The interview which appears below was originally published in Nasreen Munni Kabir's book, A.R. Rahman: The Spirit of Music. ©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.
NMK: By the time you were twenty-two, you had already worked for almost eleven years. How did you come to compose jingles?
A.R.R.: Good question. I knew the lead keyboardist Viji Manuel who used to play for Mr. Ilayaraja. Viji was one of my idols in keyboard playing. He composed jingles and I played the keyboards for him. I really loved spending time with Viji, playing all that stuff.
Some of my friends, who worked in advertising, including Trilok and Sharada, Vijay Modi, Rajeev Menon, and Bharatbala — Bala is a friend from my school days — started commissioning me to compose jingles for them. So it was film music in the day and TV and radio jingles at night.
Writing jingles was satisfying because I had creative freedom. It meant working with people who weren’t necessarily from a film background. I was entering the world of advertising, which was a relatively new industry in those days. It was exciting to meet new people and discover different ways of thinking.
NMK: When did you start composing jingles full-time?
A.R.R.: It really took off in 1989. That’s when I stopped working as a session musician. I composed hundreds of jingles till about 1991 when work for Roja started.
NMK: Did you compose any other kind of music before film music took over?
A.R.R.: Very few people know that in 1987, I composed an album called Disco Disco with the singer/actor Malaysia Vasudevan. It had lots of other musical styles besides disco. I was sad to hear that Malaysia Vasudevan passed away on 20 February 2011. He was one of the first people to believe in me. He gave me my first break as music producer for Disco Disco.
I also recorded Deen Isai Maalai, an album of Sufi music. It wasn’t a commercial venture. When I managed to build my music studio in 1989, it was the first piece of music that was recorded there.
At a jingle recording, I met the playback singer Malgudi Shubha and we decided to do an album together called Set Me Free. It was an English-language album. It was released in 1990, and later re-released in 1996, when we did it better. Set Me Free was a stepping-stone. It gave me the experience of composing tunes with English song words.
In 1997, we released the Vande Mataram album. My friends Bharatbala and Kanika Myer produced the album and the music video. I was keen to do something that wasn’t film music and we all worked together on the concept of the album. People loved “Maa tujhe salaam.” In the late 1990s, that song became the soundtrack to people’s lives.
The album also featured the popular duet “Gurus of Peace” with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
When the Vande Mataram music video was aired on all the TV channels in India, I think it was the first time that people saw what I looked like.
NMK: Do you remember when “Maa tujhe salaam” was recorded? Was it in Chennai?
A.R.R.: Yes. It was at the end of January in 1997, on the 27th day of Ramadan. It is considered an auspicious time where belief has it that angels open the gates of heaven and all prayers are answered.
I went down to my studio in the backyard of the house. It was two in the morning. My sound engineer, the ever-loyal S. Sivakumar, had vanished. A friend once described my two sound engineers as the sun and the moon because one worked all day and the other all night. [smiles]
So that night when I realized that Siva has gone, I called my friend Bala. Naturally, he was asleep. It was three in the morning. He rushed over to the studio an hour later. When he entered, I told him that he was the sound engineer for the night. I sang him a few verses of “Maa tujhe salaam.” There were just the two of us. It was almost dawn. I remember Bala was overwhelmed with emotion. He had tears in his eyes.
Making the album was a great experience. The aim was to commemorate fifty years of India’s independence. It was released on 12 August 1997.
NMK: Did you also work on Colours, a 1992 album with the superb musicians Zakir Hussain and violinist Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan? I believe you were credited as A.S. Dileep Kumar. And apparently you toured the world with them.
A.R.R.: No, I didn’t tour with them. I played the keyboards and just played the notes that I was given. I was also in the backing group of L. Shankar’s Epidemics. We performed in Bangalore and Chennai.
NMK: I believe you were part of several bands.
A.R.R.: The first band we formed was with my schoolmates, including Venu Gopal. That was when I was in the 9th grade. We used to play Deep Purple and all that kind of stuff. It was my introduction to rock music.
In 1985-86, there was Magic, a band made up of musicians who were bored of doing film music. The lead singer of Magic was Baby Anita and my bandmates were Dheena Chandradas, Sivamani Anandan, John Anthony, and Jojo, who has now sadly passed away. We played at two gigs: the wedding of Sivamani’s friend and the Music Academy. And that was it — finito.
After a couple of years, John Anthony, Jojo, Raja, Sivamani, and I created a band called Roots. I composed some fusion music. I think we gave one performance.
In 1990-91, the last band we formed was with Uday Chandra, Suresh Peters, Sudhir Prabhakar, and Paul Jacob. It was called Nemesis Avenue. We played at one gig and that was it.
NMK: It sounds like all the bands had an extremely short life.
A.R.R.: Yes, but it was great being part of a band with friends. We soon realized there was no market in India in those days for rock bands. Everything was film driven. I realized then that you can’t do anything here if you don’t do film music. The only trouble was that I didn’t like the Indian movies produced in the 1980s. My sensibilities were different.
So in my free time, I would compose music and put the tracks aside, even if I wasn’t paid. It was just for the joy of it. This work became the basis of my new music. When Mani Ratnam came to see me, I had something to play him. I was ready to go.
