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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Profile |
Heroes of Rock 'N' Roll, Uninterrupted
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| Pentagram defines rock 'n' roll in the country—sex, drugs, the works. As their latest album releases, here is the story of how they stuck it out for 16 years, defying every rule in the music book |
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FRANCIS MATTHEW |
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| (Left to right) Randolph Correia, Vishal Dadlani, Papal Mane and Shiraz
Bhattacharya.
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| I |
N THE MIDDLE OF A SET, Randolph Correia, the lead guitarist of Pentagram,
is lying on his back onstage. As the rest of his bandmates
look on, torn between sheer panic and laughing fits, Correia wants
the light bulbs switched off. Like most rock stars on a trip, Correia is
no stranger to hallucinations. The eventful concert at the All India
Institute of Medical Sciences
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in Delhi, some four years ago, earned him the moniker ‘Light Bulb’.
It’s only 4 pm and there’s a different kind of madness on a scorching afternoon
in March. I’m at Correia’s suburban Mumbai pad. In the living room, a
coterie of artists—musicians and designers—works quietly at their laptops.
The 36-year-old guitarist looks like a picture of collected cool—no different
from his usual stage persona—despite the fact that he’s been working like
a man possessed and it’s less than two weeks to the launch of Bloodywood,
Pentagram’s fourth album. Correia tells us that he’s played tracks from the
new album so many times over that he’s ready to let them go.
He’s onto a mix of ‘Tomorrow’s Decided’, the final track, in his bedroom
studio. Eight guitars are lined up against the wall in their cases,
two Fenders stand proud and naked, a toy keyboard is shoved under a
desk, a mini-xylophone over it, and The Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith
Richards’ autobiography is at arm’s reach from Correia’s computer. The
unmade bed on the floor, which is just a mattress really, and some unpacked
luggage suggest that Correia is a man on the move. Sure enough,
the band will hit the road soon. The launch, which kicks off with the fivecity
Jim Beam Pentagram Bloodywood tour that begins in Mumbai, is
slated for 22 March.
| KUNAL KAKODKAR |
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Shiraz Bhattacharya (above) and Papal Mane at
the Invasion Festival held at Palace Grounds in Bengaluru,
this January. |
While tracks from their previous two albums Up (2002) and It’s OK, It’s
All Good (2007) made up Pentagram’s set list, about a year ago the band
unleashed a new track called ‘Mental Zero’. The track that was typically
Pentagram, and sounded suspiciously like the band’s lead vocalist Vishal
Dadlani’s diatribe against dumbing down, set off mass hysteria—an effect
few bands with the exception of Indian Ocean can boast.
Anybody who’s been to a Pentagram show knows that the
band comes unhinged like no other Indian act. Whether it’s
explosive electro power pop (‘Rock N Roll’) or funk reggae
jam (‘Rude’) or a fist-pumping anthem (‘Voice’), the band’s
dynamite stagecraft makes sure nobody’s in their seats. Unlike
most bands from the 1990s to now, which slotted themselves
(classic rock, metal, death metal or even a genre as
ambiguous as progressive rock), Pentagram has constantly
evolved, refusing to be typecast.
They’re also unabashedly rock ‘n’ roll—they’ve slummed
it out in railway sleeper class, looking for cola to go with
rum and squeezing juice out of stolen mangoes when they
could find no fizz, but they’ve also had stretch limos driving
them around Estonia when they headlined the Sundance
Music Festival as early as 2003. The drugs part we know already.
Now for the sex. That’s easy. “There were only beautiful
women in Estonia,” says Vijay Nair, then manager of
the band who snagged them a spot at the festival. Dadlani
once dropped a gem: “Music was invented to get laid.”
