This evening was an exception because the host was a large American record label that was hoping to find new sounds here. If they were going to do that they had to know what was truly cool in Addis Ababa, and such was not to be discovered from the lily-white crowd who only occasionally dared the nightclubs in that part of town called "the Desert," Addis Ababa’s busy and notably wild red-light district. Hence, this party was in a new building strategically constructed to link that place with the more salubrious palace district and facilitate the creation of a cosmopolitan scene. Two American women from PETA, here to tell us why we should be nice to our little furry friends, were dancing in their underwear on an expensive Swedish carpet. A German photographer was taking pictures of their clothes where they lay discarded and saying that here at last was the critique she had been looking for when she travelled to Addis Ababa. Three members of the Trinidadian cricket team were drinking absinthe with the Emperor’s advisor on Sino-European relations, and the music was provided by one of those local bands everyone said would be bigger than the Rolling Stones. On their first and only album cover, the name of the group was given as a stylised hatchet, enamelled with a lipsticked and enticing female mouth caught somehow in the act of appreciative smirking, so that the symbols together made, in English, the sounds "axe" and "mmm"—or "Aksum," which was the old name for Ethiopia. My friend Tamirat had designed this sideroglyph and was the toast of our little circle for his wit—and, to be fair, for his execution, because it isn’t easy to convey "mmm" so clearly with just a single impression of a mouth, but he had.