The sound of music in Kabul

Music-shop owner Mohamed Salim is quite literally erasing the Taliban from Kabul - he is taping new music over the cassettes of religious chanting which the former regime forced him to sell. This morning's victim is former Taliban Top Ten chanter Fakhir Mohammed, whose monotonous warbles were a firm favourite until the regime fled the city on Monday.

Now a tape of his chants is being dubbed over with the snazzy soundtrack from an Indian film, being blasted out at full volume into the street.

Under the Taliban, music and singing were banned - they were viewed as dangerously provocative, along with neck ties, high-heeled shoes, televisions and kite flying. Now the music is back with a vengeance.

Salim's shop is one of a dozen wedged together in Farashgar Street - Kabul's equivalent of the Virgin Megastore. Only Richard Branson never had customers like this.

Getting to the front counter means fighting your way past dozens of young men, all holding money up, eager for tapes. For the moment Salim has run out, producing new ones only as fast as his tape-totape machine can dub over the Taliban cassettes.

"This is the best business in five years, I've never had such demand," he says.

"We're very happy, you can't imagine how much, just to hear music again."

Outside, Salim's music merges with the cacophany of tunes - Indian and Western - being pumped into the street at maximum volume, creating the feeling of some wild music festival in downtown Kabul.

Until Monday night, when the Taliban fled, Farashgar was a grim place to visit. Those shops which even bothered to put their music onto their speaker systems had only mind-numbing repetitive chants to offer.

Business was bad, and also uncertain. "If a Talib came to the shop, he would say give me one cassette, I will pay you after," said Salim, 22. "But maybe the money would never come. What could you do?" In fact, what they did was sell underground music: And underground music meant what it said, for many of the tape boxes on Salim's shelves held a secret.

He shows me why. On the labels of some cassette boxes are the names of the various Taliban chanters. But he opens the box to reveal, scrawled over the tape, the name of an Indian singer.

"We would sell this way, to people we know. They would come and ask, do we have this, and I would say, well, come back in five minutes. The hard thing was remembering which singer was in which cassette box."

The other hard thing were the men from the notorious Ministry for Vice and Virtue. These so called "religious police" were the Taliban's gestapo, and the shopkeepers of Farashgar were a favourite target."I was in jail four times. For one month, for one week, the last for 18 days," says Salim.

A stroll through this city shows a society finally able to stretch its legs after years of Taliban slavery.

"The feeling is like being a little bird, like now you can finally put out your wings," says my translator, Feridun.

Children are flying kites in the parks, men are having their beards either trimmed or shaved off altogether, and though most women still wear the burqa, there is here and there the flash of ankle and high-heels.

In the next door shop to Salim, his friend Mohamed Talut Taheri says:"Sometimes they could come to raid, they would open all the cassette boxes, then you were caught. The other way was that someone would be arrested for something. They would search him, of course, and find a cassette. If he told them where he got it, you were in jail."

But not now: Now the problem is supply. With the overland route to Pakistan cut, there are no more cds and only dubbed tapes on offer to a public suddenly clamorous for music.

This means prices have shot up: A tape from Salim's shop that was £1.80 when you risked jail to buy it is now £2.80. But nothing drives away the customers.

"We love to hear music. Indian, Western, it doesn't matter," says Salim. "It's just so nice that music is back."