The article which appears below was originally published in Krishna Tiloks's book, Notes Of A Dream. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
Between his work commitments and school (which he went to until he was sixteen), the young AR had little ‘me time’. But he did find the time, even during those busy years, to experiment with his own music. There was ‘work’ music and there was ‘passion’ music.
Whenever he got some time to himself, AR would jam with other musicians he had met at recording sessions or came to be acquainted with socially, through school and such: John Antony, Sivamani Anandan, (the late) Jojo and many others. They were the closest things he had to friends. With them, he could channel all his creative energy and actually make music. At recording sessions, he was just playing the notes someone else had conceived. He did not have a choice in the matter, even if he didn’t like the music he had to play. He could, at the most, improvise—though in some cases, like that of Raja, who was very particular about his creations, even that wasn’t allowed.
If he was really lucky, he might be allowed to do a single song or a portion of a score—but that was about it. And as his passion for his craft grew, AR found that he needed an outlet through which he could freely express himself. Bands seemed the perfect solution. Furthermore, he needed to interact with people closer to his own age.
The first band AR was a part of, when he was thirteen, was called Aristocrat. He formed it with a couple of his friends and the group was a distant forerunner to all the others he would one day become a part of—Magic, Roots, Nemesis Avenue, Myth and The Epidemics.
‘Mom always used to shout at him saying, “What kind of names are you guys giving yourselves?”’ Raihanah remembers, laughing. ‘Aristocrat was the only band Rahman founded though. The rest he was just asked to be a part of, as a keyboardist.’
These bands weren’t just a bunch of kids jamming in their backyards or in their bedrooms. Some of them were popular and were asked to perform at weddings and college festivals and holiday-season pageants that were taking place across Chennai. Some of AR’s former bandmates would go on to collaborate with him even after he became a composer for the movies. Suresh Peters, who was a part of Nemesis Avenue, for example, sang on Rahman’s signature song ‘Urvasi’, part of the soundtrack for director Shankar’s second film, Kadhalan. And Sivamani, the brilliant and wildly energetic percussionist, a real showman, is still one of his go-to drummers—especially for stage performances.
Some of the folks who were part of these bands, who heard the music AR was creating at this time, say he was already showing all the brilliance he would display when he did jingles and ‘film music’ in the future. A few say, in fact, that he was an even better composer back then, without the constraints of a director and a script and deadlines. The blending of Indian and foreign sounds, the merging of traditional ragas with the sounds of Western pop and jazz—it was all there already, more or less. The spiritual calm that most of his later works would be infused with did not quite feature in his music during this period, but as ad and documentary film-maker and director Bharat Bala, a longtime friend and colleague of AR’s, says, ‘It was interesting, unusual, whacky music. He did some pretty wild stuff back then.’
Even in the months right before the advent of Roja, Rahman did not let go of his bands. Nemesis Avenue, in fact, happened just before the movie.
‘In 1990–91, the last band we formed with Uday Chandra, Suresh Peters, Sudhir Prabhakar and Paul Jacob,’ AR remembers of Nemesis Avenue. ‘We played one gig and that was it.’
Much later, in 2009, AR collaborated with Mick Jagger, Damian Marley, Joss Stone and Dave Stewart and started a short-lived rock superband called SuperHeavy. The group dropped an album of the same name in 2011. The collection featured a Rahman–Jagger duet titled ‘Satyameva Jayathe’.
Even in 2018, rock bands are only just catching on in India—a country where music and films are not seen as separate from one another. And that shift is largely thanks to Rahman who both made music a relatively more respectable and lucrative career and instilled confidence in young Indians that they could make music which mattered.
Very few Indian bands ever really make it big. While some groups are indeed quite famous and successful, most just about get by—usually playing at pubs or in malls and colleges, the occasional music festival like Strawberry Fields or on TV channels such as Kappa TV. Most cannot hope to live off their concerts and/or albums, and certainly can’t be expected to fill up a stadium or break records. Even now, most artists who wish to pursue music as a career must find work in films or TV commercials and carve out a niche.
‘There was no market in India in those days for rock bands,’ AR says. ‘Everything was film-driven. I realized then that you can’t do anything here if you don’t do film music.’
