Last weekend, while Barack was wishing Iranians a happy new year and also kindly telling them to chill out with their nuclear weapons, millions of Persians around the world were celebrating the year 1388 by, pretty ironically, painting their faces black and pretending to be this guy. Oh, and also eating lots of food and dancing until the early hours to banging Persian pop songs.

To celebrate a year closer to the grave for my homeland, I attended a number of Iranian New Year parties (see crappy footage below – which doesn’t do it justice at all) where dinner wasn’t served until 1 AM (so cruel) because the host wanted the guests to carry on dancing for longer. It was total torture – we had to perform for food, like seals at an aquarium.

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Although my biggest fear is when an overweight elderly lady wearing far too much fake Chanel approaches me and yanks me over to dance with her and her friends, I can’t deny that there was some tunes that got my booty shaking. Here is my top five classic pop stars from the motherland whose music I was treated to last weekend.

Googoosh
My mother once described this Persian songstress as the Iranian Madonna. She was one of the most successful artists in Iran until the revolution in ’79 when things like singing and dancing and general fun times became illegal, so she was forced to stop recording. Now she lives (where about 4 billion other Iranian immigrants live) in California and spends her days selling out huge concerts all over Vegas and North America singing her sultry pop songs.

Black Cats
Whenever I go back to Iran all of my cousins are still listening to Metallica, Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen and Chris de Burgh. When I was younger they used to make me translate lyrics to all the songs for them, so I ended up knowing all the words to stuff like “Spanish Train”. When we’d have illegal parties in people’s parents’ basements with the music really low in case the police would hear, they would always play Black Cats. They are kind of like Iran’s answer to Mystery Jets because one member of the group’s dad is in the band. I especially like this music video because the dad (whose face is a bit like Bo’ Selecta parody of Mel B) is in the opening scene asking his slutty younger girlfriend where she’s been all this time and she tells him that it’s none of his business (wouldn’t happen in Iran).

DJ Aligator
If your guests at a party seem to slow down on the dancefloor and they look like they’re just waiting for the track to finish so they can go and sit down, then be sure to drop in a track by DJ Aligator. For this track he has (I think) sampled some type of famous football song and put an Iranian twist on it (the twist being that Iranians are really bad at football).

Kamran & Hooman
What I love about Asian music is how they can so unashamedly just rip samples from Western music and get away with it. Kamran and Hooman have, er, “taken inspiration” from Justin Timberlake and T.I.’s “My Love” with this song. I’m not sure which of the pair would be Trouserwilly and which would be T.I. though – they are both a bit too “flamboyant” to take the role of a rapper. By the way, see if you can spot the Jack Nicholson lookalike. Classy.

Andy
Hailed as the Iranian Elvis, his full name is Andranik Madadian but the nation likes to just call him Andy – which, if you were wondering, doesn’t have any more of a ring to it in Iran than it does over here. It’s hard to find any good music video for Andy but above is a great montage of some of his crazy live shows where he does stuff like pick up small children and push fans off the stage.

PRINCESS FARROWLANDS