There’s decidedly something sexual about their swaggering
stage act. Of course, there’s the darker side to aggression
that might be the norm in a rock ‘n’ roll band, but the band
has managed to stay on the good side of the law. In a track
called ‘Let Go’ from the new album, Dadlani refers to keeping
it all together in these lines: “Keep clutching/ holding
on/grabbing at the walls to get a grip/ but the floor is shiny
shiny and wet and slickety, slickety slick.” It hasn’t been too
tough for the band to keep it together, as Correia tells us.
For Bloodywood, the immensely gifted guitarist has taken
charge of co-composing, recording, mixing and producing.
“The fact that everything is DIY is fuckin’ brilliant.
Normally, a band will record it, give it to the mixing guy,
then hand it over to the producer and then give it to the
mastering guy. Here, from me it’s going to the mastering
guy. So doing everything together is quite manic and I’ve
learnt how to detach myself from the different processes,”
says Correia. He shares the perfect work plan that he
scored over the past year. “Your brain has to become this
other being—that’s good at cutting off and getting into this
Zen zone. I’ve really enjoyed the last year, spending a lot of time by myself and realising these things on my own. I
developed this strength of not being annoyed or irritated at
things that don’t really matter. I tried to conserve my energies.
So even when I’m out for a drink or a joint or a movie,
I’d be preserving my energy to come back and listen to the
album and see what it sounds like under the influence or
after a movie. The focus was the album regardless of whatever
else I was doing. I’d be channelling all the energies
into the album. So the music happened with that purity of
thought because it was a clean channel.”
The best takes were the first ones, remembers Correia,
and while composing and songwriting took place in three
stages over the past one and a half years, the album was
quick work by the band’s standards. The life of a rock ‘n’
roll band might seem bohemian, but is far from it, he explains.
“We’re city people. And we’re fucking Bombay city
people. We’ve gotta be really good at our game if we have to
survive doing what we wanna do. It’s kinda like that whole
ninja fuckin’ vibe. In short, we’ve learnt to work really fast,
cut down all the bullshit and the extra thinking about making
music, political views and artistic insecurities and get
down to doing the album.”
Dadlani, a Twitter addict, recently announced on the
microblogging site that Bloodywood is Pentagram’s best
album by far. Correia describes it as a guitar album that
sounds more rock than any other album that he’s worked
on till date. “All the songs revolve around one particular
guitar sound. I found the groove after working on it for a
week and started rearranging everything we’d written
around that sound. And it’s everywhere—it’s on ‘Love Drug
Climb Down’, ‘Must I’, ‘Identify’ and ‘Nutter’. There’s a
lot more emotion, lot more rawness that goes back to the
early Pentagram sound,” says Correia who joined the band
when he was 17. Shiraz Bhattacharya, the band’s 37-year-old
drummer who founded the band in 1994 (it didn’t have
a name for the first three months) recalls how they found
Correia. “We were searching for a guitar player and somebody
suggested this young kid who had really big hair and
always hung out at Razzberry Rhinoceros.” Juhu Hotel’s
discotheque, better known as Razz, has now gained repute
as a legendary dive that supported live rock music in the
city back in the 1990s. All kinds swarmed Razz—wastrels,
scribes and artists. “We asked him to audition for the band
and he said, ‘I’m also auditioning for another band. I’ll
come and check you guys out,’” says Bhattacharya, mimicking
Correia’s boyish baritone back then. “He checked us
out, checked the other band out and came back and told us,
‘I’ll play with you guys.’”
Correia has also been instrumental in shifting the band’s
initially heavier bordering-on-metal sound to what Mumbai
metal band Scribe’s lead vocalist, Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy,
describes as the “electronica meets rock mutative vibe”
of their second album Up. Correia, along with Clyde, a former
band member, worked on Up for six years. “There was
something very punk about Up that hit you between the
eyes,” says Krishnamoorthy. Punk it was because till 2002,
when Up released, no band had dared to drop electronica
and rock on the same stage. In fact, the band’s bassist, Papal Mane, admits he hadn’t heard of The Prodigy and The
Chemical Brothers until Correia introduced him to them.
