Amr Diab

Earth and water take four of his planets each, leaving one in fire and one in air. Earth builds and water registers; nothing in the chart simply announces itself or stands back to analyse. Diab is an Egyptian singer and the best selling Arab artist of his era, which is a standing measured across a region of many countries rather than inside any one market.

Four planets group inside four degrees of Scorpio, which is an extraordinarily tight cluster: the Moon, Mercury, Mars and Neptune, with the Moon sitting conjunct Mars at a sixth of a degree. Scorpio concentrates and withholds. Having feeling, speech, drive and image packed into almost a single point of that sign describes a performer whose appeal is intensity rather than charm, delivered without visible effort and without much explanation.

The Sun sits in Libra, the one air placement he has, which leaves the sign of the audience and of what works between people carrying the identity entirely on its own. The Moon stands at a hard angle to Venus three hundredths of a degree short of exact, the tightest thing in the chart, so private feeling and taste are at odds at effectively no distance. Mercury alone was retrograde.

Jupiter stood on its Capricorn birth degree once more on 9 December 2020, at fifty nine, eleven months after Saturn closed its own circuit. Capricorn sets any reach against what reaching cost, which is the stricter of the two accounts available, and five laps of the planet precede it. A career spanning four decades across a whole region is what that measure was designed to total up. Having Saturn ask about cost first and Jupiter ask about reach eleven months later puts the two questions in the order a working musician would recognise, and Capricorn holds both of them.