Category: Interviews & Articles

The memories are in sepia. With a sound track by Ultravox, interspersed with buskers’ music in a pedestrian street at night. It was many years ago, but even if I’d been to Vienna yesterday, it would still seem like many years ago. Vienna has that quality about it. Old. Ancient. In the best way possible.

The people too. Old. Young couples people weren’t making that many babies anymore, and the younger people were leaving for more ‘exciting’ cities. The self-sufficiency of jobs and independence of lifestyles took precedence over such mundane things as marriage and children. So that when the senior citizens saw a baby in the streets, they all turned parental and protective. God save the mother, who dared to raise her hand at her children, from the wrath of Austrian matrons.

They particularly adored Anjora. All of a year old, with huge melting black eyes and black hair coming down in a fringe, and golden brown skin, she was the rarest of sights on a Viennese street: an Indian, and that too, an Indian baby. The usually reserved Austrians gushed over her unashamedly, and struck up conversations [with liberal doses of recipes for Austrian home remedies] with her parents Lisa and Allwyn, old friends from Goa whom we were visiting.

Somehow, one of the most beautiful memories of Vienna was a trip outside it. To Grinzing, a wine drinking region where people come each year to taste the new wine, not the old; and where Beethoven composed my favourite symphony of all time, The Pastorale. I made it a point to carry it on cassette in my Walkman [the compact disc hadn’t been invented yet], excused myself from my friends for an hour, walked up the very hills where he composed it, and had the experience of my life. Even the Grand Opera Hall in Paris could not compete with the backdrop of those Austrian peaks. Not so surprisingly, besides picturing Beethoven lying there listening to the birds and taking down notes, I was also juxtaposing the Von Trapp family fleeing the Nazis and singing Edelweiss in syncopation with The Pastorale.

The robust Austrian beer afterwards, served by equally robust and pretty, rosy-cheeked Austrian waitresses in traditional low-necked blouses hugging generous bosoms, in a rural restaurant where everyone sat together on long wooden benches, was the perfect sequel to The Pastorale.  The accordionists broke into good old Viennese waltzes, everyone intertwined their arms and swayed together to the music, beer mugs in hand, and the whole restaurant suddenly felt like home and family. The succulent Austrian sausages and potatoes that followed must have nourished many a Beethoven composition.

Oh, Vienna… I’d love to return to you one day, even though I’ve stopped drinking and turned vegetarian since I saw you last.

[By Remo Fernandes. For Jitesh Pillai, Times of India, Mumbai. 21^st July 2004.]

So you wanna be a pop star and make a hit record. Nothing to it. Gone are the dark ages when stars were required to have talent, put in hours of practice at their craft, think up original lyrics and music, travel by train and carry their luggage to concerts in remote parts of the country to make their songs heard by the people …

This is the age of electronica, baby. You sing in Mumbai, your song is heard in Kahinbhipuri. And everywhere in between. Twelve times an hour, until people are so sick of it they’ll go out and buy the damn album just to stop the VJs from torturing them further.

Yeah, so you wanna be a pop star. Here’s a simple set of Fourteen Golden Rules. Follow them, and you can start investing in a cool colorful set of pens [preferably Parker, the kind AB advertises] to sign all those autographs with.

# 1: Join a gym. [Yes, you heard right, not music classes, a gym]. Work on those biceps and six-packs if you’re a guy, and on those tits and ass if you’re a gal.

# 2: Get yourself a good designer. [Yes, you heard right again, not a singing teacher, a designer]. Make sure those biceps and six-packs and tits and ass show through every outfit you wear.

# 3: Whatever your name, prefix ‘DJ’ to it. Well, not quite to any name; whoever heard of a DJ Ramakrishnamurthydharan making it to the Top Ten?

# 4: Delete the word ‘originality’ from your vocabulary. If you think today’s record companies exist to promote originality, think again, man. They didn’t delete the word from their vocabulary simply cause it was never there.

# 5: And if you think today’s record companies exist to promote good music, you’re too dumb to even be a pop star – just join your local political party and live happily ever after. Record companies are here to make money [and remixes], dumbo. That’s it.

