Pressure drop: ‘The Harder They Come’

Watching Bob Marley: One Love last week, I was distracted by a stray mention of Jimmy Cliff. Already exasperated with its cautiousness, I spent the rest of the biopic intermittently dreaming of The Harder They Come. Same era, same sounds, same politics, and yet this 1972 film starring Cliff is as rough and exciting as One Love is polished and inert.

By 1972, Cliff was already a hit artist, with a handful of reggae standards—'Many Rivers To Cross', the protest number ‘Vietnam’—to his name. Filmmaker Perry Henzell approached him with a script inspired by a gangster named Rhygin, who was a local sensation when Cliff was a schoolboy. They hit it off, and decided to work together. Their central character, Ivanhoe, was changed to a musician who takes up the gun. They had a certain type in mind—“an anti-hero in the way that Hollywood turns its bad guys into heroes,” Cliff recalled.

The Harder They Come opens with a near-bus collision, albeit a comic one. It’s a fitting start, for this is a film of constant disagreements and challenges and clashes. The Kingston we see is an endless series of shanty towns, where corrupt cops receive cutbacks from marijuana traders and all but a select few live in grinding poverty. Into this comes Ivan, a young man from the country. He’s a singer with no money or belongings, a hair-trigger temper and a taste for expensive toys.

Ivan manages to cut a record with a producer named Hilton (Bob Charlton), but is disgusted with the pittance he’s offered. He goes to jail after slashing a man with a knife, is humiliatingly flogged as punishment. He becomes a runner for ganja traders—even here he’s dissatisfied with his cut. Once he gets hold of a gun, you know it’s just a matter of time before he’s an outlaw. Ironically, as he gets deeper and deeper in trouble, his song becomes a sensation across the island.

There’s a clue to the kind of film Henzell is making in the early scene where the streetwise José takes Ivan, newly arrived in town, to the pictures. Sergio Corbucci’s Django is playing, the audience delighting in the bloody action. “The hero can’t die till the last reel,” José admonishes one of them. Though it isn’t as pitiless, The Harder They Come has some of the down-and-dirty spirit of a Corbucci western. The hero isn’t a moral man, or even particularly likeable, there’s barely any rule of law, and everyone’s desperate (“a hungry mob is an angry mob,” Bob Marley would sing a few years later). It’s also likely Henzell had his eye on the first rumblings of Blaxploitation in the US. Ivan’s taste for cars, nice clothes, women and guns is more in line with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft, both released in 1971, than the western outlaws he models himself on.

For all its debts to the gangster film and the western, The Harder They Come is at heart a musical. The soundtrack is blessedly Marley-free. You have ‘Pressure Drop’ by The Maytals, a track so electrifying it’s used several times in the film. There’s ‘007 (Shanty Town)’ by Desmond Dekker, who had one of the first reggae hits, in 1968, with the haunting Israelites. There’s Cliff’s previous hits ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ and ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, and he sings the title track too. The deepest cut, though, might be Scotty’s ‘Draw Your Brakes’, a dub version of a 1967 rocksteady track. It’s cavernous, atmospheric, druggy and irresistible.

Reggae is mostly characterised as good-time music, but as Lester Bangs wrote in a 1976 piece, this belies the underlying violence. “Many of these records may be little more than a rhythm with a guitar chopping out two or three chords, no solos except a guy hollering things you can barely understand over the whole thing; but that rhythm is rock steady, the guitars chop to kill, and the singer is, often as not, describing class oppression or street war.” Keep this in mind and you’ll find Dekker singing “dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail” or even something as simple as Toots Hibbert accusingly going “It is youuuuuuu” assume a great urgency.

The Harder They Come isn’t a smooth film, but it doesn’t matter because it’s exhilarating. Henzell has an eye for striking images and the quicksilver editing feeds on the chaotic energy of the lead character. It’s on a short list of films—Black Orpheus and Buena Vista Social Club are two others—that introduced the world to an entire musical culture. While this is a wholly deserved reputation, it tends to underrate the effectiveness of the film itself. In moments like the ecstatic church scene with a few mischievous inserts of human desire, or the chase through the ghetto with a group of children cheering on a pistol-brandishing Ivan, The Harder They Come isn’t just a great reggae film but a great film, period.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Dylan, Tarantino and artists as enthusiasts

Most great artists know a lot about their field but not all seem to love it. Even fewer show the desire to pass that love on to others. This is why I have a special fondness for directors, authors and musicians who make it a point to write or talk about works dear to them. Their enthusiasm shapes mine. Zadie Smith opened up Nabokov for me. Stephen Fry’s Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music was a push at the right time for a classical music neophyte. I discovered Powell & Pressburger through Martin Scorsese’s reverent mentions; their films are among my favourites now.

