By Bijoy, on January 10th, 2011%
“MONSOON IN Bangalore” is how Keith Richards recalls his first gig in India, where the Rolling Stones wrung out a cloudburst. That was April 2003 and those were mango showers. But for such libertine insouciance with facts, the memoir of the world’s most “elegantly wasted rock star” is a balloon of penetrating insight, smirky name-dropping, bitter bitching and bourbon-laced warmth, punctured with several needles.
At the Stones’ next show in Mumbai, I was not yet a fan. Keith Richards, older than my dad, with skull-ring, kohl-smeared eyes and eerie T-rex grin, did me in. Life reaffirms how Richards ogled at Mick Jagger’s Chuck Berry records on a train, how they traipsed London bars seeking out the blues, and how they were a crack song-writing duo for decades before Jagger made it “very difficult to be his friend.” How they shoplifted to afford drummer Charlie Watts. And how they played “American music to English people” before discovering that white Americans had not heard the blues. “The Stones’ greatest contribution was to turn American people back on to their own music,” he says.
Read the full review in Tehelka . . . → Read More: Keith Richards’ “Life” reviewed in Tehelka
By Bijoy, on April 13th, 2010%
My friends at Thermal And A Quarter and I read Inder Sidhu’s outcry against “the media’s hysterical coverage of Indian rock bands” (and before that, in 2008, Deepanjana Pal’s diatribe against Indian rock) in Tehelka with familiar feelings of resigned amusement and piquant regret. While Sidhu makes some pleasant noises and points available fingers at the usual suspects, he disappoints us by stating the obvious and therefore fails to offer us any fresh insight into what actually ails the rock scene. What ails the media we already know.
Sidhu writes that the “vocabulary and context for rock criticism does not exist in India.” When was the last time you met an editor who condescended to carry a major story about any Westernised urban counterculture in India? When was the last time any self-respecting commentator (such as you, we hope) turned away from the clippings morgue and did some legwork to find out what’s really happening in India’s underground music scene?
For instance, how do Indian bands approach songwriting, where do they learn to play their instruments, where do they rehearse? How do they finance gear, studio time and production efforts? What level of initiative does it take for a band to bag concert dates at Hard Rock Cafe or Blue Frog, or plan a five-city tour? Or to cut an album and market it independently?
These realities offer story ideas for any journalist with a serious interest in writing about Indian rock. Perhaps Sidhu might want to consider exploring these areas instead of expending two thousand words on a subject he believes is not worth writing about. That’s laughable. Of course, we are aware these stories can’t be written within a week’s deadline but has any journalist cared to investigate the possibilities, or any editor dared to commission them? . . . → Read More: Don’t believe everything Tehelka says about Indian rock!
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