SOS Music Festival Vol. 1

September 15th marked the birth of what many consider now a musical revolution in Egypt. SOS Music festival saw the light on that date. Seriously, we want to be all cool about it and say “it was quite pleasant, you should have come”, but hell no! All we can see right now when we think of the first S.O.S are 8,000 heads bobbing up and down in the crowd, thousands and thousands of hands in the air, and all those smiling faces. We can hear screams of joy, laughter, crowds singing along, and the mind-blowing music of some of the best bands Egypt has to offer.

Back in the eighties and nineties, there was a generation of musicians with great talent, such as Tera and Stonefish. A big number of them, however, played covers of other artists' songs. SOS Music festival came with the belief that talent is not enough and that a musician should always strive to present something that's original. "Let's Go Original" became the slogan and the whole idea became an incentive to many young, new bands to work harder to present a kind of music with character, something that isn't a duplication of any other artists' music.

In the first SOS Music Festival, many people came to realize the existence of original and diverse music in Egypt. Another realization was reached: original doesn't translate to boring. People fell in love with many of the bands who performed on that day, and bands like Ressala, who had a few hundred fans before the festival, left on September 15th with thousands of fans, many of which expressed how they were looking forward to seeing them on the second SOS festival.

International press was there from day one, covering the event. That's how big it got. They were so eager to cover the event and get information about it. The famous "Daily Star", distributed with the Herald Tribune, covered the festival from the day of the press conference to that day of the festival, saying in one of their articles that SOS Music Festival was "a success for all concerned".

The Bands: Brain Candy, Mood Shift, Cairo-Kee, Sahra, Masar Egbary, Nagham Masry, Eftekasat, El Dor El Awal, Resala, and Wust El Balad.