# 6: So butter up your Grandma and get her to loan you her prized 78 r.p.m. collection of old film songs. Choose eight which no one’s murdered yet. You know, eight created by those artists who were required to have talent, put in hours of practice, blah blah blah… remember them?

# 7: Find a cheap music producer with a PC based recording system in his bathroom. One who will know how to copy arrangements from Britney Spears and put techno drum loops under those eight.

# 8: Once he’s done, record your voice on top. Never mind if you sing like Scoobie Doo. The producer’s got PC based voice harmonizers and quantizers in his comp which will put every wrong note of yours in tune and every wrong beat of yours in time. What will you do on stage, you ask? Why, haven’t you heard of lip-sync, you pathetic wannabe? Oh god… if you haven’t, run to that local political party now.

# 9: Send Italian wine, Swiss chocolates and Bandra flowers to all record company executives on their happy birthdays. Guys, find female executives and flex your muscles. Gals, find male executives and wiggle your tits. It would do well to practice this art form in front of a mirror for at least 15 minutes during three days before each meeting. Yes, yes, present day artists have to do their riaaz too.

# 10: Record contract in hand, here comes your first music video. Ah, now you know why those gym fees were worth every rupee!

# 11: And then the first Music TV interview. Make sure you practice your “Yo Man” and “Hi, my name is DJ Ramakrishnamurthydharan, and you’re watching me on Empty V”. And, even though you’ve used the same music director and video director and choreographer that twenty two other pop stars before you have used, learn to say with conviction: “My music is very different.” It might also be a good idea to assume an air of mystery, raise one eyebrow and add “And my next album is going to so different, I have no clue what its about.”

# 12: You’ve done all of the above because you were just dying, vying, craving, raving, screaming, scheming, egging, begging to be famous. Now that you are, wear dark glasses to show you don’t want people to recognize you.

# 13: After you make sure they do and ask for your autograph, sigh and show how you suffer for fame and celebrity. Of course you know you can’t stop signing,  specially when you carry a Parker pen the kind AB advertises, but control yourself and loudly proclaim ‘Sorry, just one last signature now!’ when you sign each of the remaining two hundred and fifty seven. Don’t let the crowd see you’re disappointed there isn’t a two hundred and fifty eighth waiting.

# 14: Well, baby, that about wraps it up. Ah yes… make sure you attend Page 3 parties, invited or not; buy yourself front page headlines and photos on Sunday supplements; wine and dine critics and reporters; and, most importantly, don’t forget to call up concert promoters and offer them a hefty percentage on all the gigs they secure for you – or else how are you going to keep ahead of the hordes who keep joining that gym? No pain, no gain.

It does not matter whether I believe in god or not. It does not make a difference to him. Like it doesn’t matter to air whether I believe in it or not. We don’t go around saying “I have great faith in air and I’m a very airigious person,” or wear symbols of air around our necks, or go down on our knees and worship air on certain days of the week—it is all around us anyway, for us to breathe and stay alive. It does not discriminate. It is available to everyone who needs it, irrespective of whether we praise it or ignore it.
So is god.
I am a father of two sons. I give them the best things that I can in life—good advice, education, love, affection, caring, as well as material things which until now have not turned them into spoilt brats. All I expect them to do in return is to make full use of my gifts and grow to be good human beings. I do not expect them to go down on their knees and sing praises to me. And if I, a mere mortal father, do not expect praises, how much less must the universal father hanker after our puny eulogies and postures of servility. Seeing us work hard at making full use of his gifts might give him a real high, though.
I use the masculine for god simply out of habit—because “it” would sound like I’m talking about a teacup, and because going through a gender battle to call him “her” is simply not worth the trouble. But how male chauvinistic we have been to call god “he” to start with! We all know that a woman is the creator and source of life as we know it—when we talk about ourselves, we say we owe it all to our mothers—but when it comes to god, it is the divine father who has made us and given us all we have. If in the end of it all god really does exist as a definite entity, it must be in a self-sufficient form, both male and female. The one source. The beginning of all things, even of maleness and femaleness.
God—the most misused, abused word in humankind’s vocabulary throughout history. In whose name we have fought the most barbaric and savage wars in distant history, in whose name we kill and burn each other and each other’s babies even today. In the name of god, we turn into devils.
I wish we’d realise how insignificant we are, how we inhabit one of the tiniest planets in one of the most obscure solar systems in an unfashionable galaxy at the back of beyond; maybe then we’d realise that god, if at all he does exist as the entity we make him out to be, must have better things to do than follow our pathetic efforts at building little structures which supposedly house him. And that hell, if at all it does exist as the place we make it out to be, must be full of those of us who make the loudest noises in god’s name. If a Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian cannot see god in each other, then we are all hopelessly, irrevocably blind. And will remain blind forever.

