Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Greens, black, and white - immigration, race, and newspapers

This entry considers the media's reporting of immigration, and the politicians and campaigners who oppose immigration. It focuses on two men who are both much quoted on immigration matters: Conservative MP Damian Green and former diplomat Sir Andrew Green, and the newspapers that publish their words. There are often complaints from the right that there is no proper debate on immigration, so this is as close as we get.




Damian Green is the shadow minister (i.e. Conservative party spokesperson) on immigration. Although there are many problems with Britain's migrant-processing bureaucracy that he could concern himself with, Green is most often to be found giving anti-immigrant quotes to right-wing newspapers.

In October 2006 the Sun published a story accusing Muslims of vandalising a house that soldiers had planned to move in to, and of making threatening phone calls to the soldiers. The Sun later published a correction saying "no threatening calls were logged at Combermere Barracks from Muslims and police have been unable to establish if any faith or religious group was responsible for the incident." The original article featured damning quotes from Damian Green and another Tory MP, Philip Davis. Davis later apologised for his comments, saying "Newspapers and television media approach people every day and ask people their reactions to events they relate to you. Everybody makes their comments in good faith presuming that the story is true." Green has not apologised, and nor has he learnt about the honesty of the press.

The Express on June 20, 2007 reported misleadingly on the leather sofas, "designer shelving" and "10 showers and 10 toilets segregated for men and women" supposedly awaiting illegal immigrants in a camp near Calais planned to replace the old Sangatte holding camp closed in 2002. The BBC pointed out "The charities say they are already providing such services in the town, although not in one location, and have earmarked a site for the centre. [...] However, the authorities in Calais say it would not be like the original Sangatte because the proposed centre would not provide accommodation." The Express failed to mention that the new centre was not a holding camp and merely relocated existing provisions, asking Damian Green for a statement that concluded: "This latest revelation shows that the Government continues to fail to protect our borders", despite the fact that the centre was to be built in France.

An Express story on 4 December (now removed from their website but cached by Google) claimed "Migrants use 'joke' degrees to live in Britain", saying foreigners were taking degrees in theatre studies in an effort to remain in Britain. Green was quoted at length: "This is a late recognition of the chaos surrounding student visas. The important thing is to close this loophole without destroying hundreds of legitimate college courses." However the newspaper admitted that the chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee "said there was no evidence that immigrants were using qualifications from any of the organisations listed to get into Britain."

He also came up with a quote when the Express produced questionable claims under the headline "Each illegal immigrant to cost us £1 million" (at the same time contradicting Boris Johnson's idea of an amnesty for illegal immigrants). The figures were based on a report by anti-immigrant campaigners Migration Watch which assumed each immigrant family would be on benefits till the sole family wage-owner was 80 years old (4 years above the mean male life expectancy); this is despite government research suggesting immigrants brought a slight net benefit to the economy.

The Express reported in March 2009 "One in seven primary school pupils do not have English as their first language. The increased figure has prompted Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green to demand an annual limit on immigration." As Tabloid Watch noted, that has actually been Conservative policy since 2005.

In October 2009 he got his photo on a Daily Mail story despite never even being quoted in it. It's possible the paper's staff confused him with Andrew Green of anti-immigration pressure group Migration Watch. The article dubiously claimed (headline) "Migrant facing deportation wins right to stay in Britain... because he's got a cat"; the migrant's lawyer Barry O'Leary apparently "told the Sunday Telegraph that the cat was one detail among many in the case" used to show the immigrant had settled in the UK, but one of the judges commented on it so it became an easy hook for the story.

On 27 November 2008, Green was arrested "on suspicion of conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office and aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office". It was believed that he had made contact with a civil servant in the Home Office called Christopher Galley. Bob Quick, assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police in charge of the Green investigation, informed MPs what Galley had told him:
He [Galley] said Green offered to look out for a position for him but told him that, 'He wanted as much, how can I say, as much dirt on the Labour Party, the Labour Government, as possible. And so he wanted as much information to damage them as possible'. Galley also stated, 'Well, at the end of each meeting he always tends to say, "Yes I am looking, I'll try and find something, I'll put your name about", but nothing ever seems to happen'.
Green was never charged.




