Those were the days

The publicity surrounding 'What's On' magazine's thirtieth birthday prompts me to indulge myself and wallow in memories about the good ol' days in Dubai.

'Wallowing' because I was there at the conception and birth of the magazine, I even wrote a story for the first edition. The founder of the magazine, and what is now the publishing empire of Motivate Publishing, Ian Fairservice is a good friend from way back then.

I'm still embarrassed about the story, it was so bad. I was horrendously busy at the office, people were constantly coming in with their problems and in the middle of it all I dashed it off in a couple of minutes...

That brings to mind a change in Dubai, working hours. We worked, officially, 8 to 1 and 4 to 7 Sunday through Wednesday, 8 to 2 on Thursday. Weekend was what was left of Thursday plus Friday. I say 'officially' because in reality we worked through much of the siesta time and never left at the official finishing time, so a sixty hour or more week was quite normal.

In fact I met Ian before he moved here. I was, as wasn't unusual, sitting in the Banjo Bar at the Excelsior Hotel one evening. Ian was here for his interview as Assistant General Manager and we got chatting as he wanted to know about living and working in Dubai.

A few weeks later I was sitting in the Banjo Bar, again, when Ian came in and told me he'd accepted the job and had just moved to Dubai.

The Excelsior was my 'local' because it was near my apartment, and there really wasn't a lot of choice back then. I lived on the top floor of a brand new building in Deira - Al Ghurair Centre was subsequently built not far from it. In 1977 it looked like this...



The Excelsior was one of not many hotels back then and like most buildings in Dubai was surrounded by sand.



The original hotel brochure had a somewhat misleading photograph on the cover. We'd had some rain and the big puddle which appeared outside the hotel gave the photographer an idea, the sort of shot he'd seen waterfront hotels overseas use...



The old Excelsior eventually became Sheraton Deira. If you know it now you'll realise just how much the city has changed.

Ian and I became firm friends and a little later we bought a mobile disco. That's another hint at Dubai back then. There was a disco at the Inter.Continental hotel on the Creek, I seem to remember another at, I think, the Riviera hotel, there was a mobile disco sponsored by Marlboro cigarettes and us. That was it.



We really started it as a bit of fun but there was a big demand and we did pretty well out of it, getting Dh750 for each gig. We had the latest disco records (yes, vinyl discs folks) sent from the UK by friends, shared the deejaying, the setting up and dismantling, lugged the heavy equipment around in the heat and humidity.

Power cuts weren't unusual in those days which meant lifts weren't operating and on more than one occasion, in the early hours of the morning, we had to stagger up the stairs to my sixth floor apartment several times with speakers, lights, boxes of records, the disco console. We consoled ourselves by telling each other the fee made it worthwhile.

We did one-offs in private houses and various places like Dubai Country Club and the Indian Club and we had regular gigs at places like the RAK Hotel and Al Ain Hilton.

Ian had an old Range Rover which we used to transport the gear on roads which were a bit different from those we drive on today. Here's the disco on the Dubai-Ras Al Khaimah Road...



And here's the Dubai-Al Ain road...




I was managing an advertising agency and when Ian decided to leave the hotel and start 'What's On' we had many a long chat about the viability, how it could be succesful, the kind of content, whether to have a cover price. I didn't even dream that it would still be going strong thirty years later, much less that it would have morphed into a publishing empire and all credit to Ian for what he's achieved.

Putting it in context you have to realise that back then there was no English media and Dubai was a very different place. He was going into, to use a cliche, uncharted waters.

Population was maybe 250,000 to 300,000. Emiratis made up a much larger percentage of the population than they do now but there was still a large and varied expat population. Entertainment was very limited, there were very few hotels, no tourist industry. Was there enough happening to provide content for a 'What's On' magazine? Were there enough advertisers to support it? Were there enough people who'd read it?

Actually there was one English-language thing to read, called Recorder. It had changed from its earlier name of Reuters because it was actually nothing to do with Reuters, it was a local invention. It was simply copies of Reuters wire stories on A4 paper stapled together. To advertise to the English-speaking audience we printed our own A4 leaflets, one or both sides, and they were stapled, for a fee of course, into Recorder.

Photographers were thin on the ground as was all the infrastructure the ad industry needed, models for example. We had to use friends and colleages - this photo from the Excelsior brochure is an example. Amateur it looks and amateur indeed it is. Those are real waiters serving Ian and a staff member pretending to be guests.



The usual thing to do was to clip photographs from overseas magazines and use them as artwork. Copyright wasn't something to bother with. Those were the days? Maybe not after all.

Most of my photographs from the old days are back in Australia but I have a few with me and I came across this one of Ian, which I'm sure he won't mind me going public with, and it gives another glimpse of a very different Dubai.

This is Jumeirah beach, what's now Jumeirah Beach Park next to the Dubai Marine Resort.



Ian in the lounger, lead guitarist and singer from the band then playing at the Excelsior's Eve Super Club (which we assumed should have been Supper Club), big George Haddad the security man and a couple of hotel guests.


Actually, yes those were the good ol' days.