Deep Dish

IN Washington, you can take a 'scandal tour' of the City. It's conducted by a Monica Lewinsky clone and takes in all the major landmarks: the Watergate hotel, the Pentagon, the President's bedroom, perhaps. The Deep Dish Washington tour, on the otherhand, visits the Moby Dick restaurant for the best Persian food in DC - kebabs with bread and rice that fill you up for days. The bickering goes on in Sharam's car ("When it's on red, you can make a right. Unless there's a sign." "No!" "I bet you $100." "I bet you $1,000!").

We end up near the White House anyway, where traffic cops on motorbikes lurk in the middle of the road in case tourists decide to jump the fence and get better acquainted with President Bill. American families of all shapes and sizes line up against the railings for identical snapshots. Every ethnic group is represented - white trash with baseball caps and King Of The Hill accents to Puerto Ricans and blacks - and a creepy robot voice seems to be coming from the President's shrubbery. "The visitor centre is on the ellipse" it repeats over and over again.

Deep Dish It's the first time Sharam has been here to the US Presidential residence since coming to Washington. The pricklier, sharper-dressing half of Deep Dish explains that the US Congress is trying to pass a law to fingerprint Iranians as they enter the country. "You can understand why they're doing it," he says calmly. "But why only Iranians? It's just ridiculous. Especially in America where the whole country is built around people who've come from all over the world. They think that just because I have this Iranian thing stamped on my passport I have to be a candidate to be a terrorist, a menace to the people."

WHAT drove Deep Dish to do what they do was a desire to "prove the City wrong". There's never been much of an audience for their records in DC, and while the radio stations were promoting "bland, fluff music" the pair saw their precious DJing slots snatched away. Sharam was dropped from the cheese clubs and Ali fired from Exodus. "It was a shock," says Sharam. "It hurts. I wasn't going to let that happen again. They accused him of playing too much hip hop and they accused me of playing too many deep records, so we concentrated on the music. We were like, 'We're gonna show these fuckers what we're about.'" "It's infested by cheese, this city," Sharam adds. Driven to succeed, he believes everyone's handed the same chances in life: the choice is whether to grab them or sit at home and rot. "One thing I know for sure is that I'm not the type to give up on anything," he adds. "If there's a chance, I'm there, running for it."

Ali muses on the city's drug use. "Everybody does it in DC," he admits candidly. "They drink 'til they get shitfaced and they do coke to straighten themselves out and they start drinking again."

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