Chereen Amr

By: Angie Balata

The insanely funny and down-to-earth Chereen Amr, founder and lead vocal for the heavy metal band Massive Scar Era (Mascara), didn’t have it easy when she chose to become a musician. Belonging to the generation that grew up on the DOS system and dial-up internet, the young Alexandrian faced serious problems trying to learn and create her own music. Hanging out at Vibe Studio, where Amr is to be found on most days, she tells of learning to play the piano as a child, not by choice — she wanted the violin — but because her mother was convinced that the piano was a nicer instrument to have in the house. As a teenager, Amr became intrigued by the possibility of expressing herself in music and lyrics. She decided at age 18 that she was going to learn the guitar so that she too could create her own music. She had already been listening to heavy metal, but with no internet her musical models were limited to what she could get from friends. One of her friends put her in touch with a local metal musician. “I gave him (Tarek Shehata, bassist for the band Worm) a call and was like, ‘I need some music to listen to.’ It felt like I was making a drug deal,” she recounts. “We decided to meet at some party in a really weird discotheque in a mall in Alexandria. This was my first heavy metal concert. And the entire scene then was maybe 50 people.” That night she also met another musician who was looking for a lead vocal to play Evanescence covers, which led to her first band experience. After Amr came home from her first jam session and excitedly told her mother what had happened, her worried mother insisted on attending the next session. Of course, in retrospect, Amr realizes this was probably a big mistake to take her typically conservative Egyptian mother to a shady area of town for a jam session with a band consisting of male metal-heads. Not surprisingly, she was forbidden from continuing and had to play in secret. “We would jam afterward in a studio behind my house that wasn’t soundproof, and you could hear everything. I remember, I would hear them from my room playing the guitar and I’d know that it was time to start the jam session. We’d play things [like the] Cranberries and sometimes we’d get people knocking on the studio door saying that someone had called the studio and requested that song again,” Amr recalls. “So my mom would be standing in the kitchen and would hear me singing, and when I’d come home she’d be like, ‘there is a girl who sings in the building next door and the music is so loud, I’m going to report them.’ It was hilarious. My mom never realized that voice was mine.” As she began moving in wider circles, Amr eventually met Ayman Masood from Masar Egbari, whom she credits with having helped her figure out the guitar and her vocal ranges. Amr never studied music formally, but has been actively seeking advice and taking whatever workshops or training that would help her. Masood was also behind Amr’s first concert at the Alexandria Bibliotheca, nominating her for the library’s first rock concert. To overcome her mother’s resistance, she put together an all-female band, Mascara, and played her first concert with mom in tow — with mixed results. The response from the audience, Amr recalls, was great, and everyone was congratulating her mom after the show; meanwhile her mom responded by saying that this was the last time Amr would play. A feminist and a tomboy with unstoppable will, Amr kept on coming up with creative ideas to get around her mother’s rules until Ahmed Abdallah came looking for her for his film Microphone. She agreed to be in the film on the condition she not be recognizable onscreen, so her family wouldn’t find out. “I continued to play secretly until there was another competition at the Bibliotheca and we went through the same cycle again, Mommy giving in only on the condition that no one should know. And this happened a lot. None of my family knew about my singing until Microphone. At some point I even traveled to a concert on the excuse that I was going to a cultural center in Sweden to teach girls guitar. And when I traveled to Dubai for Microphone, the excuse was that I had done the musical score for the movie.” The ruse finally unraveled in Dubai. While at the Dubai International Film Festival, Amr played a concert to a largely Egyptian crowd, and one of her sister’s friends posted pics of Amr performing online. “By the time I got off the plane, my mom had found out and was Googling to figure out if I was in the film or not. I told my mom that I wasn’t even really appearing [onscreen] in the film. She kept on searching until she found someone who had shared the song from the film [on YouTube]. She called me immediately and was like, ‘I wanted you to know that the song for the movie is really good, and well you are not really appearing in the film! And I want to go see the film.’ So I took her to see it and she ended up being really proud and wanting to take pictures with the other actors in the film,” recounts Amr. Microphone and the film’s song “Abaad Makan” (The Furthest Place) introduced Mascara to a wider audience who were in part intrigued by the novelty of an all-female Egyptian heavy metal band. With family issues resolved and her career out in the open, Amr focused more on her music, attending workshops and playing gigs. But having an all-girl band proved harder than she imagined. While Nancy Mounir, one of the nation’s most talented violinists, remains from the original lineup, the other band members left because of family issues or because of a lack of skill. It took awhile, but eventually Amr was able to convince her overprotective mother to allow her to have males join. Both now based in Cairo, Amr and Mounir have been performing as Mascara for about 10 years though they did have different takes on the pop-rock feel of “Abaad Makan.” Amr now has a solo endeavor called Chereen’s Project, which is has a much more pop feel and shows off her Arabic s skills. But if she had to choose, Amr says that every time she picks up the guitar she immediately plays metal chords. But metal has never really been highly regarded here, and Amr admits her focus has always been outside of Egypt, perhaps the reason for choosing English for the band’s lyrics. For Amr, touring abroad means that they are taken seriously.  And, in many ways, Mascara has managed to get more credit outside of Egypt than in their homeland.