Aside from Scorsese—surely the undisputed director-as-enthusiast—it’s hard to think of another film-maker with the curiosity, breadth of interest and unflagging energy of Quentin Tarantino. He started out as a guide to cinema, working at the Videos Archives rental store in Los Angeles. And he continued recommending as a writer-director, through his reference-heavy films, his interviews, the erstwhile QT-Fest in Austin, and his current ownership of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles.

As he nears his self-declared limit of 10 films, the director is leaning into his role as full-time disseminator of movie opinions. He started writing pieces on the New Beverly site a few years ago, and made marathon appearances on the affiliated Pure Cinema Podcast. In 2022, he started his own podcast with Roger Avary, a friend from his rental shop days (and co-writer of Pulp Fiction). He also wrote his first book, a novelisation of his film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. And now he has published his second, a non-fiction collection called Cinema Speculation.

Primarily a work of film criticism, Cinema Speculation is also a kind of memoir, Tarantino sifting through his memories of growing up in the 1970s, when “New Hollywood became the Hollywood”. In the sweet opening chapter, “Little Q Watching Big Movies”, he recalls how he had to rely on his single mother, her boyfriends and his relatives to keep his insatiable appetite for movies fed. They took him to the movies they were watching: The French Connection, Deliverance, Dirty Harry. “Just a list of the wild violent movies I saw from 1970 to 1972 would appall most readers,” writes the director who had Beatrix Kiddo put her four-year-old to sleep with the unbelievably violent Shogun Assassin.

Most of the chapters are dedicated to single films, with Tarantino taking apart Bullitt, Taxi Driver and other '70s landmarks to see how they worked (or didn’t). His idol Pauline Kael (whose own reviews are mentioned frequently) approached criticism in a similar forensic manner—but where Kael had flowing, quotable prose, Tarantino aims to capture the excitement of speech (after listening to his podcast over the last year, I could literally hear him narrate the book). Paragraphs are kicked off with a conversational “Now…”, “Well…”, “So…”. Sometimes he will pose a series of increasingly animated questions and answer them in “yeses” and “nos”, a device he frequently uses in film-writing. In the chapter on Brian De Palma’s Sisters, in a stretch of 10 paragraphs, four begin with “But”, and one each with “Also” and “However”—an indication of the headlong momentum of Tarantino’s prose.

As is usually the case with Tarantino, it’s a lot—of information, of hypotheses, of declarations. But there’s something thrilling about him in full critic mode, reeling off names of artists and films and characters and expecting it to make sense to the reader. My two favourite chapters aren’t focused on a single film. One is a tribute to Kevin Thomas, a second-string Los Angeles Times critic whom Tarantino adored growing up. The other carries the book’s title as its headline and poses the question: “What If Brian De Palma Directed Taxi Driver Instead of Martin Scorsese?” One can imagine a young Tarantino initiating debates like this at Video Archives, a nobody with thousands of movies already in his head, not least the unmade ones of his own.

Cinema Speculation released on 1 November last year. As it happens, another pop culture mainstay brought out his own book that same day. Fans of Bob Dylan might have expected his next book to be a follow-up to his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. They got another work of non-fiction, but not a memoir.

The Philosophy Of Modern Song looks at 66 tracks, new and old. Much like Tarantino, Dylan turns the songs inside-out, trying to get a measure of their power and their hold over him. They range from standards like Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ and The Clash’s ‘London Calling’' to obscure gems like Uncle Dave Macon’s 1924 recording of ‘Keep My Skillet Good And Greasy’. Though there are songs from the 1920s to the 2000s, the preference is for mid-20th century music, mostly country, blues, R‘n’B, bluegrass, rock ‘n’ roll and vintage pop.

For each selection, Dylan writes two small essays. The first is a kind of stream-of-consciousness reckoning with the song in question (“This is Moloch, the cat’s eye pyramid, the underbelly of beauty, where you take away the bottom number and the others fall”; ‘El Paso’, Marty Robbins). Sometimes it’s Dylan talking, sometimes a character from the song. The second essay is a more straightforward assessment. Before long you realise Dylan isn’t married to this format; for some entries, he skips one or the other essay. Sometimes he throws in a list, because why not?

