Throwback: When Rohail met Junaid
It was 1983 when Rohail Hyatt first saw the tall, scrawny, dark-haired but good-looking guy that was later to become the front man for his band. He and Shahi Hasan were already a few bands old by then, Progressions and Chord X being two that they had been a part of, and were on the lookout for a vocalist. Someone mentioned that they look out for this new kid who was going to perform in Islamabad. They hopped on a friend’s motorcycle and made their way from Rawalpindi to the capital.
“He had come down from Peshawar, I think,” related Rohail, “Junaid was not an engineering student at that time. He was performing in a girls’ college in F6 (Islamabad) and he was singing ‘Careless Whisper’. I had just managed to get into the hall right at the end.”
Hyatt was impressed. “I thought, ‘Wow. What a voice!’,” he related, “It was a strange voice, you know – he had the high-range, high-pitch sort of thing. We didn’t get to talk to him then.
Rohail Hyatt looks back on the first time he and Shahi Hasan first saw Junaid Jamshed perform and the drama involved in their first major concert together
“We were just a part of the audience and we’d just managed to get there right towards the end. We were on motorcycles, it was cold and we had to get back before it got dark.”
It would be a while before the two would catch Junaid performing again. This time, Junaid was a part of an engineering university band. “The next time I saw Junaid was in Flashman’s Hotel in Pindi, in a band called Nuts and Bolts. Nusrat (later a Vital Signs guitarist) had mentioned to me that ‘That kid’s coming back. The guy you liked’ and that perhaps we should go and see him.