In May 2011, there was a launch party for the soundtrack to Mumbai director Bejoy Nambiar’s film Shaitan (2011) in which metal band Bhayanak Maut—whose song ‘Habemus Papum,’ also called ‘Unleashed,’ featured in the film’s soundtrack—was performing. The band’s vocalist, Vinay Venkatesh, a long-time friend of Nambiar, remembers the over-planned chaos: the pyrotechnics on the elevated stage at Hard Rock Café Worli not quite blending in with the glitz of a Bollywood soirée. When we recently spoke over the phone, Venkatesh said, “To be honest, for me personally, it was just something that I was able to do for a friend of mine. The rest of the stuff like Bollywood and reaching out to more people, it didn’t really matter.” The director was a fan of the band and told me that he knew that their song would be the perfect fit for a particular scene.
Bollywood and India’s independent musicians aren’t really as strange bedfellows as they have always been made out to be. But adding independent artists to your soundtrack no longer starts off with a friendly connection as it did with Bhayanak Maut and Nambiar. Several of the independent music circuit’s biggest names—such as guitarist Warren Mendonsa, drummers Jai Row Kavi and Gino Banks, and singers Nikhil D’Souza and Ankur Tewari—have put aside their indie beginnings to belt out whatever Bollywood composers, such as Amit Trivedi, asked of them. The year 2013 marked the first time that filmmakers were actually interested in featuring original music by independent artists. This was a marked departure from the past, when artists would be signed up were expected to customise their music for the medium.
One of those filmmakers was Nambiar, whose film David (2013), featured world music duo Maatibaani, punk rock band The Lightyears Explode, indie rockers Modern Mafia and vocalist Siddharth Basrur, along with singer-songwriter Ankur Tewari helming the lyrics. In an interview with BollySpice, Nambiar said he picked up most of the artists for the film’s soundtrack while he was shooting Rush, a fiction series for MTV in 2012. Actor and musician Luke Kenny, who is currently the head of programming at music channel 9XO, also launched his own film, Rise of the Zombie, the same year; he enlisted the help of Aizawl rockers Boomarang, Mumbai singer Caralisa Monteiro and composed a majority of the film score himself. The Malayalam film, 5 Sundarikal, composed of vignettes directed by five different directors, featured Bengaluru/Kochi-based alternative rockers Black Letters’ hit song ‘You Say.’ Farhan Akhtar and Vishal Dadlani are currently collaborating with Chennai-based band SKRAT for the television premiere of X Men: Days of Future Past.
Nambiar also said in the BollySpice interview that he “met and interacted with a lot of musicians. That really helped and I got to listen to a lot of different kinds of music. I’m really glad, because I feel independent-artists here today really need that kind of platform to showcase their music. And if the film can do that, then that’s great.” Saurabh Roy, front man of The Lightyears Explode—whose song ‘Kunj Gutka’ was retitled ‘3 Kills’ with minor edits for Nambiar’s David—and who now lives in London where he is studying, said in an email interview: “It was cool to work with him [Nambiar] He saw us play it and asked us if he could use it.” Roy added that, “He just wanted it to be like how we play it live, so it's a bit faster than the one on the album [The Lightyears Explode’s debut album, The Revenge of Kalicharan] and the lyrics are different (in the album version of the song), because I hadn’t written the lyrics properly yet.” While Roy cannot say for sure if it got them more fans, he jokingly adds that it did help add to their album production funds—the ‘3 Kills’ track has been played over twenty thousand times on YouTube.
In late 2014, the next attempt was made to put independent artists in on a Bollywood platform. The man putting his foot ahead was director Dibakar Banerjee, who had previously enlisted music director Sneha Khanwalkar and singer Kailash Kher for the soundtrack of Love Sex Aur Dhokha(2010) for a folksy, funky yet familiar score. He then called upon New Zealand-bred, Mumbai-based composer Mikey McCleary for the score of Shanghai (2012) and refused to give him any visual cues. Banerjee told me that, “Mikey knew vaguely about the story and I would give him context, and I told him ‘Now I want a theme called ‘We Are Not Going Back.’” Those words would just fire whatever it had to fire in his mind and he’d come back with a track. Only when we had a major scene completely composed, I would send him clips of the film just to see the composition and how it fit.” For the most part, it felt like Banerjee has never been as deeply involved with finding the right music for his films as he has been in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, which released in theatres on 3 April. For the seven-track score to the film, Banerjee and his team sat down and specifically chose artists and songs they wanted, as opposed to hiring a music director to do all the work.
