A Upsetting journey?!

It must be in the eighties that I picked up a copy of the album “Dave Barker meets the Upsetters – Prisoner of love” on a record fair in the Netherlands. It was the original release from 1970 on the Trojan Upsetter label with a nice laminated sleeve and the vinyl in immaculate condition. On the back of the sleeve I found this stamp of a record shop saying; “Music Center, P.O. Box 3068 Shar-I-Nua, Kabul Afghanistan”. That made me wondering; how on earth did this Upsetter record ended up in Afghanistan? For years now I do have this record in my collection. A collection of records gathered from all over the world, with many stamps or stickers of record shops overseas. Most of them from shops in England, US, Jamaica, Canada and some European countries. But this stamp from Afghanistan is far the most intriguing one. Plenty times I wondered about the journey this record made before it ended up in my collection. How did it travelled? Where and on which occasion had it been played? And who had listened to it?

For people from my generation Kabul is mostly known because of the war in against the Taliban, when American troops invaded Afghanistan after September 11 2001. But what was Kabul like in the early seventies? When you read about that you will find out that Kabul developed to a cosmopolitan city during the sixties. With the increase in global air travels more and more foreigners start to come to Kabul. The tourist industry picked up rapidly and the mood of the city became more and more liberalized. A lot of foreigners lived as expats in Kabul in those days. And it is said that in the late sixties and early seventies it was easy to buy high quality cannabis and other types of drugs in Kabul. This was just before the King Zahir Shah was moved by a coupe in 1973. Then the stability in the country changed, and most of the expatriaites went out.

Those were also the last days of the Afghanistan – Kathmandu – Amsterdam ganja trail. A trail which supplied the rising Smoke shops in Amsterdam. And as far as I could trace the Shar-I-Nua district, that is mentioned in the stamp, was especially a neighbourhood were foreign people and tourists stayed. And even today it still seems a bit of a trendy hippy quarter of Kabul assigned to cater for the foreign tourists.

So maybe my Upsetter record was imported in Afghanistan by some English expartiates at the time. Or some hash smugglers brought it in?! It is still nice to dream about the journey this record made while you listen to the intense tracks of the Upsetters. Is there anybody out there who has a better clue about the story of this record?!

Flying D