Sir Andrew Green is the chair of Migration Watch, which campaigns against immigration. It claims on its website to be a "think tank", says "genuine refugees should be welcomed", and praises "many immigrants [who] have made a valuable contribution to our society in terms both of skills and diversity". Andrew Green is often quoted in newspapers and news media (not just right-wing ones; the BBC is a frequent consumer of his utterances) condemning everything about government immigration policy, frequently alongside remarks from Damian Green, but never defending refugees or praising the contribution of immigrants.

Many people have questioned whether Green is a racist, and whether his stated reasons for opposing immigration are his true ones. Officially, Migration Watch is only worried that there may be too many people and that immigration is insufficiently controlled: "There must be a serious question as to whether we can successfully integrate immigrants at such a rate."
(Guardian January 7, 2007)

There's certainly an argument that the government has failed to increase funding and support for public services to match the influx of immigrants, but do the following sound like complaints about a shortage of doctors or school places?

"Our society is being fundamentally changed against the clearly expressed wishes of the public"
(Express August 22, 2008)

"The numbers of migrants are now so great as to change the whole nature of our society"
"In central London primary schools, only 20 per cent of pupils are now classified as 'white British'."
(Mail October 22, 2009)

"The working class has been the most affected but it has been silenced by the forces of political correctness."
(Express January 3, 2009)

"One has to ask, too, whether there could be a political aspect. Immigrant communities are predominantly Labour voters. If they had all been budding Conservatives, one wonders whether the situation would have been allowed to continue for so long."
(Mail March 31, 2008)

"mass immigration under this government was a deliberate policy concealed from the public, and especially from the white working class whose lives and neighbourhoods have been most affected."
(Mail October 27, 2009)

He's said time and time again that he doesn't care about EU immigrants: "The big issue remains the very large numbers coming to the UK from outside the EU"
(Express February 18, 2009)

"The rapid rise in the Muslim population is just one way in which mass immigration promoted, even encouraged, by this Government has affected the whole nature of our society."
(Express December 14,2009)

The Express reported on October 23, 2009 "Aside from brave mavericks such as Frank Field, Nicholas Soames and Andrew Green, the chairman of the Migration Watch think tank, there have been no mainstream political figures willing to speak up for the widely held view that immigration is out of control and the British national identity under threat."




This raises two questions. First, are right-wing anti-immigration campaigners commenting on newspaper stories without finding out if they're true or false? And secondly, are they hiding their true reasons for opposing immigration?

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Follow the dead celebrity: more Twitter advertising

In June, furniture store Habitat published tweets with tags related to the protests in Iran. Twitter users are encouraged to mark the topic of their posts with a hash-tag such as "#iran", and twitter.com keeps a chart of the most popular ("trending topics"). Users often click on tags in the top ten to find out what they're about, being taken to a sampling of Twitter posts (tweets). If you can get on this list, there's the chance that a lot of people will read you - Twitter seems increasingly popular as a news source whether you're interested in the latest celebrity death or political protest. Habitat's Twitter feed displayed messages tied to the protests over Iranian elections, such as: "HabitatUK: #MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card." Habitat apologised and claimed they had no knowledge of this promotion but refused to say who was responsible. (BBC; Register)

According to The Register, One Riot (a Colorado-based search engine for Twitter and similar social media sites) is offering Habitat's morally-dubious strategy to everybody, with its new idea: "trending ads". Described as "a stream of ads that are related to trending topics as they emerge across the social web", the idea is that a company provides a marketing message (like "win a gift card!") and One Riot links it to trending topics. A spokesman for One Riot linked his service to dead actress Brittany Murphy, telling the Register "As an advertiser, you have no way of knowing that the everyone is going to be searching for Brittany Murphy. You can't build ads ahead of time. We index your site and then build the ads for you."

One of the risks of any open medium is that people will try to use it to make money, and that the advertising messages may overwhelm the content, destroying the utility of the original source - many people feel this way about email, faced with the endless spam. In a method similar to that of One Riot, each big news event (the death of Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods' infidelity) is accompanied by unsolicited email whose subject line or content promising salacious video or images, only to lead you to some dodgy online store or compromised website, or trick you into downloading a virus. It's a battle that web search also has to fight, with Google constantly tweaking its systems to remove scraper sites and link farms.