If Tarantino in Cinema Speculation aims for conversational zing, Dylan in Philosophy is after something more literary. As with Chronicles, his prose is a unique amalgam of hard-boiled pulp, folksy wisdom, cultural arcana and Beat flourishes. There’s a spaciness here, though, which makes several entries seem almost like prose poems—or a Dylan song. I must admit my attention wandered and waned on some of the more expansive rambles. But there are startling phrases, sentences, things that only Dylan would think of writing. The Uncle Dave Macon song is “like a silent movie… it shows what it has”, “a unified song, all things in constant motion”, “a spirit guide… an interpreter in foreign lands”, a song that will “milk the cow till it gives blood”.

When he isn’t free-associating, Dylan describes songs and singers with an exactness that can only come from love and a lifetime of close listening. “Time and again he’ll slip the first few words of a line upstairs into the end of the previous line,” he writes of Bobby Darin’s phrasing in ‘Beyond The Sea’. When Dean Martin croons, “Words dissolve into runs of vowels without the traffic lanes of consonants.” “The Clash were always the band they imagined themselves to be”—as succinct an assessment of the socially committed English punks as anyone has done. About bluesman Jimmy Reed’s use of space: “You feel like you can see the light hitting the dust as it swirls under the sway of the music.”

The Philosophy Of Modern Song is steeply priced but stunning to look at. The layout (in hardcover) is eclectic and witty—not obvious images but references of the kind Dylan is making in the text. The entry for ‘Tutti Frutti’ has three accompanying photographs: singer Little Richard, Carmen Miranda with her famous fruit hat, and one of Paul Cezanne’s paintings of apples and pears. For ‘Beyond The Sea’, it’s Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling on the beach in From Here To Eternity and a 19th century wood engraving of boats attacking whales by William James Linton.

In less direct ways than Tarantino, Dylan has been a tastemaker, both through his recent music, which has thrown light on everything from blues and folk traditions to the Great American Songbook, and the radio show he hosted for 102 episodes. The book is as much his voice as ‘Queen Jane Approximately’—and Cinema Speculation reads like Tarantino dictated it. Both are labours of love and should spur months of discovery.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

The sublime dance of the Andrew Dominik-Nick Cave films

As Nick Cave walks across the studio, we hear his voice on the soundtrack. He’s grumbling about bandmate Warren Ellis and film-maker Andrew Dominik, who’s making a documentary on them. “They like to go on about accidental nature of art…. There’s no such thing as accidents.” Just as he says this, there’s a sound and the camera lurches downwards—its operator has probably tripped over something. We then cut to Cave sitting at his desk, launching into a complicated answer to a question we never hear by saying, “I think accidents is the wrong word…”

This is one of the few light-hearted moments in a heavy-hearted film, which also found its genesis in an accident. In 2015, Nick Cave was completing his album Skeleton Tree when his 15-year-old son Arthur died in a fall. With an album to promote but no will to answer questions about the tragedy, Cave asked Dominik, whom he has collaborated with on films and known for decades, if he would like to document that time in his life. The result was One More Time With Feeling, a black and white film with off-the-cuff interviews with Cave and Ellis, scenes of them performing the album’s tracks, and a digressive voice-over by Cave.

Arthur’s death isn’t spoken of directly but it hangs over the film, making the already doomy songs of Skeleton Tree seem like they came after the fact, even though they were mostly written before. There is, however, a melancholy splendour to the studio sequences: the messianic Ellis, with his long white beard, arms outstretched, shaping the music with minute movements in the air; Cave complaining he doesn’t know what the chords are, then playing an exceptionally beautifully figure on the piano. In one stunning sequence, the camera is placed on a circular track, with the musicians playing in the middle. Strobe lights flash disorientingly as images are superimposed on one another—a startling interpretation by one artist of another’s fragmented present.

There are flashing lights in This Much I Know To Be True (2022) too. Cave and Ellis, both in dark blue suits, surrounded by the deep browns and blacks of an abandoned factory floor, begin the slow intro to ‘Ghosteen Speaks’. As the camera glides around them, lights flash on and off, creating dramatic warm swatches of illumination, a visual answer to the shimmering chords. As Cave launches into the chorus, their irradiance goes up a notch, a shower of disco lights. In the 2016 film, the effect had been unsettling; here it feels euphoric.