[Second part added on 2^NDJune 2003. Sent to Hindustan Times Delhi on 5 June 2003.]

Most readers will not have known Goa while she was still undiscovered; while she was still a lost-in-time, forgotten and unfashionable pristine paradise. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been born and raised in that Goa, and I wish I could share that experience with you.

However, I am at a loss for words to try and make you feel the way time moved at a pace so slow and so relaxed in a place at once so Latin and so Indian. Words to make you see what I saw through the eyes of an eight-year-old child: devout Christian ladies in Portuguese lace gloves and parasols, carrying their high Hindu caste like an invisible armor hanging on an invisible string from their pale upturned noses; serious learned Hindu gentlemen in Indian dhotis, Nehru cloth caps, socks and shoes, and the latest European jacket [plus a solid black British brolly for good measure] to complete an unintended premature fusion fashion statement; the smell of sunshine and dry leaves floating through a lazy sleepy village summer afternoon so hot, not even a crow could be bothered to fly out from under the shade of an over laden mango tree; screaming children running to the front verandah to watch the only car which might pass by on a red dusty road in the course of a whole week; people who ordered a carved furniture set and wisely let years go by while the master carpenters calmly went at their craft with an abundance of a precious ingredient unaffordable to today’s art: Time.

I remember the huge aristocratic mansions, the humble little huts and comfortable homely houses of all sizes in between, the ancient temples and white-washed chapels and a few rare mosques, all safely hidden under millions of coconut trees… the allopathic and country and witch doctors, all eyeing each other with studied suspicion… the tamed rice fields and wild lush forests and virgin silver beaches spilling one into the other.

And above all, Goa’s basically friendly people practicing two main religions, speaking two main languages and abiding by two thousand unwritten social dictates, all co-existing in a harmony which stood firmly on one unshakeable philosophy: live and let live, and while we’re at it, let’s sing a song and share a drink to help the time go by.

No, I cannot accurately describe what it felt like growing up in such a place during such an epoch. I can, however, suggest you read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It doesn’t matter that he writes about South America. The villages, the houses, the people, the states of mind, and above all the ghosts past, present and future he describes to poetically – that could well be the Goa I once knew and loved so well.

……………………….

And know and love so well still. Floating gently down to the present, I shall resist all temptation to say that Goa today has ‘gone to the dogs’. Because she hasn’t. The Goa I spoke about was simply too beautiful and precious to remain undiscovered, unknown and unexploited. Something big was bound to happen. So tremors were felt, signs appeared in the sky, and a boom headed her way. But what was it to be: an industrial boom? A mining boom? An IT boom? A tourist boom? Luckily for her, it was the latter. It was certainly the lesser of all evils.

This is of course highly debatable; people say tourism has commercialized and killed her roots and customs. I say its just the contrary; it made her dig out her grandma’s recipes, folk dresses, songs and customs from the dusty old attic – alright, she did it to serve it all up to the tourists; but so what? At least tourism made her do it. She was in danger of forgetting that precious old treasure-filled attic anyway, which itself was in danger of collapsing under the onslaught of industry and mining. Tourism made Goa take another look at herself and rediscover her past. And it made her want to preserve it for the future.

