The day fox news called

One day shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Hassan Ali answered the door to his family home in Baghdad. Some strange men were standing on the doorstep. "I'd never seen anything like these huge armed men in flak jackets. They were scary. My father was worried they were going to kill us." The men turned out to be bodyguards for a Fox News crew, come to interview Ali and the other four members of his band UTN1.

Fox News weren't the first or last western journalists to visit. During 2003, wave after wave of advancing media troops from Britain and the US fell on UTN1, each one withdrawing in triumph with the same putatively sweet story. In the middle of the unremitting bleakness of war, here was comforting, upbeat news about five cute guys who, inspired by Boyzone and Westlife, had firmed their abs, modulated their harmonies and followed a career path comprehensible to us in the west: they had formed a boy band.

It was an irresistible story. UTN1 wore singlets - like Take That! They pouted broodingly for the cameras - like Ronan Keating! They sang in English and wore Converse! They crooned about peace, rather than detonating themselves at army checkpoints!

Better yet, somehow these plucky guys had managed to imbibe western popular culture (meaning the Spice Girls, Boys to Men and, just possibly, Blue). They were a multicultural melange of Muslims and Christians, Sunnis and Shias - thus pointing the way to the fine democratic future that Bush and Blair said Iraq would enjoy as soon as the west had won. In a marvellous piece of cultural imperialism, the west wrote up these five men - Shant Garabedian (30), Akhlad Raof (28), Artin Haroutiounian (31), Hassan Ali (26) and Nadeem Hamid (26) - as Iraq's only boy band, and a symbol of the country's bright post-war future.

The story suggested Iraqis wanted to be like us; and, more, that our invasion was to liberate people like us from people - devils, really - who weren't.

Iraqi culture thus apparently consisted of citadels of western-facing music and art in an otherwise toxic wasteland. Iraq had one boy band. It also had just one heavy metal band, we learned, called Acrassicauda, who had a similar tale of battling Saddam's censorship to hear the inspirational tones of Metallica and Napalm Death. If only western journalists had dug deeper, they might have found Eminem's spiritual brother in Mosul, Iraq's answer to Tracey Emin in Basra and an underground network of Harry Potter nuts extending from Kurdistan to the Gulf.

Only one problem with UTN1's story as it appeared in the west. It wasn't true. "We weren't a boy band," says Hassan, who is UTN1's guitarist and singer. "That was just a handle for the western media."

"We formed just before the millennium," recalls keyboardist Haroutiounian. "We wanted to do something unique in the Arab-speaking world: writing and performing our own songs in English." Their ambitions were written into the band's name: UTN1 stands for Unknown to No One. "We were very influenced by Boyzone and Westlife. I was fascinated by the Spice Girls."

Why, for the love of Mel C, why? " We liked the harmonies of singing together in these groups. Each singer had a different line," says Garabedian. "In Arabic music there is no such harmonising group singing; it's usually just one vocalist. We really wanted to do what they did, but with our twist. Yes, we were inspired by western pop music, but that was never all we were."

How did UTN1 feel about being made into poster boys for the liberation of Iraq? "The media interest was an opportunity for us at the precise moment when there were no other opportunities for us as musicians and the future for musicians in Baghdad looked - as it has indeed proved to be - very bleak," says Hamid. "We didn't see ourselves as poster boys: we saw ourselves as musicians struggling to carry on our careers in very difficult circumstances."

But the band had previous in pursuing dubious-seeming opportunities. They once wrote a song celebrating Saddam Hussein's birthday; it was commissioned by a radio station run by his son Uday. It's not entirely clear to me whether they were exploiting or exploited. "Let me explain how that happened," says Artin Haroutiounian with a grin. "We wanted to be the next U2, and we thought it was possible if we sang in English." So the band wrote a love song that they wanted broadcast on the Voice of Youth, an English-language radio station in Baghdad.

VoY agreed to play the song, but on one condition: UTN1 would have to write another commemorating the birthday of Saddam.

"We wrote the song in three days!" says Raof. All five chuckle over this memory as if it were just one of those crazy things one has to do in showbiz, like Take That wearing nipple-gaping tops to titillate pre-pubescent girls in the early 1990s. Didn't you have qualms? "We wanted our record played," says Haroutiounian, staring me down. Their song included the following lines: "All bells let them ring/ As we all will sing/ Long live dear Saddam." "They told us we had to use the word 'Saddam'. Otherwise we probably wouldn't," Haroutiounian says. VoY played it incessantly, but only spun their love song once.

UTN1 went on to make an album of songs in English, funded by Alan's Melody, the only shop selling imported CDs in the Iraqi capital. Ali says: "In Saddam's Iraq there was no satellite TV, no internet, not much access to the outside world, so [the shop's] influence was vital."

