Look what Delhi is Dancing To...

This one is an insight into the evolution of Delhi's nightlife and the creation of a homegrown music scene.

Look what Delhi is Dancing To...


Delhi"s club scene, throughout its short history, has had its share of fits and bouts of musical love affairs with genres that are making it really big in the West. Bollywood and ( for some time) Indipop numbers have ruled the city"s dance floors for the longest time, but with the emergence of electronic bands like Midival Punditz, Jalebee Cartel and B. L. O. T, who are drawing capacity crowds to the nightclubs week after week, the sound of music is now very different.

Copycats of cool
Back in the 1950s and 60s, when nightclubs were not the same as they are today, Delhi"s groovy set would go to fashionable nightspots such as Gaylord restaurant next to the Regal Building, Connaught Place, which had the only wooden dance floor besides the members- only Gymkhana Club.

And the music they grooved to comprised covers of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra numbers.

The scene then moved to Tabela at The Oberoi and later to Cellar, again in the Regal Building, where couples stole kisses, men wore long hair and bell- bottoms, and the air was thick with smoke from questionable sources. These were the happy hippie days of the " 70s, when the Woodstock generation rocked to The Doors, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. The "80s brought in the disco revolution, led by the Bee Gees and John Travolta, whose Saturday Night Fever became a huge hit around the world. And obviously this trend found its way into the nightlife of the city.

At no point thus far had Delhi"s clubbing scene shown even a glimmer of originality, not even the odd exception to prove the rule. Every new wave of music making it big in other parts of the word would seep into the local clubs, only to make way for whatever came along next.

The "80s and early " 90s saw a change in scenery, when clubs began to play the odd few Indipop numbers, which were seriously promoted by the king of deejays, Sunny Sarid of Ghungroo, who made ethnic music respectable among those with money to spare. He was fortunate to have come up at a time when Bally Sagoo was pioneering a new wave of fusion music and Alisha Chinai was crooning Made in India .

Cocaine nightsThe "90s were also the time when the world discovered Goa as the rave destination.

And electronic music finally arrived in India via Israelis dodging the draft back home. By the end of the decade psychedelic trance was the biggest thing going on the Delhi party circuit, which had incidentally discovered cocaine around the same time.

DJs such as Rummy, who now runs Kuki in Masjid Moth, began travelling around and brought back trance and techno music from Europe.

It wasn"t long before expat DJs arrived on the Delhi club circuit, starting with Namito from Berlin. They brought with them new sounds that aspiring local DJs began to use in their own sets.

The trance dance
Once people mastered these new genres, the evolution of an underground music scene began at the end of the " 90s. " We wanted an original sound that we could call our own," says Ashvin Mani Sharma of Jalebee Cartel, who recalls going to Goa on many occasions as a student in Bombay, just looking for new trance and techno sounds to work with.

"We were heavily influenced by Goa trance when we started," Sharma says, explaining that even before they had begun creating their sound, Midival Punditz, formed in 1997, were experimenting with drum " n" bass. " The Asian Underground movement was finally born in India at that time," remembers Sharma. In those days, they had a small but committed audience. " It gave us hope even though we were making Hindi remixes for Bollywood to make ends meet," he says.

The Midival Punditz duo, Gaurav Raina and Tapan Raj, started experimenting with sound because they believed that the western dance music, which was popular at the time, was not really connecting with the Indian audience. So they decided to introduce Indian influences into their sound. " This was the time when we had an underground scene in the city," remembers San Bindra, aka DJ San, from the New Delhi Project, who recalls getting hold of unreleased music of the Punditz at Palika Bazaar.

This was also the time when the Punditz came in contact with people like Talvin Singh and Karsh Kale, some of the pioneers of the UK Asian Underground scene. Singh signed the two Delhi boys onto his label Six Degrees Records. And for the first time in its history, Delhi"s nightlife scene had an original sound.

Others, such as Delhi- based DJ Jayant, Jalebee Cartel and Basic Love of Thing ( B. L. O. T.), have all created new sounds that they can now call their own.

Underground rises
But there was a lot more that went into the making of what had started out as an underground movement into a mainstream phenomenon that is slowly becoming the mainstay of Delhi"s nightlife circuit ( despite some clubbers sticking to their staple diet of Bollywood remixes and bhangra music), with the most happening venues like The Love Hotel and Shalom making electronic music their genre of choice.

For a long time the only time electronic music was played was when "50 of us would meet on a friend"s terrace lugging our speakers and equipment up six flights of stairs," reminisces Jalebee Cartel"s Sharma about his Bombay days.

Delhi, fortunately, had people like San, who started Threshold, by inviting some of the most talented electronic musicians and opening up his own home in Jangpura to provide DJs a forum where they could experiment with their original sounds in front of an audience that understood the genre.

"We can"t ever play what we really want in clubs," says Brin from East India Company, who DJs under the name of Khirki Gharana, so such forums really helped the genre evolve. And then there was No Escape, the nightclub where Midival Punditz and most other acts started out in Delhi.

Are we there yet?
Today you can catch an electronic music gig on almost every night of the week. People recognise the sounds of bigger artistes and every club promoter wants a piece of the action. " We have realised that over the last year or so that no other genre of music sells out as fast as electronica, not even Bollywood," says Saarthak Gupta, head of the nightlife promotion consultancy, My Purple Martini.

Young people are looking at the success of people like Jalebee Cartel and Midival Punditz as inspiration and going down the electronica route. And their audience is expanding also because of the growing expat community of the city, whose average age has dipped in the past five years.

But are we really there yet? DJ San, who has worked on the music of films like New York , says there is still a long way to go.

"People say Delhi has its own sound, but only four or five people making a particular type of music does not constitute a Delhi sound," says San, who adds that even the audience in the city is very restricted and limited. " We will have arrived when, like Bollywood, our sound reaches out and appeals to the masses." But the day that happens will be the day Delhi"s underground scene will die and every sound will be commercial.