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Last update - 23:23 20/02/2008 Soundtrack of their lives By Ben Shalev Tags: Ehud Banai, music, Israel  "I remember the first time I heard Ehud Banai on the radio," recalls Uzi Preuss, the repertoire director of the Hebrew department at the NMC record company. "For a young guy who was connected mostly to foreign music, this was something amazing: an Israeli record that sounded just as good as U2. As though that gap between England and Israel, which always seemed so huge to us, was no longer relevant. That is good music and this is good music." Musician David Peretz also remembers the release of the album "Ehud Banai and the Refugees" as a key event in his life. "I was in 11th grade and that was maybe the first time I felt that Israeli music spoke to me, not to my old aunts," he says. "To understand this feeling you have to remember what there was here in the mid-1980s. [Pop vocal quartet] Hakol Over Habibi was the most popular group. It was such a desert. The feeling was, what is this weird place? And all of a sudden something came along that could correspond with what was happening abroad. This was a huge shift in consciousness. As though something had ended and something new had begun." "Ehud Banai and the Refugees," which has just been rereleased in a new edition to mark 20 years since its launch, did indeed signal that something new had begun. In stark contrast to Rami Fortis' album "Plonter," for which there have recently been 30th anniversary celebrations and which in real time was a one-off alien from outer space in the skies of Israel, Banai's debut album was part of a process by which Israeli rock reinvented itself, came close to English and American rock with respect to sound and production and, in addition to "Ehud Banai and the Refugees," gave rise to a series of albums that resonate to this day: Yehuda Poliker's "Ashes and Dust," Rami Fortis and Berry Sakharof's "Tales from the Box," Corinne Allal's "Forbidden Fruit" and the eponymous first album by The Friends of Natasha. Advertisement Rock, roll and Hebrew The blossoming of Israeli rock in the late 1980s will not be stricken from the agenda during the coming months: The next in line to mark 20 years, after "Ehud Banai and the Refugees," is that same "Ashes and Dust," Poliker's masterpiece, and toward the end of the year, no doubt 20th-anniversary celebrations will get underway for "Tales from the Box," the album that brought Fortis and Sakharof back to Israel and was considered the trigger event for the next wave of blossoming in Israeli rock, which began in the early to mid-1990s. Nostalgia for The Friends of Natasha has already brought that band back to the stage for a one-time reunification performance, which could well lead to a more permanent reunification as next year's 20th anniversary of the launch of the group's first album draws closer. The change of direction that occurred in Israeli music at the end of the 1980s is a source of contemplation now for understandable reasons. There is nothing that contemporary culture loves more than nostalgia for the glorious periods of the past, and 20 years are an ideal stretch of time in this respect. As singer Shalom Gad puts it: "Three or four years from now people will start being nostalgic for the Kasparim, Where's the Kid and the whole generation of [the club] Roxanne." More interesting to ask what it was about those years that led to the creation of such watershed albums. What was going on then that brought forth a formula that successfully connected rock and roll to Hebrew? "It is possible to point to parallel processes that both the audience and the artists were undergoing during this period," says Aran Diener, an expert on Israeli music and the author of the wonderful blog "Zeh Mistovev" (mistovev.haoneg.com), which is dedicated to the early days of Israeli pop. "With respect to the audience, it began to be satiated with the artificial and bloated sound of the 1980s. Toward the middle of the decade rock disappeared, apart from a few exceptions, and the radio filed up with pop productions. By the decade's end, people were hungering for a fresh, sharp and naked sound and for some sort of kick and rebelliousness. "With respect to the artists," continues Diener, "you had the maturation of a lot of younger musicians who at the start of the 1980s had been active on the fringes, and toward the end of the decade reached the center. Yossi Elefant, for example, without whom there would not have been the sound of the Refugees, or Ovad Efrat, who was in Click and became a dominant producer at the end of the 1980s, and of course Fortis and Sakharof." Shalom Gad, what made the dynamic between the fringes and the center so fertile in those years was the fact that there was no clear distinction between the two. "There weren't fringes and a mainstream like there are today. There was one stream and in that stream you had to compete, even if in your orientation you were a strange bird," says Gad. "If Ehud Banai were starting out today, he wouldn't be trying to go to the mainstream. He wouldn't be trying to get control of the center. He would open a page on MySpace and sign with Anova," a small record company that represents Israeli musicians who sing in English. "That's what musicians do nowadays. They concede in advance and this is convenient for everyone. But then you lose that romance of someone who comes out of nowhere, from an apartment in Petah Tikva where he sits and plays music with his friends, and succeeds in ravaging the center." New Wave, Michal Niv, Kutner "One of the things that changed toward the mid-'80s was that there started to be much greater exposure to music from abroad," says Uzi Preuss. "Army Radio really flourished, there was the 'Ad Pop' show on television, New Wave groups came to perform at the Dan Cinema. These things trickled down, both to the audience and to the artists. The Refugees were very influenced by New Wave, Mashina was influenced by ska and by the Clash, and Poliker too was influenced by what was going on in England." David Peretz adds: "It's impossible to understand the move that Poliker made from [the band] Benzin to 'Dust and Ashes,' without taking into account the influence of a group like Tuxedomoon. The whole concept of artistic music, atmosphere, drama and synthesizers - they all come from there." Albums like "Ehud Banai and the Refugees" and "Ashes and Dust" did to a large extent draw their sound from those American and English influences, but they would not have been such resonant works had they not also been able to touch the roots of the Israeli experience and illuminate dark and repressed corners of it that local musicians had previously refrained from touching. The drama of the second generation of Holocaust survivors in the work of Poliker and his partner Yaakov Gilad, the transparent people at the margins of Israeli society whom Banai saw best of all - for young people to whom Israeli music had not spoken until then because they saw in it falsification, closed eyes and too much of the establishment, this was discourse of a new kind with which it was possible to identify: probing, direct and sharp - just like the music. Izhar Ashdot, who produced that first Friends of Natasha album, has a surprising observation. "The blossoming of rock at the end of the 1980s began with Rita," he asserts. Rita? "Rita's takeoff was an unprecedented event in the Israeli music industry," explains Ashdot. "It brought about a revolution in buying habits. From the end of the 1970s to the mid-1980s, people here bought more foreign-language discs than Hebrew ones. Rita was the watershed. She, and later on Shlomo Artzi, restored the center of gravity to Israeli music and it started to sell in quantity. "I of course am not saying that Rita caused people to love The Friends of Natasha, but she was the catalyst. Sometimes something gigantic is necessary in order to change a way of thinking, to get a process moving, and the fact that something Israeli became so big and resonant created an opening through which all the other things entered. This is true both at the level of consciousness and at the practical level. After Rita and Artzi, when the record companies started making money, they were also able to invest in artists whose success was less obvious." Albums like those of Ehud Banai, Poliker, Fortis-Sakharof and The Friends of Natasha were the next stage in the evolution of Israeli music after the big bang of Rita, says Ashdot. "After the Natasha album came out, friends said to me: 'At long last an Israeli record that I identify with has come out.' My generation did not grow up on Israeli music. The records that we identified with were by Pink Floyd and The Beatles. What happened at the end of the 1980s was that people of 20-plus started to hear from Israeli artists - from Banai and Poliker and Fortis - the soundtrack of their lives, the real soundtrack of their lives. That was the transformation." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Land of milk and honey Israeli model Bar Refaeli poses for Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition. If the earth's a-rockin' Shas MK blames gays for recent earthquakes in the region.   1.   Ah! How sweet it was 01:35  |  Danite 21/02/08

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