‘MUSICIANS NOW ARE SMARTER’

Why didn’t you give the task to a big recording company?
AMIT: We’ve been frustrated in the past by cameramen and editors who’ve made videos of our shows. They almost always focused on the vocalist just because he happens to be singing and the guitarist just because he’s moving a lot. That’s unfair. Other members are doing equally important work for the music.
ASHEEM: Our band has no leader or even a lead vocalist. I do a lot of singing but other members do equally important work. Photographers and cameramen in India have no sense of music. Quite often, a shutterbug has asked us for the lead singer so that he could fix his camera on him. And it is silly that when the tabla is playing, the camera zooms in on the guitar and vice-versa.
AMIT: Band culture is very new in India. There are just a few popular bands that are doing something original. Ours is a predominantly soloist nation. All our classical musicians are soloists. Except for the folk musicians perhaps, who are a poor lot and don’t get the publicity they deserve.
RAHUL RAM: We’re also sick of music companies that usually want the rights. It just happened now with our DVD. I mean it’s our music but this company said they would have the copyright over it. That’s disgusting. We wanted no such situation.  

Other artists are going their own way too and new labels to promote indie music have come up. Like Dhruv and Ash who are co-owners of Blue Frog. Or Vishal-Shekhar who’ve launched their label.
ASHEEM: It’s because independent musicians have burned their fingers.
AMIT: Vishal Dadlani of Vishal-Shekhar, for instance, is part of rock band Pentagram and he knows how difficult it is for a band to get a record deal. Bollywood gets them through but Pentagram isn’t as popular as it deserves to be. This trend has emerged because music companies don’t believe in building brands out of bands. Most of these young guys are smart enough to understand that freedom is what they want the most. They don’t want to be enslaved by a company in a horrible, one-sided contract.
RAHUL: Musicians are frustrated with music companies who can’t think beyond Bollywood. Those who do sign on an artist by fluke, produce rubbish, thanks to poor quality control. Plus, they don’t pay. We are convinced that we don’t get full royalties. For our first cassette Indian Ocean, HMV gave us a royalty statement saying that we’ll be paid Rs 16,300. Later on, their chairman approached us for another record and said that we had sold more than 40,000 copies. I mean, was he paying us 25 paise per cassette or was he just lying. Then, for Jhini, we signed up with a company for a licensing deal. They gave us advanced royalties once and after that, they disappeared.
AMIT: But there have been good things too. For instance, we thank Times Music for releasing Kandisa because we had no means of doing it then. But we do not thank them for not making a video or pushing it outside India.
SUSMIT SEN: Today, their CEO wants to re-release Kandisa with a new video. Talks are already on and they want us to do another album. 

Can new labels take non-Bollywood music forward?
AMIT: Somebody’s got to make a beginning. If the music companies don’t find it business-worthy to do new, upcoming indie sort of music, somebody else has to. 

Do you also plan to launch a label?
RAHUL: We are not ruling it out but in that case, music becomes business. Let’s see though how this DVD does. If it does really well, we may see if it’s worth to set up an office and hire a manager. We might also listen to new artists that we like and suggest them to tie up with us. For that, we need money to set up recording studios.  

Besides producing their own work, how can bands help themselves?
AMIT: They are using the Internet and music companies are feeling the heat. The young guys and now even the not-so-young ones like us are using the Internet to push their products, without the help of a music company. Even though ultimately a record does need to be stacked in a music shop and so, for that reason, musicians have to take external help, but a lot of sales are now happening online. Some musicians are even giving free downloads, thus pulling the rug off the feet of music companies. If they won’t make the money, they won’t let the music company make the money either. Parikrama gave their music for free download and they had two million hits. That’s more than anything that a music company could ever do for them.  

You too allow download of your songs on your website.
RAHUL: So far, only clips of our songs can be downloaded. But from next week, we’ll be releasing new numbers—a song from the film Shoonya and another from Halla —on the Internet and they can be downloaded for free.

But how will you make money?
AMIT: We don’t want the money. We just want people to listen to it. We are selling other things on the website, like this live-in-concert DVD.
SUSMIT: A real connoisseur of music will, anyway, like to have an album he can hold and read up the lyrics in the booklet inside. An MP3 can’t be possessed.  

When will we see an independent album from you?
RAHUL: Bad question (laughs). Hurts my heart. I think we’ll only be able to start working on it after March next year. For the next two months, we are performing in the US, Canada and South Africa. And then Bollywood’s keeping us tied. One by one, filmmakers are forming a queue (cringes). 

Doesn’t that make you happy?
RAHUL: No. Well, it makes me happy in one sense. But we have had this discussion in our band that slowly, slowly we seem to be becoming Bollywood music directors. What will happen to our music?
SUSMIT: I don’t think that is going to happen. If it were, we would not have been going on long tours outside. We could actually just sit here and earn the money, right? We are a live band and that’s what we want to maintain, till the day one of us hits the stretcher. (laughs) 

How has it been to work for tinsel town?
RAHUL: Thankfully, the filmmakers we’ve worked with aren’t typical Bollywood fare. Anurag Kashyap (for whom we did Black Friday and a song for Mumbai Cutting), Arindam Mitra (for whose film Shoonya we have done a track), Jaideep Verma (a song for his Halla) and Avik Mukhopadhyay (all the tracks of his Bhoomi) are all very cool guys and have given us a lot of freedom. So far, we are getting the space to make the songs of the length we want. But there may come a time when the pressures of the market curb our freedom. We don’t make music for others, we make it for ourselves.

Have you been approached by a biggie?
RAHUL: Our music is not the kind that a Subhash Ghai or a David Dhawan would approach us. We were approached by another very big name though for composing the background score of one of his films but we refused. We have nothing against doing background music. Roja’s background score by AR Rahman was great. Mani Ratnam knows where to use music and where not.
AMIT: We are in talks with Anusha Rizvi, whose film may be produced by Aamir Khan. It’s too early to talk about it though.  

Wikipedia says Indian Ocean does“Indo-rock fusion with jazz-spiced rhythms that integrate shlokas, sufism, environmentalism, mythology and revolution”.
SUSMIT: I never knew we were so complicated. We are just Indian Ocean. If we define ourselves, that’ll limit us.