in bed with diid

Kenadiid Osman

words by Diid Osman, soundtrack by Jon Stewart originally from Gorgeous and Fully Equipped xmas issue Diid Osman, the mysterious bass man and main sex symbol of the band according to certain salivating young indie females. At last unleashes upon an unsuspecting public his deepest, darkest secrets and the wondrous events of his long and varied life. And talks about getting pissed. Read on...

A STAR IS BORN
“Borned in Woking, home of such luminaries as Paul Weller. I liked England so much I left it two years later and went to live in Somalia, which is now a war ravaged country. I seem to have this effect on the countries I go to, because later I went to live in a place called Mozambique which is also war-torn.

THE CHIMPS TEA PARTY
Basically I lived the life of Mowgli out of the Jungle Book because, it being Africa, my garden wasn’t so much a garden as the book end of a jungle. My earliest memory is of having breakfast outside with the animals; monkeys, iguanas, crocodiles and hippopotamuses that used to break through the jungle fence. It seemed like such a natural thing so it didn’t scared me at all, I’d never seen anything else. I’d sit on the table and around it would be baboons and stuff. We used to have everything growing there as well, a banana tree, an orange tree, we never used to go shopping except to get bread and that. It was very hot so I used to run around in shorts and I didn’t wear shoes until I was nine. I walked around barefoot for seven years.

THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE GORY
Somalia was quite a dangerous place because it was trying to get its independece at the time; I dont actually remember it myself but apparently somebody was executed in fromt of me-- I suppose it’s one of those mental suicide things. So what with deadly animals and vigilantes wandering around with machine guns it was a really dangerous place to live. But we lived in a built up area, not just huts-- my dad worked for a sugar refining company. There wasn’t much going on in entertainment, apart from just milling around town and walking into the bush or whatever, but there was a cinema, where I saw my first spaghetti western films; I was really into them. That’s all we used to get, that and Indian films.

DAZED AND CONFUSED
School was a bit of a problem. At the time Somali was a British and Italian colony, so I went to the Italian Catholic school, even though I wasn’t a catholic-- Somali was a Muslim country-- and I was taught in Italian. They sent me to the school psychologist because they thought there was something wrong with me, and it was just because my head was full of too many languages-- I used to go to Italian school in the morning, Arabic school in the afternoon and speak Somali as my natural language so I was really fucked up. The school psychologist said there’s nothing wrong with him, he’s just a lazy git.

VOYEURISM FOR BEGINNERS
I was taken out of that school because I used to just stare out of the window all the time. Then I went to the Arbic school and I only lasted about two months before being expelled. I was expelled for putting a mirror underneath a girl’s skirt because none of them used to wear underwear and it was a really devout Muslim school. I just went from one extreme to the other, Catholic school, Muslim school... woah! So that was pretty much Somalia-- just school and loitering around in a jungle really.

BEATLES VERSUS BHANGRA
The first music I ever heard was Somalia which just a derivative of Arabic music, it’s whiny and completely grates on your ears after a while. That and Indian music, that was really popular in Africa so I got a big distaste for Indian music. But there was the Beatles and Elvis Presley. We had one of those big sideboard gramophone things and I never knew what it was, all I remember is coming to England years later and hearing them again. If I hadn’t heard any Western music I’d probably be in a bhangra band now.

(concluded in issue five of The it Zine)

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