Already, the majority of Twitter users seem to be selling something: Twitter does allow you to exchange messages with your friends in a little closed world, but plans for Twitter to be used as an advertising and market research platform require people to continue to interact more openly, to use hash tags and see what other people are writing about. Without people like One Riot, Twitter will go bankrupt, but with them it may not have any genuine users. Twitter has shown signs of being the conscience of the internet; it will be ironic if it starts making money from dead celebrities and political protests. Mainstream news media always sell more copies when it's bad news, but they don't promise to put a photo of the latest corpse in the middle of your press ad.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Those prudish Americans!

It's a common myth that Victorian English people were so appalled by the sight of a bare ankle that they placed skirts or trousers around piano legs. In fact, this was first reported as something done not by the prudish English but by Americans. It seems to come from Frederick Marryat's Diary in America Volume II, from 1839. Marryat was an English naval officer and novelist who visited North America in the late 1830s, helping to defeat a rebellion in Canada and touring the USA. Like Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope, who both visited the USA around the same time, he wrote a detailed account of his travels.

Only the last paragraph of this excerpt is relevant, but the earlier provide an amusing build-up.
When at Niagara Falls, I was escorting a young lady with whom I was on friendly terms. She had been standing on a piece of rock, the better to view the scene, when she slipped down, and was evidently hurt by the fall; she had in fact grazed her shin. As she limped a little in walking home, I said, "Did you hurt your leg much." She turned from me evidently much shocked, or much offended; and not being aware that I had committed any very heinous offence, I begged to know what was the reason of her displeasure. After some hesitation, she said that as she knew me well, she would tell me that the word leg was never mentioned before ladies. I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to my having been accustomed only to English society, and added, that as such articles must occasionally be referred to, even in the most polite circles of America, perhaps she would inform me by what name I might mention them without shocking the company. Her reply was, that the word limb was used; "nay," continued she, "I am not so particular as some people are, for I know those who always say limb of a table, or limb of a piano-forte."

There the conversation dropped; but a few months afterwards I was obliged to acknowledge that the young lady was correct when she asserted that some people were more particular than even she was.

I was requested by a lady to escort her to a seminary for young ladies, and on being ushered into the reception-room, conceive my astonishment at beholding a square piano-forte with four limbs. However, that the ladies who visited their daughters, might feel in its full force the extreme delicacy of the mistress of the establishment, and her care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge, she had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!
(on archive.org, or reprinted Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MT, 2004, p90, accessible via Google Books)

Friday, December 11, 2009

Everybody loves Apple?

Another story about the iPhone? Is the mainstream media - particularly The Guardian - biased towards Apple projects, such as Mac computers, iPods, and iPhones? Although many newspapers often jump on strange bandwagons, such as the Guardian's enthusiasm for Twitter, the Daily Express's continuing obsession with Princess Diana, or the Daily Mail's project to categorise everything into the world into those that cause cancer and those that cure cancer, suggestions of pro-Apple bias have been made for a number of years. Many journalists celebrate the charisma of Apple founder Steve Jobs, but there are other possible reasons for good treatment: the tactics of Apple's PRs, and that most journalists personally use Apple Macs.

Apple are notoriously touchy with journalists and publishers. They refused to talk to IT news website The Register for a long time, have sued several technology blogs, and banned all publisher John Wiley's books from their stores. Reasons to incur this wrath included: mocking Apple boss Steve Jobs, producing a book about him, and reporting on upcoming products.

Historically Macs have been prevalent in newsrooms even in the company's 1990s doldrums, running software such as Quark used for newspaper and magazine production. Macs have their pros and cons - they are easy to use and have good software for many creative and design tasks, but have less software in other areas (particularly games). They can't interface with as much hardware - mobile phones, cameras, MP3 players, etc - as Microsoft Windows, due largely to the decisions of hardware manufacturers about what to support (although they do support iPods and iPhones), and they cost more than systems for Windows or Linux. In image terms, Apple have strong product design, but they lack the moral superiority of free software such as Linux, which appeals to many serious programmers for its underlying philosophy as much as for its power, configurability, and cheapness. Microsoft's business practices drove many morally-based purchasers away (although Apple's transgressions are less widely known). For the needs of a journalist, an Apple Mac might be ideal.