It helped that Pentagram has always been unapologetic onstage,
even if Dadlani shows up with a cheat sheet of lyrics
to do versions of hip hop tracks that the band has never performed
before, infusing some of its own manic energy into
the crowd and feeding right off it when it comes back from
them. It’s a cycle. The band remained as visceral and aggressive,
challenging audiences with the new sound in Up.
And while most fans stuck on, some fell out.
Three years down the line, the band and its fans had more
serious grounds to be upset. The infamous microphone
stand-throwing incident at Mosh Mania, a rock show that
was organised by Pentagram’s manager Vijay Nair in 2005,
is hard to wipe from memory. “My apology went out to the
crowd and that kid Jash who was hurt. He was a fan and I
regret hurting that kid. But some asshole threw a 2x4 plank
studded with spikes at Papal and missed his head by an
inch. Papal didn’t see it. It whizzed past his fuckin’ head,”
says Dadlani, reliving the episode in shock even today.
“That’s when I threw the stand. I should have been more
responsible about it and found that guy.”
It may as well be what ‘Human Failings’, a song that
Dadlani wrote for the latest album, is about. There’s a line
in it that goes: “Experiences are a bunch of mistakes.”
“That’s a brilliant definition that I heard somewhere. It’s
not specific personal stuff. It’s deeper,” defends Dadlani,
who made peace with Pentagram’s audience the same year
when he publicly apologised for the incident at I-ROCK, a
rock competition that was once the biggest stage for Indian
rock bands and audiences. By the time It’s OK, It’s
All Good, the band’s second shot at electronica, released in
2007, it wouldn’t be incorrect to assume that the band had
not only won most of its fans back, but emboldened other
rock bands such as Medusa to explore the electronica route
and sizeably expanded its own fan following. Dadlani, to
his credit, relentlessly works every section of his audience,
be it a thoroughly uninterested crowd out just for drinks
at Hard Rock Café or fisherfolk from Khar Danda, a Mumbai
suburb, until they pop a lung with him. Nothing deters
Dadlani from showing his audience a good time. He
fractured his knee while performing at blueFROG in 2009,
but the show went on and he showed up on crutches a few
weeks later for the launch of the music networking site
MySpace at Bandra Fort.
The 38-year-old vocalist walks into the Correia residence
later that night. Munching on vada pao, Correia
and Dadlani suggest some changes to the album artwork.
“The lyrics look better in lowercase,” says Dadlani. “Don’t
do gaandmasti with the photos on every page. Let some of
them look natural,” Correia says to his friend Ravi, also
the designer. Both Correia and Dadlani are the more vocal,
opinionated members of the band, often clashing with each
other. Nair admits that Dadlani and Correia are known to
bicker over the weekend typically like husband and wife
and get back together.
Dadlani’s right arm bears a newly acquired tattoo that
reads: “In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty.” Lines from the Bob Marley track ‘Rat Race’. A Marley-inspired
Dadlani wrote one of their most popular tracks, ‘Voice’, for
Pentagram’s past album It’s OK, It’s All Good after watching
a documentary on the reggae legend. “Rita Marley was
talking about how Bob Marley was a voice to his people. I
was trying to say that we didn’t have one,” explains Dadlani,
whose recording studio in Bandra has an entire wall dedicated
to a painting of Marley that bears an uncanny resemblance
to Dadlani. Bloodywood’s Rastafarian number,
‘Must’, is already a concert hit and opens with a frenetic riff
that transports you straight into a Quentin Tarantino flick.