This Much I Know To Be True is, structurally, the same film as One More Time With Feeling. Dominik directs. Cave and Ellis perform songs from their album Ghosteen and give interviews. Cave shows off ceramic sculptures of the Devil he has been working on. Ellis animatedly talks up his copy of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium. Yet, some crucial things are different. There’s no voice-over. The film is in handsome, sober colour. And the pall of death has lifted. There’s a calm to the proceedings, a kind of quiet euphoria.

The performances were recorded in an abandoned factory in Bristol. It’s almost like Lars Von Trier’s 2003 film, Dogville: peeling walls, everything in the open, tracks laid out, a camera and its operators circling in the back. Both films call our attention to processes: songwriting, performance, rehearsal, filming. One More Time With Feeling begins with Ellis talking to the camera in a cab, but then something in the setup goes wrong and he’s asked to do it again. A little later, Cave is asked to repeat his entry into a room. We see the film crew mapping out shots, musicians trying to find the tune, engineers at their consoles. At one point, Dominik encourages Earl, Arthur’s twin, to take a photograph of a cameraperson on set, saying they will use it in the film.

Without making it sentimentally obvious, the Cave-Ellis relationship is at the heart of the second film. Dominik intercuts clips of them talking about their collaborative process. It’s like a lover’s argument, except they aren’t talking to each other. “A whole lot of shit happens, I mean, a whole lot of terrible shit happens, when Warren and me get into a room,” Cave says, suppressing a smile. Trying to nail ‘Waiting For You’, they stop and start, Cave complains, Ellis makes adjustments. But the most revealing moment is during ‘Bright Horses’. Ellis is at the piano, Cave at his microphone. But for the last stanza, Cave walks over and finishes the song sitting beside Ellis, Dominik framing them in a series of simple, moving two-shots.

I'll go out on a limb and I've never seen music shot more expressively than in This Much I Know to Be True. In the performance of ‘Lavender Fields’, Dominik and Robbie Ryan’s camera elegantly glides and weaves between Cave at a microphone, Ellis conducting a four-person string section, and a trio of backup singers. They all seem transported. Fittingly, no cuts interrupt the mood; it’s a four-minute take. I am travelling appallingly alone/ On a singular road, the song begins. Perhaps Cave in 2016 was appalling alone; he seems in a better place now, singing with great tenderness about a kingdom in the sky. It’s the hard-won joy of a ship coming into port. An extraordinary gift from Dominik to Cave, and to us.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

KK: A farewell in 10 songs

Krishnakumar Kunnath, known to a generation of Indian film viewers as KK, died in Kolkata last night, after suffering a cardiac arrest following a live performance. He was 53. 

KK started as a playback artist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as the male singer to tap for soaring melodies. His clear voice stood out in an industry where the most popular singers usually have some kind of vocal affectation. He sang on dozens of hits over the years—Aankhon Mein Teri, Bardaasht Nahi Kar Sakta and Dus Bahane, to name a few—and also gave Indipop two of its enduring classics: Yaaron and Pal. KK will be intensely missed, not only for the quality of his work but its warmth and familiarity. Whenever KK was on, it was like a friend was singing. Here are 10 songs to remember him by.

Chhod Aaye Hum 

Just the song title, repeated once, at the start. But KK stretches the line until it extends across some imaginary valley. Hariharan, Suresh Wadkar and Vinod Sehgal handle the rest of the Maachis song, but KK turns up with a memorable high echo of “woh galiyan” in the final chorus. Hardly anyone had heard him before this; Maachis was his Hindi debut, a few months after his Tamil debut in Kadhal Desam. Everyone who heard it knew he’d be sticking around. 

Tadap Tadap

The track that made his reputation. Tadap Tadap, from Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, could easily have become a self-pitying incel anthem. Instead, KK’s lightness of tone even in his heaviest moments allows it to burn clean. After the bluster of the chorus, the way he descends, defeated, on “lut gaye hum teri mohabbat mein” is heartbreaking. 

