever booked.

"The Bedouin Jerry Can Band are as real as it comes - there are no electric guitars, no cod westernised afrobeat and no European based musicians masquerading as nomads.

"These guys have come all the way from Egypt in an effort to provide others with a fascinating insight into their culture, and they play Selby a week before taking to the stage at the Glastonbury Festival. This is an event that nobody should miss!"