Banerjee explained that, “Sometimes when you design music that is exactly for the picture, you really don’t add to the picture. That was the first thought. I needed music that was not composed with the film in mind.” When a fan of the independent scene hears Joint Family's ‘Life’s A Bitch’ in that teaser, or Bangalore electronic music duo mode.AKA’s 2013 single ‘Andov.A’ in the trailer to the film—it’s a real surprise to see them somehow fit in to a potential blockbuster.
Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! features Mumbai-based electro-swing duo Madboy/Mink who channel 1920s-era swing music over (reworked) Hindi lyrics on ‘Calcutta Kiss,’ which is a plot point for the brand of heroin that’s being peddled in the film. A majority of the song— originally the band's high-energy signature number called ‘Taste Your Kiss’—plays during a ballroom party, and does justice to this, its original intention, and to what it implies.
This is followed by Khanwalkar, who has roped in rap artists such as Smokey the Great and Big Deal from Bengaluru on ‘Bach Ke Bakshy.’ However, this piece doesn't come close to the rest of the music in the film. For all the rock on this album, a rap song could have widened the reach of the soundtrack, but 'Bach ke Bakshy' doesn’t add much of a new dimension.
With the exception of ‘Bach Ke Bakshy’ and Delhi pop group IJA’s ‘Yang Guang Lives’—the villain’s theme that aptly makes its eerie presence felt with every mention of the antagonist whose reputation is built out of myths—all the other songs in Byomkesh Bakshy have been reworked. Mumbai alternative punk rock band BLEK jam with a thumri singer on ‘Byomkesh in Love,’ retain the original warm, happy tones by guitarist-vocalist Rishi Bradoo, while a bit of synth and dance-floor friendly drum beats come into the film as a love angle begins to bloom between Byomkesh and the daughter of a politician, Satyavati. The track, oddly, is heard again in the final fight scene of the film, used by Banerjee in a Tarantino-esque fashion, adding ‘happy’ music to violence.
The only track you can hear in its entirety, as opposed to snippets in the film, belongs to Delhi-based psychedelic rock band Peter Cat Recording Co., who reworked their 2011 song ‘Pariquel’ to ‘Jaanam’ by adding Hindi lyrics. Frontman Suryakant Sawhney’s voice booms over clean guitars as viewers get a glimpse of 1940s Calcutta, trams, Chinatown and overcrowded streets. ‘Jaanam’ proves that Banerjee’s use of contemporary music in a period film works, and especially well in Byomkesh Bakshy.
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Mode.AKA’s ‘Chase in Chinatown’ is not very different from its original rendering, except that the band has tagged on another of their tracks to it called ‘Chick.n’ and mashed them up. The result proves why Banerjee picked that song over any other for the film’s trailer. Used in a chase scene and later in sequences where Byomkesh is breaking his case down, it is cinematic, groovy and as modern as it gets in the film. Delhi nu metal band Joint Family, which has been inactive since 2011, really amp it up with ‘Life’s A Bitch,’ which is placed at pivotal case-cracking points in the film. As the final scene segues into the end credits, it is easy to tell that Banerjee found something truly expressive in a metal track to give it this much prominence.
There’s a slice of everything that’s come out of India’s independent circuit on the Byomkesh Bakshy soundtrack—from metal to electronica to rock. Banerjee and his team picked out upcoming artists and the well-established—whether it is the months-old IJA or the decade-old Joint Family. It’s proof that any music can be fitting when you’ve got a dark, gory story abound in mystery and intrigue. We’ve now know that neither independent artists nor Bollywood are spooked by each other. The line in the sand, if it ever existed, has been washed away. There are over hundreds of bands and artists across India who are making music that needs a wider audience than the thousand-odd people who show up for a festival every now and then. Bollywood is theirs for the taking. While Roy from the Lightyears Explode told me in an email that more projects for films were in the works, but they fell through, Madboy/Mink’s guitarist-producer Imaad Shah told me in an interview with Rolling Stone that they are already working on similar projects, while also completing their second EP. Vocalist Saba Azad, known as Mink, said, “It’s a commercial film we were working on, so the song is a bit abridged, but it helps us reach out to a lot more people. Bollywood has a big reach and it’s a good medium.”