And I think we’re really lucky in the kind of tourism we’ve got. No, its not as high-class and exclusive as the one in the Seychelles, but it is down-to-earth and humane. The middle class, middle aged Europeans who come in charter flights are a jolly friendly lot of simple folk looking for a bit of sunshine and an economical seafood meal on the beach, not gambling casinos or shady night clubs or giant malls. And the younger, more adventurous back-packers bring with them new freaky ideas, music, dress codes and hair colors. Yes, they do take in a few drugs, but all they do after taking them is dance. They respect nature, peace and harmony; they keep the beaches clean [it is our local shack owners who dump all their plastic bottles in heaps]; and most importantly, they do not go looking for local sex. Our Goan girls – for that matter, our Indian girls – haven’t turned into traders for tourists the way they have in Thailand. Hats off to the poorer women of our once third-world country.

And as far as preservation is concerned, we did start late, but we’ve started. Old Latin quarters, majestic colonial buildings, ancient temples and water tanks, are all getting the restoration and face lift they have long yearned for. And together with the old, we also have the new. Together with the bad, we also have the good. There are crowded beaches full of action, full of hotels of all shapes and sizes. And there are empty beaches which are near virginal. There are rice fields ruined by construction, and there are rice fields which – very simply – grow rice. There’s Goa Trance, and there’s the Goan Mando. There are concrete abominations, and there are gracious old Goan houses.

Yes, Goa today has moved. Very fast, and very far. But the Goa of yesterday is just below the surface. One little scratch, and you see it in all its glory. Look for it, and you shall find. Insist on it, and you shall help preserve.

[Written by Sigmund de Souza – Courtesy Goa Messenger]

It was a birthday bash with a difference and like none that Goa had ever witnessed before. Goa’s favourite son and one of the most famous personalities in contemporary Indian music, Remo Fernandes turned fifty on 8 May and the inimitable entertainer showed that he knows how to celebrate.

Performing before about 25000 fans at the jam-packed Panjim Gymkhana Grounds, teaming up with bands and singers with whom he had grown up with through the years, Remo’s 50th Birthday Concert turned out to be a complete entertainer.

Having worked for a whole month, putting the concert together, supervising arrangements for his buddies from former bands, who arrived from all over the country and abroad and, going through rehearsals with them for days, Remo dished out his greatest performance before his hometown fans and by far the biggest concert that Goa has seen in the new millennium.

Displaying awesome energy and stamina, that would make a man half his age stagger, the versatile musician who has dominated the Goan music scene for almost two decades now, teamed up with his school days band ‘Beat 4’, Architecture college days band ‘The Savages’, hippy days band ‘Indiana’ and his current touring band ‘Microwave Papadums’.

Speaking to GM after his concert, Remo said he didn’t feel a day over twenty. “I know some musicians who hide their age. So why am I so happy that I have turned 50?  I don’t know, I just feel great that I am 50.  I still feel young and I don’t even dye my hair! I guess it’s just that I enjoy doing my music so much,” said Goa’s golden boy….Ooops, his not a boy anymore!

Remo kicked off the concert singing ‘Minha Maizinha Querida’ (My Mother Beloved), which he had sung as a five-year-old at Clube Nacional in Panjim.  The crowd’s response was instant, a thunderous applause.  He followed that up with the Konkani dulpods, getting everyone swaying, clapping and singing from the word ‘go’. At one point, he had everyone in peels of laughter with his humorous rendition of ‘Undra Mhojea Mama’ in five different accents of Konkani.

After performing three songs with the Microwave Papudums, it was the turn of the ‘Beat 4’ to get on stage. The surviving members of the band, Nandinho Lobato Faria and Caetano de Abreu teamed up with Remo to belt their school-day favourites. Drummer Tony Godinho, who had flown down all the way from Oman, could not join the band since he was recuperating from a mild heart stroke, suffered a couple of days earlier at a dinner following a rehearsal. Remo asked the crowd to clap for Tony so loud that he would hear them all the way at the GMC hospital in Bambolim. And the crowd obliged.

