A band formed by musicians who grew up in Bahrain is performing at one of the UK’s top music festivals tomorrow (June 25).

Flamingods are joining some of the world’s top artists on the bill for the four-day Glastonbury Festival in England, which starts today and runs until June 28, said a report in the Gulf Daily News (GDN), our sister publication.

Other performers during the event include Kanye West, Florence And The Machine, Pharrell Williams, The Who and Lionel Richie.

The five-member band Flamingods sets itself apart by playing multi-ethnic instruments, which Bahraini-Turkish founder Kamal Rasool began collecting from all over the world.

“We all grew up in Bahrain and went to school there,” band member Charles Prest told the GDN.

“We were in similar friends groups and played in various bands together.

“We all moved to the UK for university and were studying in different parts of the country.

“We met our friend and fifth member Karthik while we were in London.”

Band

The band is made up of Rasool, 24, Jamaican Prest, 25, Briton Sam Rowe, 23, Irish-Spanish Craig Doporto, 24, and Indian Karthik Poduval, also 24.

“We’re really looking forward to playing at Glastonbury,” said Prest.

“It’s been somewhat of a dream come true for some of the members – we’re actually playing on Sam’s birthday.

“If anything, we’re just really honoured to be given the opportunity to play and hopefully it goes down well.

“In the lead-up to the festival, we’ve had a few days of brutally long practice sessions, but we’ve also just been hanging out and trying not to overthink things.

“For all of us, except Karthik, it’s our first time going to Glastonbury so we’re aiming to make the most of it.”  

He explained that the band initially started as a bedroom project by Mr Rasool before evolving into the current 
line-up.

“Kamal was really into exploring new sounds other than the ones we were used to at the time which, generally speaking, was a lot indie and alternative influences,” he said.

“In the beginning we just had a lot of loose jams with each other, not really viewing it as a band but more experimenting with all of these instruments that Kamal had collected from around the world.

“Over time a handful of songs began to emerge that we started to play live.

“What was interesting for us was that it wasn’t really a formed group in the beginning, sometimes it would just be Kamal, Sam and I and a few friends who would be there for some shows and not others.

“Craig and Karthik later joined at different points and we’d sometimes work with a live set even when a member couldn’t make it for a show.

“It was basically us trying to have fun and attempting to make sense of the sound we were touching upon.”

Due to UK visa laws, the band is split between the UK and Dubai.

“It’s hard to make it work when we don’t live in the same country, for sure,” Prest said.

“It does mean we don’t get to do as much as we’d like to throughout the year, especially when it comes to touring.

“At the same time though, we’re always working on music together, often sending ideas over the Internet for each other to work on.

“Our last album, Hyperborea, was pretty much recorded from five different locations with none of us being in the same room.

“We do what we can given our circumstances and I think we’re planning on being in the same place geographically again in the near future.”

He said the band is currently working on their third album and aimed to tour the Middle East in the future. - TradeArabia News Service