Occasionally a few journalists start to worry about this. The first seeds of dissent sprouted in late 2005 when Apple's initial iPod success was followed by a series of products of less than brilliant innovation, particularly the first video iPod - which came long after products from rival companies and had a tiny screen and minimal battery life (see below). In early 2009, when it turned out Apple had lied about boss Steve Jobs's health and he was actually seriously ill, there was another round of criticism.

One of the first people to discuss this was columnist John C Dvorak in August 2005, who compared the treatment of Apple with that of Microsoft:
As big and as important as Microsoft is, the coverage of the company is quite mediocre. This is particularly true in the mainstream press. The reason for this is that today's newspaper and magazine tech writers know little about computers and are all Mac users. [...]

The newsroom editors are generally so out of touch that they can't see this bias. Besides, they use Macs too. There are entire newsrooms, such as the one at Forbes, that consist entirely of Macintoshes. [...]

I often confront these guys with this assertion, and they [...] all say that they use a Mac "because it is better."
Daniel Lyons in January 2009 complained that the media failed to pursue stories about Steve Jobs's health problems:
The fact is, in the eyes of the media, Apple is the corporate equivalent of Barack Obama—a company that can do no wrong. [...]

But some of my colleagues in the media have made a Faustian bargain with Apple. In exchange for super-special access to Jobs, they tacitly agree not to criticize the company or even to say things it doesn't like. [...]

Apple's entire corporate culture is built on secrecy, and I mean crazy, CIA-style secrecy[...]. Imagine what it might be like if the Church of Scientology went into the consumer electronics business
He also criticised Apple's PR machine in strong terms:
This is a company whose idea of "corporate communications" mostly involves picking up the phone and saying "No comment." Or sometimes they'll pick up the phone and just repeat the same meaningless sentence, over and over again, no matter what question you ask them. I'm not kidding. They really do that. And of course a lot of the time they just don't return phone calls at all.
This may seem incredible, even by the standards of telephone customer service people, but similar claims have come from The Register:
Apple corporate has turned these talented PR professionals into little more than call center workers who repeat the same, frustrating phrases over and over again, refusing to activate anything resembling human emotion or intellect. This has to be dehumanizing, and I suspect many of the PR staff seek therapy just so they can drive to Cupertino each morning.
It is little wonder that journalists whose careers depend on good sources in the industry and access to new technology will try and be nice to these fearsome PR robots.

Many critics of bias focus on over-enthusiastic reports of new iPhones and iPods. As already mentioned, these are almost the only mobile phones and media players that are fully supported on journalists' Apple Macs; Samsung, Motorola, or Nokia phones generally come with Windows-only software. CNet complained in November 2008:
the vast majority of journalists use Macs to write their stories and have a deep-seated love for Apple products. [...] When was the last time you saw the entire technology field stop and wait for an announcement from any other company besides Apple?
(CNet is no stranger at annoying big companies; Google once refused to speak to them for a year: report and the story that started it.)

The 2005 video iPod announcement provoked some questions from journalists, such as Jack Shafer in Slate, October 2005
The pairing of the V-iPod announcement with news that the iTunes store will sell Desperate Housewives and other ABC fare drove the story to Page One of USA Today and onto the biz fronts of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. [...]

Apple manipulates several narratives to continue to make its products interesting fodder for journalists. One is the never-ending story of mad genius Steve Jobs, who would be great copy if he were only the night manager of a Domino's pizza joint. The next is Apple's perpetual role as scrappy underdog—reporters love cheerleading for the underdog without ever pausing to explore why it isn't the overdog.
(Slate was at one time owned by Microsoft, but they had sold it by then.)

2005 was probably the high-point of Apple hysteria and bias. Another example: on 22 September 2005, the Guardian published almost the only positive review of the long-forgotten Apple/Motorola ROKR phone on the exact same day as they published an exclusive interview with Apple boss Steve Jobs. Following this, the Guardian featured in TV ads for the iPhone, where users were shown surfing to the newspaper's website, without the long loading times that the javascript- and ad-heavy web pages caused especially on first-generation iPhones.

Stephen Fry occasionally writes on consumer electronics for the Gardian, and one of Apple's biggest fans, with a close relation to the firm's PR machine. The corporation flew him over to Apple's headquarters to try it out, giving him a pre-release model, and in return received Fry's typically rhapsodic prose. (Time, MacWorld) This is no different to the way corporations woo other journalists, but Fry is not a young staffer on a technology website who might be expected to fall for such tricks.

