What a time, what a place - and a place and society which can only be understood by those of us who lived there.

Sadiki, home brewed beer, smuggled whiskey, 45 degrees centigrade every day, camels tied down in Toyota pick-ups.

Wives, daughters and children in the back of the pick-up goats in the front passenger seat (goats cost money!).

Car crashes every 500m and dead bodies left at the roadside - I suppose someone eventually collected them?

No Western women and certain death to look too closely at an Arab one! Not that you could see anything behind the black tent anyway.

A society which operated as England must have 1000 years earlier.

Interesting times.

One thing which made them a little more interesting was a group of young men from one (or was it two) of the British company compounds who got together and formed a band they called Exit Visa, so called because it was a Saudi requirement that all foreign workers must obtain an exit visa from the appropriate government department in order to be permitted to leave the country. This visa would not be issued unless one's employer and/or his Saudi sponsor agreed that you had satisfactorily performed all work required under your contract. To my considerable annoyance, and for this reason, I was not permitted to board an aircraft at Jeddah one night and ended up foraging through the cargo hold of  a 737 in order to get my bag back!

The guys of Exit Visa thought they would have a little (and typically British) satirical fun at the expense of the Saudis so rewrote the lyrics to many popular songs of the time (mostly Beatles numbers) in order to capture some of the more "colourful" aspects and nuances of Saudi society... and they did it very well indeed :)

If you weren't there then much of it will go over your head, eg. references to Sewer Street relate to a major street in Riyadh which had a large open sewer flowing down its centre. I recall standing beside it one day as an Arab cooked pitta bread in his clay oven and simultaneously sampling the two competing and very different aromas. However, you'll probably figure out the reference to "Head-chopper Square".

I got the full story from a member of the band who contacted me a couple of years ago: they did the recordings in "someone's flat" in Riyadh, the tapes were (illicitly) duplicated on a machine at [name removed to protect the guilty foreign government official]. Some time after release of the tapes the band were arrested by the secret police, held incommunicado for a week, interrogated and then deported. The Saudis were not happy about this recording, nor I understand were the major companies who employed the band members.

I obtained a 4th (or something?) generation cassette copy at the time. At some point since then I came across a better quality copy and seem to have become the "Keeper of Exit Visa", the albun is titled "Losing Our Heads" - you will find the copy here:

Exit Visa audio zip file

The file is about 40MB in size. Please post your own copy of the album and help to spread the word.

If you were in Saudi at the time feel free to drop me a line at:
radio@vk3ufo.com

Page last updated May 2021