Sout El Horeya

Cairokee did not start out singing in Arabic. Amir Eid and Sherif Hawary, friends since school, began in 2003 with an English-language band called Black Star, playing covers of English songs with Pink Floyd and the Beatles as their models. The one Egyptian song in their set, Ghariba, was the crowd favourite, and they decided it was shameful to keep singing in a language that was not their mother tongue. Yet it took a political upheaval to bring them to wide attention. That came with the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. In its aftermath they recorded Sout El Horeya, The Voice of Freedom, together with Hany Adel of the band Wust El-Balad. The music video was filmed in Tahrir Square, the centre of the protests, and spread at astonishing speed, reportedly setting records for the number of views it gathered in a short time. The song became their first major hit and one of the anthems of the uprising. It set the course for what followed. Ya El Midan personified Tahrir Square itself as a fellow protester and brought the veteran singer Aida el Ayoubi back after twenty years away, their album Matloob Zaeem asked what qualities the next leader should have, and in 2013 they played to hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Cairokee went on to become one of the leading rock bands in the Arab world. Sout El Horeya remains the sound of the moment when a generation believed it could speak freely in public.