There is also one particular story of pro-Apple bias which indicates the editorial standards of newspapers' technology desks. In the summer of 2009 readers noticed that the New York Times was employing as a technology journalist David Pogue, who also wrote several books on Apple products, and who gave Apple's products good reviews. Although he was not paid by Apple, there were suggestions of self-interest.

The Times's Public Editor summarised the problem:
Two Thursdays ago [27 August 2009], two of Pogue's interests seemed to collide. In his Times column, he gave a glowing review to Snow Leopard, Apple's new operating system for Macs. At the same time, he was writing a "Missing Manual" [part of a season of books] on Snow Leopard — two, actually — already available for pre-order on Amazon. It is no intended knock on Pogue's integrity — he has panned Apple products and praised those of competitors — to point out that the review put him in the kind of conflict-of-interest situation that The Times regularly calls others to account for: doctors with a financial interest in the drugs they recommend, or a presidential adviser whose clients have a direct interest in certain legislation. In this case, the better Snow Leopard sells, presumably the better Pogue's "Missing Manual" on how to use it will sell.
Later Pogue admitted that Snow Leopard, the OS he had praised so highly, was full of bugs and often crashed. The New York Times - one of the world's most respected newspapers - saw a conflict of interest but refused to take any action to stop it.

The always self-questioning BBC have given the pro-Apple bias some consideration. In 2008 Jeremy Hillman discussed its coverage of the iPhone 3G (not the original iPhone) launch which he claimed was modest (getting radio and website coverage but not TV) and correctly proportioned.

On the other hand, many Apple fans have insisted that the media is anti-Apple; while this can hardly be justified with respect to iPhones and iPods, the media has sometimes paid less attention to Apple computers - but with Apple's tiny share of the PC market that is not too surprising.

What is needed is more substantial, perferably quantitative, analysis. In the absence of that, I did a quick search of the Guardian's archives today. "Apple" returned 16131 results, 2145 in 2009; "Microsoft" 13085 results, 1341 in 2009. Taking figures for 2009, that is 60% more coverage for Apple than Microsoft, despite turnover of $58bn for Microsoft (makers of Windows, the XBox, search engine Bing, and websites including Hotmail) against $34bn for Apple (makers of Mac computers, iPhones and iPods, and operators of the iTunes online store). iPhone got 1074 results against 305 for Nokia. Google (2640 results) and Twitter (3566) got more coverage, although those stories may have been bulked by journalists inviting people to Twitter comments or Google stuff.

(The Guardian's vast Twitter coverage is another topic; whether they are enthused by Twitter's usefulness for marketing, or someone there just really likes it, is unclear.)

Monday, December 7, 2009

Lost and Found

Some examples of lost, mislaid, stolen, or destroyed, music, books, and films, plus some subsequently recovered.

Keith Waterhouse left the first 10000 words of his novel Billy Liar in a taxi and had to start it again.

John Stuart Mill accidentally destroyed the only manuscript of Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution, mistaking it for scrap paper and setting fire to it, but Carlyle rewrote it and it became a classic.

Andre Malraux's manuscript novel The Struggle against the Angel was destroyed by the Germans in World War Two; Malraux, who fought in the French Resistance, was also captured but survived. Only a fragment of the book escaped destruction, and was later published as The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. Malraux did not write any more novels, but served in de Gaulle's governments and became an important art historian.

John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester burned many of his more immoral poems when he decided to reform.

Ralph Ellison lived 40 years after the publication of his masterpiece Invisible Man without ever producing a followup, but with many excuses for not writing it - he claimed to have lost 365 pages of it in a house fire, but the truth of this excuse is disputed. His work in progress was published posthumously as Juneteenth.

Fantasy writer David Eddings accidentally burnt down his office when he attempted to test whether a liquid leaking from his car was water or gasoline by setting fire to it. However, it was not reported that he lost any work.

William Faulkner died in 1962; The Dreadful Hollow, a vampire screenplay set in Victorian England and possibly written as a joke, was found among his papers in 2007. Faulkner was a successful screenwriter, working on The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, and To Have and Have Not among other films, and there were rumours when it was discovered that The Dreadful Hollow would be filmed with a $60m budget, but this doesn't seem to have happened.