Khuda Jaane 

KK’s superpower was the way he could go loud without visible strain, without sacrificing that beautiful clear tone. It’s evident in all his great songs, never more so than this track from Bachna Ae Haseeno. KK and Shilpa Rao trade restrained verses and suddenly he’s in the sky, singing “Khuda jaane ke main fida hoon/khuda jaane main mitt gaya…”

Banda Bindas Hai

A majority of KK’s hits showcase his searing higher register. The up-tempo, Goan-flavoured Banda Bindas Hai from Aks is a rare track that uses his lower register to great effect. His reading of “Ras pine ki pyas hai/banda yeh bindas hai” is playful and perfect, KK gleefully exaggerating the alliteration in both lines. 

Yaaron

There are farewell songs, and then there’s Yaaron. Off his first solo album, this warm number, with KK singing over a simple guitar riff, is perfect for singalongs. I should know: it was the go-to song when I left school, college, post-grad…

Strawberry Aankhen

This playful AR Rahman track with nonsense lyrics by Javed Akhtar needed a light-as-air vocal. Rahman, always a great matcher of singer and song, called upon KK. He combines easily with Kavita Paudwal, handling this Hollywood musical-like curiosity with an easy humour. 

Alvida 

From Life in a Metro, a stormy power ballad tailormade for KK. The first 80 seconds are deceptively calm, but after KK launches into the chorus, he’s raging. There are no verses after that, only agitated bridges that carry him back to the anguished interrogations of the chorus: Alvida alvida/ab kehna aur kya/jab tune keh diya alvida.

Le Chale

KK had a way with acoustic ballads, and this from My Brother Nikhil was one of his best. The shift from moodiness in the verses to hope in the chorus would not have been the same with any other singer. 

Chadhta Suraj

In the first season of Coke Studio India, there was a fortuitous pairing with the Sabri brothers on this ominous qawaali by Aziz Nazan. The first four minutes of this nine-minute track are exquisite slow burn, after which it explodes, KK cutting completely loose at the end. 

Aur Tanha

From Love Aaj Kal 2.0, a late-career gem—unsurprisingly, a Pritam collaboration. KK’s voice soars as easily as it did a quarter of a century earlier. And the wordless coos he adds at the end of the chorus are pure KK: featherweight, perfectly pitched, intuitively emotional. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Todd Haynes' notes on the Underground

This is a rock group called The Velvet Underground/ I show movies on them, do you like their sound?/ Cause they have a style that grates/ And I have art to make

These lines are from Style It Takes, a track by Lou Reed and John Cale. The two reunited in 1990—just over 25 years after they formed The Velvet Underground—to record a tribute album to the late Andy Warhol. The “I” is Warhol, the artist and impresario who gave the band a platform and designed the famous banana cover for their debut album. Warhol’s home movies were literally shown on them, projected on to screens behind as they performed their songs on stage.

A style that grated, and still does—the feedback screech after the first chorus in Run Run Run is gloriously ugly after all these decades. But the Velvets weren’t just an arty provocation out of Warhol’s Factory: They were a rock ‘n’ roll band, albeit one that did viola freakouts. They released four studio albums, the first two of which are pop landmarks, the other two merely excellent. They barely lasted six years but their afterlife has been remarkably influential—insert here the obligatory line about how not many heard the Velvets back in the day, but those who did started their own bands.

When director Todd Haynes first heard the Velvets, he realised he was listening to the blueprint for the punk and new wave music he loved. “I’d felt like I’d found the source,” he said in an interview to Rolling Stone. “I’d found the epicentre.” Now, he has channelled the thrill of that revelation into a film that doesn’t just tell the story of the band but captures the spirit of the scene from which they emerged.

Haynes has made two feature films about musicians earlier: the glam rock throwback Velvet Goldmine and the shapeshifting Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There. He also directed, at the beginning of his career, a curious short called Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, in which the musician and her bandmates were Barbie dolls. The same experimental spirit animates The Velvet Underground (streaming on Apple TV+), Haynes’ first documentary. He uses the Warhol films and other bits and pieces of 1960s avant-garde cinema to create a stream of collages instead of the usual clip-interview-clip. Often, there is an interviewee on the right of the screen and a film scene on the left, or two scenes running side by side, with a voice-over.

This density of information and sensory overload is bracing: the thrill comes from the feeling that you are missing something with every passing frame. Popular film today just doesn’t take these kinds of risks, which is why it’s worth celebrating that Haynes could slip in something like an experimental film under the guise of a band biopic. This is also apt, because Warhol and his associates were at the vanguard of experimental cinema at the time the Velvets were emerging.

