Outside, the rain drummed down. Inside the Pharmacist’s Club, a private dinner venue on the banks of the Tigris, the beat was as relentless. Sweating fans thrashed, writhed and banged heads. Heavy metal was back, alive and kicking, in Baghdad.

For the first time in five years the hardest of hard rock was back in a city that has been more accustomed to the sound of artillery and suicide bombs than the deafening chords of a metal concert.

For two hours on a recent Saturday night Baghdad’s metalheads defied convention, and the militias that still terrorise much of the city, and rocked to Dog Faced Corpse, a band named after an apocryphal tale about gangsters who had stitched a dog’s head onto a victim’s decapitated body.

Latif Ahmed, 22, the drummer, who abandoned his engineering studies at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University after a stream of death threats, found almost no support from friends or family for his “hare-brained” scheme to restore heavy metal to Iraq’s cultural scene.

“It’s very, very loud and our rehearsals made my neighbours very angry. We’ve had a lot of opposition,” he admitted last week. “But on the night it was great. About 250 headbangers showed up. Seven tables were broken. It was a full metal night — the day I’ve always dreamed about.”

The concert was a calculated act of defiance by Ahmed, whose jeans, long hair, goatee beard and taste for Black Sabbath and Metallica had marked him out for attacks at college by religious fundamentalists. Students loyal to Moqtada Al-Sadr, the Shi’ite clergyman, dragged him out of the university and threatened him.

However, the band was determined to press on. Those at the gig, many of whom had found consolation in heavy metal during Baghdad’s darkest days, yelled obscenities, “moshed” and smashed furniture just like western fans.

They also defied Iraqi convention by putting on heavy eye shadow, anarchist pendants and black T-shirts. Some girls even wore nail varnish and dresses that stopped well above the knee, a blatant act of rebellion in Iraq.

Muthana Mani, 21, a computer student and the lead singer, said afterwards: “I felt proud because after all the difficulties we did it. Yeah, we did it.”

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