Most of the songwriting for Bloodywood was done impromptu
on the microphone or when Dadlani dropped in at
Correia’s home after winding up his film music work for the
day. “All of it has been written in five minutes. There was no
sitting down to write with a pen and a pad. If you threw me
something to write on, I’d just write,” says Dadlani. ‘Technology–I Get You’, for instance, partially takes its title after
the loop that Correia used, and Dadlani made up the lyrics
as he sang along to the loop in his studio. “I had no idea what
I’d sung. I had to transcribe it once I was done and thought
‘What the fuck have I written there?’ It’s the freakiest song
on the album. Shekhar (Ravjiani) told me that I sound like I
shot up when I sang this song,” says Dadlani. However, the
song has no link to technology. “I’m talking about people I
know on this song—creative folks, artists,” says the vocalist,
refusing to take names.
His insomnia went down in verse in ‘Nocturne’, a U2-
esque track with anthemic guitar lines. “I haven’t slept
properly in almost two years now for not more than two
hours a night, max three hours. On a really good day, five
hours. So the night begins to weigh very heavily on you.
The night. The quiet. I mean, how much TV can you watch?
Then you kinda live with the silence, think about shit that
you wouldn’t normally think about. Like how you take everything
in your life for granted,” he says. The lines, “The
moon plays shadows on the walls of my head/And the
stranger shapes form of the words that were said or left unsaid,”
wrote themselves on one of those nights “when I was
awake and sitting in my balcony, and saw the moon do that
little dance on the fucking sea, I was going over I everything
I said. Whether they’re friends or family, there could
be misinterpretation; someone may not understand what
the fuck you said. At that point in time, that moonlight on
the fuckin’ ocean was throwing all that at me.”
| KUNAL KAKODKAR |
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Producer and guitarist Randolph Correia at Invasion Festival, where the band met one of its favourite acts, The Prodigy. |
Dadlani recalls growing up with fairly uncoloured views
on music, so it’s easy to understand how he straddles making
music for Bollywood and its unbalanced twin Bloodywood.
“RD Burman shared equal shelf space with Led Zep
in my father’s music collection,” he says. It’s also what he
describes as a “beautiful shutdown” when it comes to songwriting
for the band and what Correia reasons Dadlani
yearns to do “because he’s not writing to a brief”. At 19,
Dadlani knew he wanted to cut loose from his family’s construction
business. And Bhattacharya was looking for a guitar
player to form a band for a one-off show called Fun Ball.
Bhattacharya cracks up at the memory even today when I
meet him at a café in Bandra. “A common friend introduced us. I needed to form a band for this Fun Ball at Navy Nagar
organised by kids for their parents. So Vishal was the guitar
player and Shekhar played the keyboard. The lead singer
couldn’t sing. We started playing, and knowing Vishal, who
couldn’t take it any more, went up to him and told him,
‘Listen you can’t sing, so don’t. Let me sing,”’ says the wiry
drummer and ad filmmaker.
Bhattacharya, like the rest of his bandmates, is easy to
talk to but is perhaps the most entertaining storyteller. “I
didn’t want to go to college. Vishal didn’t want to work at
his dad’s office. So I thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s form a band,’”
he says. He too realised early that he needed a side project
to keep Pentagram alive. “After a couple of years of playing,
I got really tired of the band. You start a business, you
invest time in it, you give it three years or fours years, and
when there are no returns coming in, then you shut it down,
right?” he asks, artlessly. “But we decided we’ll play for passion
and do other stuff for making money. Till date, with
the kind of lifestyle we boys have, we can’t live on what the
band makes,” he says, turning his head to admire a leggy
woman in a dress walk past the café. Pentagram today
charges  200,000-250,000 per show, a mind-boggling figure
when compared with what bands fetched in mid-1990s.
Back then, most bands made 5,000 a show or, if they were lucky,
10, 000.