Graham Greene's detective novel The Empty Chair written in the mid 1920s was unearthed in his archives in 2008. Unfortunately he never finished it, so nobody knew whodunnit.

Many works narrowly escaped destruction on the author's death when friends and relatives disobeyed the author's will. Nabokov left instructions for his unfinished manuscript The Original of Laura to be burnt after his death in 1977. His wife saved it and it sat in a Swiss bank vault for 30 years. Despite being little more than notes on index cards, it was published in 2009; reviewers were embarrassed or critical (Washington Post, Guardian, Telegraph). Virgil did not finish writing the Aeneid before his death, and legend says he ordered its destruction. Max Brod failed to carry out Franz Kafka's wish that he destroy unfinished manuscripts. In contrast, Ted Hughes destroyed some of Sylvia Plath's diaries upon her death, apparently without her authorisation.

Gerard Manley Hopkins spent his lifetime agonising over whether he should write poetry and released only a few mild verses that did not show his true genius; he died in 1889 but it wasn't till 1918 that his friend Robert Bridges published his poems. Emily Dickinson was another poet almost unpublished during her life; she died in 1886 and her sister Lavinia discovered her poems shortly after; they were published by friends in 1890. However, this collection was heavily edited and it was not until 1955 that a scholarly edition was produced that made no attempt to correct her strange rhythms and half-rhymes.

The history of popular music is full of legendary missing recordings. The mastertapes of Green Day's Cigarettes and Valentines album were stolen and they recorded something else instead - the American Idiot album. The tapes of an album by Peter "Where do you go to my lovely?" Sarstedt recorded in 1970 were lost for 30 years; it was released as the Lost Album in 2008. There is a missing album by Johnny Marr and Ian McCulloch (Echo and the Bunnymen), recorded in 1993, stolen from a courier van on their way to fellow Bunnyman Will Sergeant.

The BBC followed a deliberate policy of deleting old programs on videotape so that the tapes could be reused. This means there are no recordings of episodes of classic shows from Doctor Who to Dad's Army, as well as classics like Hancock's Half Hour, live broadcasts from Top of the Pops to the BBC's coverage of the first moon landing, adaptations of Madame Bovary and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and many televised plays including The Madhouse on Castle Street (1963) which featured Bob Dylan's first acting performance. Sometimes an old telecine recording turns up, or a tape leant to an African broadcaster returns home, but the supply is surely drying up.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

The Afghan John Lennon

In his latest blog post, Adam Curtis tells the story of the king of Afghan pop music, singer Ahmad Zahir. With the style of Elvis Presley and the political commitment of John Lennon, he remains an idol to his countrypeople. He was the son of Abdul Zahir, Columbia alumnus, court doctor, health minister, and prime minister under Mohammed Zahir Shah.

As Afghanistan's elite grew more westernised in the 1960s, the children of the ruling class looked for new forms of entertainment and expression. Ahmad started making pop music that blended western influences with traditional music and poetry as well as songs from Indian cinema.

This is Aye Darya* from his first album, with the Habibia Amateurs. It starts very strangely but bear with it a minute:



Later he became more involved with prog rock, working with Afghan band The Stars, who loved Emerson Lake and Palmer but also covered western disco songs. Begzar Ta Begeryam Chon Abaro Dar Bah is from Beyayed Beyayed, the album they recorded together:



Here's Khuda Bowad Yaarit, another proggy song, with a striking video:



And one of his last songs, Tu Ba Mani (1978; released 1979), with another dodgy fan video:



Following the marxist takeover in 1978, he protested against the new government and his songs were banned from state radio. He died mysteriously in his car on June 14, 1979. Officially it was a car accident, but many people believe he was shot dead by one of his friends who were travelling with him, on the order of communist general Daud Taroon.

Following the Soviet invasion in December 1979, his sister Zahira fled to the west, settling in Washington DC, where she set up a hair salon in the Watergate building. Her customers included Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George HW Bush and his son George W.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, they destroyed Zahir's grave, believing all music to be sinful. But Ahmad Zahir still retains incredible popularity in Afghanistan and elsewhere, not least at his official web site. Recently his music featured in the film The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan.

*Unfortunately the romanisations of his song titles vary a lot (probably from being translated between Persian, Pashtun, and other languages).