The split screens in Haynes' film are a reminder of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, a film which starred, among others, Nico, the German chanteuse who sang on the first Velvets album. We see clips from the famous Warhol “screen tests” (Reed and Cale were among the subjects) and bits of films by Jonas Mekas and Paul Morrissey. These scenes—casually transgressive, oddly beautiful—are a perfect complement to Velvet classics like Heroin and Venus In Furs, and give us a sense of what it must have been like to see the band perform live, with film, music, lighting and drugs all mixed into one mind-altering package.

Cale participates in the film, as does Velvets drummer Moe Tucker (Reed and Sterling Morrison are no more, and Doug Yule didn’t want to be part of the film). Other talking heads are drawn from the 1960s avant-garde scene: former Warhol superstar Mary Woronov, video artist Tony Conrad, musician La Monte Young. “We are not part, really, of subculture or counterculture,” Mekas says as the screen is split into a dozen moving parts, “we are the culture!” Particularly delightful are the reminiscences by Jonathan Richman of The Modern Lovers, a Velvets superfan. “Not only was it new, it was radically different,” he says of their sound. “It was this slow mid-tempo stuff, strange melodies. You could watch them play and there would be overtones you couldn’t account for.” He recalls how there'd be a few moments of quiet whenever the band abruptly ended a live rendition of the orgiastic Sister Ray. “The crowd would be dead silent for”—counts one, two, three, four on his fingers—“five. And then they would applaud. The Velvet Underground had hypnotised them again.”

Surprisingly for a band that divided opinions so effortlessly, the Velvets have now become a marker of evolved musical taste. A tribute album to The Velvet Underground & Nico, released in September, had an impeccable lineup of alternative musicians—Kurt Vile, Courtney Barnett, Matt Berninger, St Vincent, Thurston Moore. Some of the tracks are brilliant—Michael Stipe’s breathy version of Sunday Morning, King Princess’ snarly There She Goes Again—but it’s also an indication of how close to respectability the Velvets are now. Which is why Haynes’ immersion in 1960s avant-garde, the queer movement, modern art and experimental cinema is a bracing reminder of the heady cross-currents that gave rise to The Velvet Underground.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Fleet Foxes' Shore, Kurt Vile's Speed Sound Lonely KV: Album review

On 22 September, Fleet Foxes dropped their new album, Shore, on YouTube. Along with it came an hour-long film directed by Kersti Jan Werdal, which had the album’s 15 tracks set to long, often static shots of the outdoors: the ocean, fields, mountains, streams, animals, birds, and the odd human. The release was timed to coincide with the autumnal equinox—a very Fleet Foxes gesture, at once folky and arty, organic and somewhat precious.

If the opener, Wading In Waist-High Water, sounds like typical tasteful unplugged Foxes, it’s the second track, Sunblind, which suggests their sound might be headed in a slightly different direction this time. Pecknold sounds his familiar self on this warm tribute to singers departed, recent deaths like David Berman as well as influences like Elliott Smith. But the stabbing of the piano leading into the chorus is new, and the chorus itself is as close as they've come to structured pop songwriting.

Shore is the fourth album by Fleet Foxes. The first two were near-perfect batches of artisanal folk: jangling guitars, ethereal harmonies and Pecknold’s searching voice. They added a choir and strings on their ambitious third album, Crack-Up (2016), a deepening and darkening of their sound. It’s a beautiful, stormy record but, with its baroque touches and esoteric song titles (Third of May/Ōdaigahara, – Naiads, Cassadies), not outside the realm of affectation.

Perhaps Pecknold decided there wasn’t much further to explore in that direction. On Shore, he strips the Foxes’ sound down to something winsome and bright. He recorded the album himself, with the help of guest musicians like Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Raphael Rossen and Christopher Bear. None of the Foxes’ other members feature on it; as Pecknold explained in a note, the studio albums are “predominantly my work and vision”. It’s surprising to hear pronounced drums on track after track—conventional percussion has never been a Fleet Foxes staple. But it’s a positive move, the sort of opening up a well-regarded band can afford to make on its fourth album (in the late 1980s, R.E.M followed three superb, moody records with the exuberant Life's Rich Pageant).

The song lengths are back under control too—no rolling eight-minute epics—and the titles aren’t tongue-twisters. It’s the old Foxes sound, but streamlined and accessible. Whatever experimentation is there is subtle. Quiet Air has a modal breakdown at the end; Going-to-the-Sun Road has lovely elegiac horns. Young Man's Game takes advantage of the steady beat to include driving harmonies that one might not have got on an earlier album. Pecknold is in fine, relaxed form, making even the mainstream balladry of Can I Believe You memorable, stretching the ‘you’ over three or four syllables, his voice ringing high and clear like Rick Danko in It Makes No Difference.

