Live
This Way: Dead People and Colourblind Chameleons
Photograph by Vikas Munipalle
Date: October 28, 2006 | Venue: Razzberry Rhinoceros, Mumbai
Saturday’s gig was scheduled to be “one of the season’s biggest rock shows”, featuring two of India’s top rock acts — Thermal and a Quarter (Bangalore) and Skinny Alley (Calcutta). It almost seemed too good to be true — you don’t usually get to see bands of the caliber of Skinny Alley and TAAQ performing together on the same night. As it turned out, it was too good to be true. Skinny Alley was taken off the bill a week before the gig was scheduled to take place, supposedly due to one of the sponsors backing out.
Tickets for ‘This Way’ were initially priced at Rs 300 — something that wasn’t adjusted even after the announcement that Skinny Alley wasn’t going to be performing. In a city like Bombay, where tickets for most rock shows don’t cost over Rs 150, the entry fee for the gig was something that a lot of rock fans in the city weren’t too happy about. To make things worse, the scenes on the road leading to the venue seemed to resemble some sort of traffic hell, with opening band Medusa reaching Razz two hours later than they were supposed to. Sound check followed, and it was quite a while till both Thermal and a Quarter and Medusa were reasonably satisfied with the sound at the venue.
Starting a good two hours late, Medusa (in their new groovebox avatar) started their set with a rather weird rendition of “Renegades” (interspersed with Crystal Method samples). The small crowd that had gathered seemed unusually quiet for a Medusa performance — they were clearly there just for Thermal and a Quarter, and didn’t care about some electronica/rock band making lots of noise. Disappointed by the poor turnout and lack of involvement from the audience, vocalist Raxit Tewari did his best to taunt the crowd, calling them “dead people” and “zombies” in between songs — which sadly failed to draw out even the slightest response.
Medusa’s set included their versions of songs by the White Stripes (a rather excellent cover of “Seven Nation Army”), the Prodigy (”Breathe”), Radiohead (”The National Anthem”) and the Chemical Brothers (”Setting Sun”). They even threw in a couple of their new songs, “Daddy Loves Us All” (with Raxit yelling the chorus of ‘Who’s your daddy?’) and “Beep Off”. During the show Raxit also informed the crowd that bassist Siddharth was, in fact, the “cleanest member of the band” (hey, being weird is cool, right?) and that he would be leaving for the States soon, to pursue a degree in psychology from NYU.
By the time Thermal and a Quarter took the stage, the number of people in the audience had increased considerably. TAAQ encouraged the crowd to give it up for “the band that played before us, they were great”. Nice.
Supremely talented though they all are, what makes them truly great are their songs — Thermal’s songs are about things and experiences that most of us can relate to, and the music ties in splendidly with their often witty lyrics.
For those of you who don’t know too much about them, Thermal and a Quarter (with Bruce Lee Mani on guitars/vocals, Rzhude David on bass/vocals, Tony Das on guitars and Rajeev Rajagopal behind the kit) hail from Bangalore, and are considered to be one of the best bands from this side of the world. And on Saturday, they showed everyone just why.
Thermal’s set included songs from their repertoire of three albums — older songs like “Brigade Street” and “Jupiter Café” (a rather different version from the one on the CD, Bruce even included a lick or two from “My Favourite Things” from Sound of Music, heh), newer songs like “Chainese Item”, “Bend the World”, “Motorbyckle”, “Paper Puli” and “Galacktiqua” from their latest album, ‘Plan B’. Hell, they even played a funky cover of “Wonderwall” (Oasis).
As good as the aforementioned songs are, what made the evening really special (as if it really needed anything more) were their new, unreleased songs. “‘Last Band’”, smiled Bruce, “is a new song from what will hopefully be our fourth album. It is about a fantasy — what if this was the last band on the earth, and there was no more live music? It’s a scary thought, but one that’s all too real”. One of their other unreleased songs that impressed as much was “Chameleon” (’This isn’t even from our fourth album, it might be in the fifth’). A song about “us urban folk”, “Chameleon” was a catchy song with some rather striking lyrics (’The consumer and the consumed … the confusion and the confused’).
Supremely talented though they all are, what makes them truly great are their songs — Thermal’s songs are about things and experiences that most of us can relate to, and the music ties in splendidly with their often witty lyrics. Saturday night saw everyone who was fortunate enough to be at Razz treated to not only some brilliant musicianship, but also some brilliant songs — and as the night came to a close, everyone was left with a smile on their faces, wanting just that little bit more.
Nice review.
Beautiful review Arun .
Kicking my self for missing this TAAQ supreme gig :(
It’s a good feeeling to have hear some one get down and deep into our music.
thanks for being there and the good writing.
May your tribe thrive
Rz
hey arun..that was a nice review..