DIGGING UP THE PAST
Remo Fernandes, July 2004. For The Week,
India. In answer to specific questions from Bosco Eremita.
I was eight when I was introduced
to rock. A cousin returned from London bringing along a record
called 'Rock Around The Clock'. This sound was so new, so
exciting… life was never to be the same thereafter.
After about a decade of going
crazy over Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, The Shadows, The
Rolling Stones and The Beatles, one of the greatest influences
in my life was the psychedelic music of the 70s, especially
the movie 'Woodstock', which I watched over and over again.
That was the time when rock broke all barriers and became
experimental; Jethro Tull fused it with western classical,
Blood Sweat & Tears fused it with jazz, Santana fused
it with Latin, Osibisa fused it with African… rock truly
became the voice of global youth, no more the prerogative
or monopoly of America.
Those years I was studying architecture
in Bombay, writing my own songs, playing solo and with different
bands. Although rock had a niche audience, there were these
massive concerts which we performed at venues such as Shanmukhnanda
Hall, Rang Bhavan, and in all the "in" colleges
of Bombay. But I had no desire to blindly copy western rock.
I wrote my own songs, and tried to fuse rock with Indian.
I began to tune my guitar to make it sound like a sitar, and
taught myself to play the Indian flute.
'Woodstock' shows that at that
time, audiences were open to all kinds of music. Right from
Joan Baez, who had the purest, softest folk voice, to the
heaviest rockers like The Who and Jimmy Hendrix—the youth
listened to and appreciated them all, in pin-drop silence
or lusty celebration.
Today, people have less capacity
for diversity in music. The tendency is to segregate and compartmentalise.
Try playing fusion to a rock audience; or jazz to a pop audience;
or, god forbid, techno to a classical audience; the stage
would be so full of tomatoes, it would put a ketchup factory
to shame. I love to play many different kinds of music, right
from energetic fusion rock to chill-out ambient to soft Portuguese
ballads to jazzy Brazilian bossa-novas. I just wish my audiences
could take it all as well.
* * *
During my three-year stint in
Europe between '77 and '80, I performed a lot alone on acoustic
guitar, but also with fusion rock bands such as Rock Synergie
in Paris on electric guitar. Back home in Goa, I had an encounter
with a Dutch violinist called Lucas Amor. He had travelled
with friends [a motley bunch of musicians, actors, poets,
painters, mimes, acrobats, etc.] all the way from Amsterdam
to Goa in a huge bus painted sky blue with white clouds, and
with the legend 'Amsterdam Balloon Company'painted on its
sides. They lived in colourful hand-made cloth tents on the
beach (since there were no houses on the Palolem beach then).
Later, in Amsterdam, Lucas and I cut a record called Venus
And The Moon, a song I'd written about a girl from the
Amsterdam Balloon Company; her planet was the Moon, mine was
Venus, and the two were aligned in the sky at the time. We
watched our two planets in the night from her roofless muslin
cloth tent on the beach, in which we lay aligned here on earth.
The Amsterdam Balloon Company
had a philosophy which I greatly appreciated; they mingled
with and performed for local people wherever they travelled,
and did not stick to the European nomadic clan which was very
closed-in and pretty alienated from the peoples of the countries
in which they travelled and lived. This led me to invite them
to perform in Panjim, on Miramar beach, so that the mainstream
Goan people could for once see the artistic side of the hippie
culture, which they hitherto only associated with drugs and
lethargy. The show was very highly appreciated by the Panjim
intelligentsia, got rave reviews on the front pages of all
the local dailies, and middle-aged Goan intellectuals eyed
the young long-haired colourful hippies with a new respect
from then on.
* * *
It was at the Dresden International
Song Competition in East Germany, some time in the 80s, that
I had my first encounter with truly international events.
The festival attracted competitors from socialist and communist
countries, whose music goes unheard in the western capitalist
world—which is a shame, because Cuba, Nicaragua and socialist
Latin American countries have absolutely fabulous music! Even
the Chinese and Russian pop artists were of an outstanding
calibre.
At Dresden, I won three awards—the
Press Critics Award, the overall Second Prize, and the Audience
Favourite Award—this last one being
gauged by a computer sensor which records the loudest applause
of the evening in the hall.
They told me
later that press music critics were the hardest to please.
They consisted of musicologists, holders of doctorates in
music, and what they called "pop scientists".
* * *
Some years later, India was invited
to the Tokyo Music Festival for the first time. As compared
to the communist countries, this festival had all the trimmings
and perks of capitalism. I was once again chosen to represent
India, since at that time Indian pop was in English, and I
was the highest-selling artist in that genre. I was amazed
at the organisation and teaching methods of the Japanese.
The whole complicated drill was taught to all the artists
on the morning of the event itself, but the entire event ran
like clockwork, without a single artist missing a cue!
* * *
In retrospect, 1986 was the turning
point in my career. Three things happened that year which
catapulted me into the national mainstream. The first was
my singing of my controversial song 'Hello Rajiv Gandhi' to
the man himself at an official function in Goa. The editor
of a local newspaper, for personal and motivated reasons,
criticised me daily for that song, taking the controversy
out of Goa and into the national publications. I took a chance
and sent a newspaper clipping to Rajiv; to my great relief,
he wrote back saying he'd loved the song and found nothing
objectionable in it. The press loved the fact that the new
young Prime Minister had written to a rock musician [Prime
Ministers before that did not even acknowledge the existence
of rock, leave alone rock musicians…], and his letter,
together with the whole story with pictures, was carried in
countless national publications, giving me unintended mileage.
The second thing which happened
in 1986 was that I sang at a concert called Aid Bhopal, held
to raise funds for victims of the Bhopal tragedy. I didn't
want to perform because I wasn't satisfied with how much of
the proceedings would actually go to the victims. But I went
as a spectator, and the organisers insisted that I sing at
least a song or two, and someone pushed an acoustic guitar
into my hands. I sang 'Pack That Smack' and 'Ode to Graham
Bell', both for the first time in Bombay. These two songs
had a huge impact at the concert. To my surprise, Doordarshan
televised the concert on four successive Sundays at prime
time, starting each slot with my two songs. In a country with
just one monopolistic television channel at the time, that
was tremendous exposure indeed, especially since DD had also
hitherto ignored rock and pop completely.
The third [and perhaps the biggest]
thing that happened to me that year was 'Jalwa'. I composed
and performed the title song in that film, acted a very tiny
bit role in the movie, and suddenly I, who had been singing
original songs in English for nearly two decades but was only
known to a niche audience, became a household name, through
just one film song. People recognised me in the streets in
different corners of India. The power of Hindi cinema and
of the Hindi language in India revealed itself to me in all
its glory.
* * *
If you ask me what Indian rock
lacks to make an international mark, I'd sum it up in one
word: Originality. Indian pop and Indian film music have a
very distinct Indian identity, but unfortunately the "heavy" Indian rock bands simply copy. Okay, some of them have a mandatory
tabla or sitar, but these are mostly used as appendages, without
a true feeling for seamless fusion. Unless we have a sound
and style of our own we stand no chance. The West does not
need second-hand copies: they own the originals.
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