They sent copies of their CD to record companies in London, says Haroutiounian. "It is a capital of the musical world and we wanted to go there." But it wasn't to be. It was now late 2003 and the dictator whose birthday UTN1 had been obliged to celebrate in song had been swept from power and their homeland was being razed. "None of us had passports and getting new ones in wartime was impossible. It would have taken a year and a half."

As a result, the boys contemplated giving up music. Handily, while working for an import-export company, Garabedian met an American businessman called Larry Underwood whose Laudes Corporation was operating in post-Saddam Iraq. After hearing the CD, Underwood, who saw commercial possibilities of Iraq's first ever international pop group, decided to invest in them and so arranged for his new charges to go to Jordan. Once in Amman, the members of UTN1 successfully applied for a UK visa at the British embassy. As a result, they spent seven months in London in 2005 and 2006, learning to dance, sing and finesse the buffing of their six packs in the manner deemed requisite by UK style gurus. "It is a great city and we want to go back there sometime," says Haroutiounian. "Yes," agrees Raof, "we never did go on the London Eye."

Seemingly UTN1, funded by an American and groomed by Brits, was being moulded to became even more western than before. Ali, who not only plays guitar, but also oud on some UTN1 tracks, denies this: "Yes, we perfected that kind of boy-band style, but our Iraqi identity is clearly in the music." The band also uses the joza, a violin-like instrument which Hassan describes as having "its own special scale of sadness". You can hear it on their first single called While We Can. In the song's video (available on YouTube), children carry wooden guns which they symbolically drop at the end. "It is about stopping war," says Haroutiounian. "That is what we believe in."

Once their UK visas ran out, UTN1 settled in Beirut. Why the Lebanese capital? "It is impossible to make music in Baghdad. We are musicians, so we are in Beirut," says Hamid. "If we were freedom fighters, we would be in Baghdad."

Only one problem: they moved to Beirut in 2006, shortly before the Israeli-Lebanon war broke out. "War seems to follow us," says Haroutiounian. UTN1 withdrew to Amman, returning to Beirut only after hostilities ceased.

They remain exiles in Lebanon. Do you want to go home? "We go back to Baghdad occasionally," says Hamid, "and we would like to play a concert there, but it is not clear whether that would be too risky. As for living there - yes, perhaps, sometime, though who knows when?"

What do your families make of your chosen careers? "When we started some of them thought it was crazy for us to try to make our livelihoods in music. It just didn't happen. But now we're successful, we hear less of this," says Ali. All five prefer not to discuss their families who still live in Baghdad.

"One day," says Raof, "we hope to return to Baghdad. We want to set up a music school there, or a music store, or do something for our homeland. Iraq has too little music these days. We have been away for too long and we have so much to give back."

We're sitting in the new offices of UTN1's management company in central Beirut. From the fourth floor window one can see not just the Mediterranean, but also gridlock reportedly caused by a Hezbollah rally. Outside a muezzin is vying with the jackhammers and construction cranes as he summons the faithful to prayer at the Al-Omari Mosque. Beirut's city centre is being rebuilt. Only in Shanghai have I been more overwhelmed by the omnipresent sound of construction. This, I say, to UTN1, is what Baghdad will sound like in a happier time. All five giggle obligingly but none comments.

Instead, they tell me about their latest career move. Last year they decided to start singing in Arabic, recording a single called Jamila, which means beautiful. "It was number one across the Middle East," says Haroutiounian proudly. Why was it a success? "Because we sang Arabic but with western-style harmonies. There is nothing like it in the world. It blew people's minds." It did too: if you consult UTN1's MySpace page, you'll find encomia from around the world.

Hassan Ali tells me they have already recorded an album of six English and six Arabic songs and their management is waiting for the right time to release it. "Our hope is to heal the wounds between east and west, to spread a message of reconciliation."

Are you a political band? All five shake their heads. "We always wanted to show that something good can come out of Iraq," says Haroutiounian. "We are three Muslims and two Christians. We show how things are changing in Iraq." I notice that on the band's MySpace page, Nadeem cites Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East as one of his favourite books. "I will remove that reference. I am not sure that I trust his politics, having now finished the book."

Are you happy the British are leaving? "We're glad that the withdrawal shows that Iraqi police and soldiers can now look after their own country," says Hamid.

What would you be doing if you weren't successful in music? "I have a qualification in agriculture so I would be a farmer," says Garabedian. "I have a degree in chemistry, so I would be working for a corporation," says Ali. "I would be a porn star," says Haroutiounian who, I think, isn't taking my question seriously. "I would be his assistant," says Raof. "I studied biology," says Hamid, "but I don't see myself in a lab coat."

It's all smiles until Hamid adds: "Actually your question is impossible. None of us can imagine what we would have done. It's hard enough to know what you'll be doing in two weeks' time if you're an Iraqi. It's too dangerous to imagine the future. Hassan couldn't have been an industrial chemist because for him to step outside his house in Baghdad would have been suicide. Shant couldn't farm - it would have been too dangerous. And Art is Armenian so he would have been abducted by some sect. Normal dreams weren't available to us."