November 25, 2008	Tuesday	Ziqa'ad 26, 1429

NEW YORK, Nov 24: Saudi Arabia’s first all-girl rock band, the Accolade, was profiled in Monday’s New York Times, as the band members got ready to enter into music arena which has hitherto been a ‘taboo’ in the kingdom.

The newspaper reports that the band’s first single, “Pinocchio,” has become an underground hit, with hundreds of young Saudis downloading the song from the group’s website. Now, the pioneering foursome, all of them college students, wants to start playing regular gigs — inside private compounds — and recording an album.

But the members of the all-girl rock band, are clearly not afraid of taboos.

“In Saudi, yes, it’s a challenge,” the group’s lead singer, Lamia, who has piercings on her left eyebrow and beneath her bottom lip told Times. “Maybe we’re crazy. But we wanted to do something different.”

In a country where women are not allowed to drive and rarely appear in public without their faces covered, the band is very different. The prospect of female rockers clutching guitars and belting out angry lyrics about a failed relationship — the theme of “Pinocchio” — would once have been unimaginable.