The 1990s were also a time when audiences demanded only classic rock or metal covers and wouldn’t have bands
performing more than two or three originals. Pentagram
changed all that. “We started writing originals from day
one. Even in a 10-song set, we used to do five originals. And
one day, we just decided, ‘Fuck that shit, we’re gonna do
our own stuff.’ When we had enough material had to do a
1.5-hour set, 80 percent would be originals and 20 percent
would be covers, but our versions. No point playing it note
to note,” says Bhattacharya. True to date, when Pentagram
does a cover of U2’s ‘Desire’, it owns the version. Fanboy
and Scribe vocalist Krishnamoorthy, who attended his first
Pentagram show when he was still at school, admits that
Pentagram introduced him to Rage Against the Machine,
an iconic, iconoclastic American rap metal band. “If all you
wanted was to do a good show, there was a way to do it back
then, but Pentagram always tried something that no one
else did. The idea of being fearless onstage and making every
second of your stage time count are things for bands to
learn from them,” he says.
It’s this spunk that saw three straight wins at the annual
rock contests held at IIT Kanpur (Synchronicity), which is
where it all began, followed by IIT Delhi (Blitzkreig) and
IIT Bombay (Livewire). “We were shitting bricks at IIT
Kanpur because we were a small band,” says Bhattacharya,
“The band travelling with us—Psychic History or Side Kick
Factory or whatever it was called—was fully geared with Pro-Mark sticks (one of the best brand of drumsticks) and
gloves. It’s also hilarious now that they wore bicycle shorts
and had women who were crying when they dropped them
off at the station as if they were never coming back. We were
like, ‘Dude, what the fuck, big band and all.’ There were some
35 bands competing at IIT Kanpur.” And maybe 30 bands
in Delhi and 30 in Mumbai. “So once we won all three in a
row, we felt we could do something with the band.” An album
deal just reaffirmed that they were onto something big.
However, Dadlani has always had unshakeable faith in the
band. “We’re the best fuckin’ band in the country.” To him
it’s a gospel truth that has led him to defend that Pentagram
will only play as a headlining act at any rock festival featuring
Indian bands, an attitude that has irked other senior
bands. “That’s the way it is,” says Dadlani, asking us to point
out a band that delivers a bigger bang for the buck. When
the band performed at the Glastonbury Festival in 2005, it
was not only the first Indian act to play there but returned
with more conviction in its act. “The White Stripes? We saw
them. They’re shit live,” says Bhattacharya.
Of course, Dadlani’s daredevilry has brought the band
treacherously close to being accosted by the army and elevated
them to super-rockdom at the same time. Nair reminisces
about “an epic concert” at IIT Roorkee about six
years ago. About 6,000 students had gathered at the show
and struggled to find space to stand. “There was a distance
of about 150 feet from the stage which was empty, with
some chairs for VIPs that remained unoccupied,” says Nair.
Dadlani wanted the audience to be allowed to occupy the
space and when the institute’s dean paid no heed to his request,
there was no holding him back. “Vishal began swearing
at the dean onstage and the much-provoked audience
cheered him on. The dean was an extremely influential
man, who literally ran the city along with the army,” says
Nair. When the dean stepped on stage and cut the concert
short, Nair knew they had to exit at breakneck speed. “I remember
running onto [the] stage. That was the fastest packup
in Pentagram’s history—five minutes. The Helga’s Fun
Castle boys helped us, and we were running out of the college
before we knew it. The students formed a human chain
around us and ran after us.” It didn’t end there. Nair had to
work swiftly to book the band into a new hotel, so that they
could remain underground until it was time to leave.
And when there was no accommodation, the band didn’t
hesitate to doss down on benches inside classrooms, says
Papal Mane, Pentagram’s reticent bassist and the most sober
soul in the band. “This was the time when there were
no budgets to travel by flight. But I remember all of us rushing from the railway station to board a flight when we realised
we couldn’t fit the bass drum in the train,” says Mane.
I meet Mane during a shoot for Rolling Stone India at Mehboob
Studios. ‘Tomorrow’s Decided’ is playing in the background
here as well. The band’s in a mood to fool around
and constantly rib each other. Dadlani breaks into a semi-Lavani as the beats turn harder and dancier.
