Mo’min Swaitat’s lockdown trawl of old cassettes led to some amazing discoveries – and our 2022 story on it helped open the music up to the entire diaspora and beyond
My original story in January 2022 on Mo’min Swaitat, a Palestinian actor and film-maker living in London, originally from the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, described how he was stranded there when the pandemic began. It was during that time that he found himself drawn to a closed-down music shop he remembered from childhood. The former owner let him while away the lockdown days searching through the archive of tape cassettes on the second floor.
Swaitat uncovered thousands of hours of long-forgotten music that animated Palestinian life during the 1980s, when the first Palestinian uprising broke out. Synth, funk, disco, Bedouin and revolutionary tracks inspired by the intifada were among the treasure trove.
