Disco Tehran comes to the UK
The New York-based party celebrates the 1970s golden age of Iranian dance music and imagines a different present
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Disco Tehran launched on the sticky dancefloor of a gritty New York venue in 2019. The party’s mix of traditional Iranian rhythms, electronic music and joyful nostalgia for the lost disco scene of pre-revolutionary Iran has become an international success story. Now, tickets to its events in the US, Berlin and Paris sell out fast. On Friday 28 March, Londoners will have the chance to celebrate the ancient Persian new year holiday of Nowruz at the Jazz Cafe in Camden.
The night’s founder Arya Ghavamian left Iran with a one-way ticket to the US in 2009, aged just 16. “I didn’t realise that I had a single-entry visa until someone told me to check when I was on the plane,” he recalls. “I was on my own and for many years I couldn’t find a sense of community or a sense of home.”
“When I moved to New York, I started hosting dinner parties for my friends — Iranian and not — to celebrate holidays in the Iranian calendar. One Nowruz, a friend said that they were working in a dive bar that was closed on Mondays and suggested we throw a party there. That Monday was the eve of Nowruz, so it was perfect timing. We threw something together at the last minute. We didn’t think many people would come, but the turnout was over 300. They barely fit in the place.”
The DJ Ghavamian hired did not turn up, leaving him to get behind the decks — something he had never done before. “Towards the end of the night I played a track by an Iranian singer from the 1970s named Ebi,” Ghavamian remembers. “It was emotional, very romantic. I was playing it for myself and didn’t think anyone else would get it.
“In the years that I had lived in the US, I had thought that people who are not Iranian could not connect with my kind of music, but then I looked up and there were maybe 30 or 40 people left — most of them not Iranian. There was so much love in the air. It was beautiful.”
In that moment, Ghavamian realised that he could curate spaces where music from his homeland would transcend borders and cultures. And so, Disco Tehran was born. Through monthly parties, the night grew in the US and gradually sprawled across Europe. It has also recently launched its own zine, including essays and personal reflections from a range of contributors, but Ghavamian’s annual Nowruz parties remain the highlight of the year.
Nowruz has been celebrated on the spring equinox — marking the beginning of the Persian calendar — for centuries and traces its origin to the ancient Zoroastrian religion. Today, it is still celebrated in many Muslim-majority countries across central Asia and the Middle East that have been influenced by Persian culture.
“I had been to Disco Tehran parties before, but the Nowruz party in Paris last week was something else,” said Eylul Dizdar, a DJ from Istanbul who is set to perform at the forthcoming London night. “The music, the instruments — it was the kind of thing you hear at big weddings here in Turkey.”
While Dizdar does not celebrate Nowruz, she enjoys the symbolism of the holiday. “It makes more sense for the year to start with spring rather than in the dead of winter,” she says. “The Gregorian calendar is not very accurate.”
While nostalgia is undeniably a big element of Disco Tehran’s appeal, drawing heavily from the vibrant Iranian dance music scene of the 1970s, Ghavamian is careful to avoid idealising the past. Instead, it is his way to imagine a different present. “I don’t like the idea of going back to this golden time,” he says. “Disco Tehran is about imagining a parallel universe — what if this thing just suddenly appeared today?”
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