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“Persistence is the key to success” so said my late Grandfather, and it’s a phrase which the London based, Iranian musician, Ali Azimi keeps close to his heart. Azimi, a former mechanical engineer, came to public attention in 2009, with his band Radio Tehran and the album 88. It was a fresh sound in Iran’s alternative rock scene, and marked a new beginning for Azimi, who made a decision to dedicate his life to music. During this time, Tehran had plunged into a sea of protest, and for all Iranians, both inside and out, it felt like something was about to change. However, in almost the blink of an eye, our collective anticipation diminished and soon disappeared. Unbeknownst to Azimi, he had captured this renewed sense of hope in 88, but like the fate of the protests, Radio Tehran became mired in problems, leading Azimi to take flight and experience new surroundings abroad.
Crafting together songs tinged with an infectious joie-de-vivre, transferring from raw energy to a lilting beauty, always coupled with fine musical prowess, they mark Azimi out as a musician of distinction. I first stumbled across his work in 2014, with the song ‘Aghaye Past’. The feel of the music was reminiscent of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s, sprinkled with hints of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust phase, I found the guitar work and intimate lyrics an intoxicating bundle of indie rock. It struck me how much Azimi mixes elements of nostalgia in both his music and videos, it’s an endearing quality, having the ability to bring lost memories to the fore and ignite new feelings simultaneously.
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Forever a man of impulse, I approached this Ali Azimi, asking if he would take part in an interview, and by good fortune he agreed. We came together on Skype, and feeling slightly nervous, I was thankfully put at ease by the relaxed Azimi, whose warmth proved an instant tonic. An admitted sufferer of ADHD, he had spent much of the previous night working on song lyrics for his new album “when I get a melody in my head” he said “I have to work on it there and then.”
Our conversation was one of unpretentious sincerity, I wanted to understand this man whom I had heard about so much, had developed a great affection for his songs. I understood immediately that for Azimi, music is the love of his life.
He began “I’m not from a musical background. I had spent two years training in classical guitar in my late teens, along with studying engineering. At the time I was very serious about wanting to become a classical guitarist, like Julian Bream, and gradually I began getting work from it. Eventually I started covering Beatles songs, sometimes adding Farsi lyrics. It lead to me writing my own song, which became popular among my circle of friends, it was very funny. Finally, after all that, I felt confident enough to write and play more of my own work.”
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Later, he would enter into an underground music competition, the first of its kind in Iran, set up by Tehran Avenue. Azimi said “I submitted a song to these guys, and it was my first attempt at putting my work out there in a very public way. Paeez, a naive love song, which suited my emotions at the time when I was 23. It grew quite popular, but soon after that I became distracted with work and life.” At 26, thoughts of a career in music began to diminish, he moved to London to complete his Masters Degree, securing a job in the city soon after graduating. Stuck in the austere and clinical world of engineering, Azimi quickly grew tired and frustrated with it.
“It was around the time of the financial crises, there were a lot of redundancies at my work. One day I was sat next to my boss, and we had this spat, he said if you want to become like me, you have to act like this and that. I said to him, in front of everybody, if I become like you I’ll kill myself. Two weeks later I was fired.” After this less than amicable departure, at the age of 31, he returned to Iran.
Back in Tehran, he finally came to the decision to launch a music career. “I took this grand idea to my musician friends, that for years I had always jammed with, and said listen, we’re all getting old and this dream is slipping away fast. I’ve got these songs, let’s just start a rock band where we adhere to our own standards, where we say what we want to say, let’s just start this dream. They replied with OK! Let’s do it, and that was the beginning, the real beginning of everything.” From there the band Radio Tehran was born. Azimi and his friends were working on the album during the 2009 elections, “we became mired in problems” he said “during the periods of mass protest, some of my band mates were getting arrested and thrown into prison, our viola player got beaten up, in the end it got so bad I came back to London.”
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Along with Azimi came one other band mate, the other two unable to make the journey due to visa problems. “It wasn’t an ideal, but the album was getting some attention, and we were desperate to play gigs, whilst the album was fresh in peoples minds. But with the other members stuck in Iran it was an impossible situation, so we ended up auditioning musicians in London, essentially reforming the band. It gave us the chance to play some gigs around the city, so people were finally able to see us live.”
There’s a certain air of melancholy surrounding Azimi, a talented musician who has well and truly found his niche, however circumstances beyond his control have lead him to live a life of struggle. Creating intimate indie rock gems, and gaining a loyal and loving fan base in the process, yet with each album, with each tour, there is always a financial loss attached, and something ubiquitous of the creative mind, self doubt.
As our conversation became more contemplative he touched upon this “you’re never settled” he said “this is my third album I’m writing now, which I will hopefully release this year. I’ve gradually built up an audience, my name and my work are more well known, my tours in Europe and North America were really successful, so it’s easier for me to believe in what I do now, but I never feel secure enough to say, oh yes I’ve made it. I still pretty much doubt what I do.”
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A double edged sword depending on how one looks at it, but it is said that struggle often gives an artist more creative zeal, I believe this to be true with Azimi, a man whose strength lies in his Goliath like stoicism. Continuing battles with forces outside of his control, has seem Azimi become impenetrable to the noxious miasma of superficiality and grandiose pomposity which so often hovers over those in the music industry.
Like many artists and performers within the Iranian diaspora, Ali Azimi creates a world of his own, one which speaks to so many of us, but it comes at a cost. Yet somehow, in someway, a striking sense of creative decency emerges, one which is hard to define, but impossible to miss.
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You can also read this article over at Reorient Magazine, by clicking the image on the left.
Images and photos courtesy of Ali Azimi