One of the artists Pecknold mentions on Sunblind is country-folk legend John Prine, who died in April. Prine recorded a cover of his 1979 song How Lucky with Kurt Vile at the end of last year. Over a fingerpicked guitar figure, Vile and Prine trade verses, then sing one together. The track, and a cover of Pine’s Speed of the Sound of Loneliness, feature along with three other songs on Vile’s new EP, Speed Sound Lonely KV, which was released on 2 October.

Vile is a prolific singer-songwriter, with eight full-length albums and 18 EPs since 2003. His mix of indie fingerpicking and dreamy electric psychedelia has changed very little since his breakthrough, 2011’s Smoke Ring For My Halo. No other major artist today, with the exception of Canadian power pop savants The New Pornographers, has so stubbornly stuck to such a simple and well-defined sound over time. The new EP veers towards country—it was recorded in Nashville—but is still recognizably Vile, full of his tricky guitar riffs and lackadaisical, philosophical writing (“I ain’t lying/just being a little exotic”, he sings on Dandelions).

Change carries risk, of course, but in this age of reinvention, with a listening public vying to be on the cusp of the new, it’s also a surefire way to indie cred. Fleet Foxes deserve credit for tweaking their sound and producing an excellent album that’s true to their ethos. And Kurt Vile should be recognized as the modern master of not fixing what ain’t broke.

This piece was published on 20 October 2020.

Jatin-Lalit, the sound of the '90s

 It’s a balmy October evening in Mumbai. Lalit Pandit is on the phone; he’s singing ho gaya hai tujhko toh pyaar sajna.

I had mentioned how the differing tempos in the verse and chorus make it sound like two separate songs. “There were two different songs we combined to make one song,” he confirms. “Na jaane mere…it’s slightly fast. The energy and rhythm of the two pieces is Indian-Western. The ho gaya hai dholak break is amazing. Laakh kar le tu inkaar sajna, dildaar sajna, hai yeh pyaar sajna.” On the last “pyaar”, his voice does the upward lilt made famous by Lata Mangeshkar, who sang this and three other classics on the Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge soundtrack.

Aditya Chopra’s film celebrates 25 years on 20 October. It was, at the time of its release in 1995, one of the biggest commercial successes in Hindi cinema, setting off a trend of outwardly youthful, secretly conservative romances to woo the NRI community. It’s still watched and referenced today, so much a shorthand for Bollywood romance that Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020) used it as a framework for its gay love story. Central to the film’s appeal is the music, composed by Lalit and his brother Jatin: seven songs, each of them intimately familiar to most Indians alive today.

When the duo was first called in by Yash and Aditya Chopra, they didn’t know the name of the film or who was in it. They presented some of the tunes they had at the time, including early versions of Mehandi Laga Ke Rakhna and Mere Khwabon Mein Jo Aaye—enough to get them the job. Later, after a detailed narration, veteran lyricist Anand Bakshi told them, “This picture will be great, give it your all.” “The biggest thing was that Lataji was going to do the songs. Millions of fans crazy about her, and you get a chance to make her sing…” says Lalit, his voice trailing off as if he still can’t believe it.

They worked on the film for four and a half months. Ruk Jaa O Dil Deewane was created in the image of Rishi Kapoor stage songs like Bachna Ae Haseeno. Mehandi Laga Ke Rakhna, originally intended for Khiladi (1992), then for a Firoz Nadiadwala film, found its rightful home. “Of course, we were the captains, but our collaborators were exceptional,” Lalit says. “Humein phoolon jaise upar utha diya (they lifted us up like flowers).”

Jatin-Lalit’s music was the bedrock of Hindi film in the 1990s. Theirs was an inviting sound: clean, uncluttered, with an emphasis on melody. Not for them the distinctive dolour of Vishal Bhardwaj or the aggressive rhythms of A.R. Rahman. Akshay Manwani, author of Sahir Ludhianvi: The People’s Poet and Music, Masti, Modernity: The Cinema Of Nasir Husain, says the duo brought “melody and a certain propriety” back to film music. “The Hindi film song had really hit its lowest in the 1980s,” he says on email. “Jatin-Lalit emerged in this backdrop. I wouldn’t say they were exceptional or ingenious or anywhere near as brilliant like Rahman, but they brought an element of decency back to the film song, which is their single largest contribution to Hindi cinema.”