“Do you really need to talk to me? Vishal and Randolph
are the spokespersons,” says Mane guilelessly. Mane and
Correia, friends from the JJ School of Art (Mane studied
commercial art and Correia fine art), joined the band
at about the same time towards the end of 1994. “Before
I joined, Vishal used to sing and play bass,” says Mane. “I
played the same thing that every other band played back
in college—Metallica, Megadeth.” Bhattacharya describes
Mane best: “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t
womanise. He doesn’t do anything. He only drinks chai and
maybe scares old ladies and little kids secretly.” After a concert,
Mane will most likely be back in his hotel room, tucked
in bed watching Sun TV, a South Indian channel. “It’s damn
good fun and bizarre,” says the 36-year-old Maharastrian
who does not get any Tamil, of course. Nair refers to Mane
as the band’s stabilising factor. “He neutralises all the aggression
in the band.” When a crazy fight or what Nair calls
an “epic situation” crops up, he knows that he can count on
Mane to pacify his bandmates and share a laugh with later.
The towering musician could be intimidating if he wanted
to, but is far from the volatile rock star that Dadlani is. In
fact, when Brit rock band Porcupine Tree performed at IIT
Bombay in 2009, Mane was lurking around the queue trying
to make his way in like a regular fan who didn’t have a
ticket. Never once did he pull out the Pentagram card. “If I
had to pick one guy to be alongside me in a fight, it would
be Papal. He’s a crazy motherfucker and I mean this in the
best possible way,” says Dadlani.
The key to enduring 16 years without a line-up change is
an unspoken rule to not trespass upon one another’s professional
and personal boundaries. “Luckily, all of us are very
sharp,” says Bhattacharya rather matter-of-factly. “So we
figured [out] who’s good at what and don’t interfere in each
others’ territory. If Randolph’s producing it, he’s doing it.
He’ll come and make us hear the track and I might suggest
some changes to the drum parts, but that’s it. Vishal does
the writing. Me and Papal just keep it all together.” Bhattacharya,
given his filmmaking background, also oversees
stage lighting and videos. Independent music entrepreneur
Neysa Mendes, who began her career as a publicist for bands
with Only Much Louder tells us that Pentagram was the
first band she worked with and shares a dynamic she picked up: “If you’re pitching something to the band, the chances of
it working are higher if you have either Vishal or Randolph
agreeing to it. If both of them oppose it, there’s no way you’ll
be able to take things forward.” As always, Correia breaks
it down simply. “We’ve stayed positive from the beginning
and the mediator has always been the space we give each
other. None of us compromises but we’ve got so good at letting
each other be, it has helped us get stronger and better
at what we do,” he says. Dadlani is a little more sentimental:
“If families functioned like this, people would be better adjusted
to the world at large and themselves. It’s the truth.”
What makes a great band? Correia says Pentagram’s
taken a fairly simple route. “We just believe we’re a good
band—with all the discipline (eight-hour rehearsals), all the
fucking homework, all the understanding of the music,”
he says. And if a band evangelises anything other than the
truth, it won’t be heard for long. There’s a prophetic track
called ‘Paper Toys’ on Bloodywood. “I wrote it because the
whole world seems to be heading for a refresh-screen moment.
Did you know that it snowed on Lahore on February
26? It has never snowed there in human memory. It’s coming
around, all of it. All the shit that we put out. It’s like the
sea,” says Dadlani. The song can’t get any closer to life, even
as Japan stands ravaged by man and nature.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Jolene Fernandes
23 May 2011
03:53 AM
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Now THIS is some really good writing ! Comprehensive and insightful .
PS : Aren't some of the quotes off Pentatv ?
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Ananya
4 April 2011
10:22 PM
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Brilliantly written! Kudos!
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pri
2 April 2011
10:01 PM
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what a wonderful read...truly comprehensive and provides great insight into the band...
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Magik
31 March 2011
02:27 PM
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fucking awesome! the best i ever read! bravo!
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