Indian Ocean: Live at Madras

Date: February 18, 2006
Venue: Wesley School Grounds, Madras

You know what the problem with being the opening act is? The majority of the crowd hasn’t come to see you. Most people start fidgeting and looking at their watches waiting for the main event even as you’re up there performing. Now, you can win the crowd over by playing some great music, but what if the kind of music you play just doesn’t strike it with the kind of music the crowd is there to hear? There’s the story of Jimi Hendrix opening for The Monkees (the “pre-Fab Four”) in 1967 and the crowd reaction being so overwhelmingly booey that, a few concerts down, he stormed off stage — while playing “Purple Haze”, no less — and refused to open for them anymore.

Cut to a night in Madras that’s billed as an Indian Ocean concert, with — if you read the fine print — a band called Molotov Cocktail opening. The action starts an hour late and you’re preparing yourself for a quick one (a few hands-in-the-air-swaying rock standards, let’s try to mollify the impatient-with-waiting masses, eh?) before the organisers rush the main event on-stage. Instead you find a band that, in it’s three-quarters of an hour on stage, serves up an array of music played so bang-on that you’re sitting up progressively straighter in your seat as it unfolds. A very funky original called “No Way Out” that segues into a Red Hot Chili Peppers medley best described as in your face (what else can you call “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” – “Give It Away” – “Suck My Kiss”?!), the band, led by the phenomenally multifaceted Arjun Thomas, and supported by an appropriately used alternating lead guitar arrangement, then works it’s way through a set list that almost seems show-offy. Showing off the band’s incredible versatility, that is. There is straight-out rock, there is the aforementioned “Purple Haze” (incidentally), there is the thrash metal of Pantera, there is Pearl Jam grunge. That’s a whole range of hats to don, especially in forty-five minutes, but each hat is worn impeccably, with the sort of gusto and flourish that I’m admiring increasingly the more I think about it.

The crowd gets fidgetier and fidgetier as the set goes by, culminating in them turning down an offer for a last song: not the best of farewells for one of Madras’ own. But what do you do, except try to inhale some of the buzz that the impending arrival of the headline act on stage is generating?

Onward ho, then! Enter four guys on stage, one behind the drums, a long-haired bass player, a guitarist that takes a chair almost immediately, and a tabla player with an almost startling aura about him. Except for the (last) Indian appendage, a standard four-piece, you think. YOU THINK! Starting with “From The Ruins”, Indian Ocean was the kind of band that grabbed you aurally, from the oh-so-delicately pronounced first note of Asheem Chakravarty’s tabla, and kept you there until they decided to stop playing.

It would be blasphemous to relegate the roles of any of the four (and occasionally, five) band members by singling out a ‘leader’, but they certainly have a frontman in their bassist Rahul Ram. Apart from his very groovy, very melodic bass lines, he is one of those rare examples of musicians that can chat up the crowd and get them to enjoy his banter as much as his music. Introducing their second song, “Kya Maloom”, for instance, he refers to the “one above” as “the dope smoking long-haired dude”, and you’re left smiling at the possibility that he was being purely self-referential.

A slew of well-executed songs follow: From “Bandeh”, part of the soundtrack that they wrote for the movie ‘Black Friday’ (“The movie never got released”, says Ram, grinning), to “Jhini” (“Kabir Das wrote this. Kickass lyricist”) to a very upbeat, Goan-Punjabi folk influenced song called “Hille Le” that gets the crowd onto its feet in a hurry. This is followed by “Boll Weevil”, and the most innovative jugalbandi-type thing I’ve come across: the tabla-player sitting up against the bass guitar tapping the frets even as Ram plays melody on it, creating a very interesting rhythm, versus Amit Kilam on his drums.

Each song has long improvisational bits and interesting sounding arrangements, like a section of “Kya Maloom” that is purely Ram’s bass all over the place on top of the tabla. The vocals range from all-out chants to lots of different folksy stuff that all seem to somehow fit into the particular song that they’re playing. Susmit Sen’s guitar playing provides the most succulent icing on a well-textured cake. His playing often leaves you wondering if he switched to a mandolin, and then to a sitar, and then back to a guitar, all when you weren’t looking.

The crowd is now screaming for “Kandisa”, Indian Ocean’s most popular number, and it brings on quite a roar when it comes on. The song is apparently a Syrian Christian chant with lyrics in Aramaic. No matter, it still sounds very good.

It’s impossible to not feel satisfied at the end of a concert like this one. A band with an arsenal of well-written songs and playing their hearts out on every one of them. A ‘fusion’ (a word that I’m a little wary of) sound that is pulled off so perfectly that you’re thinking that these guys were meant to sound exactly like this. And play music exactly like this.