Lucio Miranda, Remo’s childhood idol, oldest friend, mentor, and fellow musician, sang three songs to the sound track from his album ‘Lucio’, which was arranged and recorded by Remo. It is heartening to see how Lucio has recovered from the injuries he suffered in a serious road accident last November.  His amazing voice had the audience cheering him all the way.

Then came a power packed performance from ‘The Savages’.  Bashir Sheik (drums), Prabhakar Mundkur (keyboard), Ralph Pais (bass guitar), and Remo (lead guitar) left the  audience gasping at the sheer energy and enthusiasm displayed by the former musicians, now all in their 50s.  Bashir got a rousing cheer from the crowd for his awesome performance on the drums.

An audiovisual creating awareness on SARS, presented by the Goa Government, was then filmed, explaining what the disease was all about, what precautions one should take and what facilities the government had in place to tackle the eventuality of an outbreak of the SARS virus.  There were messages from the Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, Health Minister Dr. Suresh Amonkar and Health Secretary Rina Ray during the documentary.

The most touching moment of the concert came when Remo acknowledged how he missed his childhood mate, the late Alexandre Rosario and the original members of the Microwave Papadums – Dharma, Selwyn and Victor, who died in a tragic accident in Kanpur two years ago. He also fondly remembered Goa’s Spanish guitar virtuoso, the late Dr. Eloy Gomes, whom he said he had admired so much during his childhood years.

Remo was furious when their pictures failed to show up on the giant screen.

One of the sweetest moments of the evening came when the Valadares Sisters – Ruth, Lucia and Jacinta joined Remo on stage after staying away from the limelight for about 20 years. Remo told the audience that the sisters fondly referred to him as their brother and shared a very deep bond of affection. Cheered by an enthusiastic audience, Remo backed them up with just his acoustic guitar, as they sang a Samba medley, followed by ‘Bonequita Linda’ (which ended with a verse in Konkani) and signed off with a strapping rendition of ‘Tinta Rella Di Luna’.

Next on stage was ‘Indiana’, the band that Remo had formed with the versatile percussionist Bondo, tabla player Lala and Abel on the bass guitar.  Abel could not make it to the concert, but the others did.  Remo once again brought back memories of the days when full moon parties with live concerts and fusion music were the happening scene in Goa.  Bondo, who came down for the show from Mumbai, drew a lot of applause from the crowd although he gave a more subdued performance.

Remo then went on solo (with his box guitar) to sing some of the songs that had become very popular in Goa during the 80s, songs like A Pig’s Eye View, Everybody Wants To (his AIDS awareness song), The Paper Caper and Graham Bell.  He also performed his mega-hit songs like ‘O Meri Munni’, ‘Hamma’ and ‘Ocean Queen’ (dedicated to his wife Michelle) backed by the Microwave Papudums.

By now it was a half past Eleven in the evening, and trust the Goa Police to spoil the party.  They suddenly asked that the concert be wound up.  Remo received great applause from the crowd when he took a dig at the Deputy Inspector General of the Goa Police, who was at the concert earlier in the evening. “Since he has left the venue, his policemen are back to stop the show”, remarked Remo over the microphone in his trademark bold and forthright style.

After his power packed rendition of Jalwa, Remo called all the artists of the evening back on stage to take a final bow.   They obliged and then prompted the crowd to join them in singing the ‘Birthday Song’ for Remo, and the crowd obliged, bringing down the curtains on one of the most amazing concerts that Goa has ever seen.

Remo’s performance had lasted four and a half hours and he still seemed to have more left in him.  It was five minutes to midnight when the concert ended.  The amazing thing was that most of the crowd, which comprised schoolchildren and teenagers to middle-aged and older folk, had filled in at about 6.30 pm and were on their feat for the entire duration of the show.

The 50,000-watt state of the art sound–complete with relay traps, impressive stage lights mounted on trusses that moved and the huge stage was set up by Reynolds, Bangalore.  The stage sets were done by Lesley Reynolds, Goa, and the giant screens and live video coverage were provided by Shamir Diniz with Margao Electronics.