As a child of the '90s my primary allegiance was to Rahman, but I consumed more Jatin-Lalit than any other composer. Emanating from movie screens and cassette players and countdown shows on TV, their music seemed to reach out a hand. I had my favourites, of course: Tu Mere Saath Saath from Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (1992), as seductive a vision of social mobility as anything in Rangeela; Jaana Suno from Khamoshi (1996), which transforms Paul Anka’s laborious Bring The Wine into a soaring ballad; Main Koi Aisa Geet Gaoon from Yes Boss (1997), with that wild violin break; Zindagi Maut Na Ban Jaaye from Sarfarosh (1999), a qawwali-style number movingly rendered by Sonu Nigam and Roop Kumar Rathod.

They came from an illustrious musical lineage, the Mewati gharana. Their uncle, Pandit Jasraj, was one of the revered classical singers of the 20th century. The siblings were trained by their father, Pandit Pratap Narayan. Jatin, nine years older than Lalit, went into films first with their elder brother, Mandheer. They worked without much success for 15 years. Mandheer bowed out and Jatin-Lalit teamed up. Success came almost immediately, with their first film, Yaara Dildara (1991), yielding the disco-lite hit Bin Tere Sanam. The track was actually a repurposing of Le Ja Mera Dil, from their album Rhythmic Love (1989). Dil Kehta Hai, from the same album, would later become Chaand Taare in Yes Boss.

By the time Bin Tere Sanam became a hit, Jatin-Lalit were working on Mansoor Khan’s Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992). Unlike Yaara Dildara, this Aamir Khan-starrer was a hit, and so was the soundtrack, especially the piano duet Pehla Nasha. “Udit Narayan practised the song for almost one and a half months, every day,” Lalit says. “Sadhana (Sargam) would come in, so would Udit, we would finish the day’s work and rehearse with them.” Like all Nasir Husain productions, the sound was Western pop-influenced. The verses in Yahaan Ke Hum Sikandar are similar in metre and melody to The Who’s Pinball Wizard, and Naam Hai Mera Fonseca is a remake of Chuck Berry’s rockabilly classic Johnny B Goode.

It was on Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman that an era-defining partnership was formed. There are few things more quintessentially ’90s than Jatin-Lalit songs for a Shah Rukh Khan film. They collaborated on Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1994), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Yes Boss, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Mohabbatein (2000), Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (2000), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) and Chalte Chalte (2003)—memorable soundtracks all, as well as some of the most successful Hindi films ever. The reason they meshed so well with Khan’s image is because they were the right composers for that era. The slick romantic drama had a resurgence in the ’90s, which suited their clean, bright style better than the naked emotionalism of Nadeem-Shravan, a more traditional sound which ruled the early part of the decade. “We had a clarity of sound that you couldn’t hear in anyone else,” Lalit says. And it’s true that in a Jatin-Lalit song, everything—voices, horns, strings—is in balance.

Jatin-Lalit’s most famous works are the Shah Rukh romances but they composed for other actors and genres too. Their filmography includes Vaastav (gangster film), Khiladi and Ghulam (action), Sangharsh (psychological thriller). The cop film Sarfarosh yielded the popular Jagjit Singh ghazal Hoshwaalon Ko Khabar. Ghulam (1998) had the monster hit Aati Kya Khandala, delivered in tapori fashion by Aamir Khan. And there was Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s musical drama Khamoshi, their most rounded work, which alternates typical Jatin-Lalit melodies like Aaj Main Upar with uptempo rhythm-driven pieces like Huiya Ho and Gaate Thhe Pehle Akele.

Lalit counts Bhansali as one of three directors he worked with who really understood how to use music (the other two are Aditya Chopra and Aziz Mirza). “I could make out that even though it was his first film, he was asking for something different,” Lalit says. “He would tell us, I will take money out of the film if needed, but I want my music.”

I ask Lalit if he ever felt competitive with his contemporaries. His reply is immediate: “I always felt, and now I feel ever more so, that our music was far beyond anyone at that time.”

As beloved as Jatin-Lalit’s music is, many would likely disagree with this statement. One could make a case for elevating the duo above Nadeem-Shravan, Anu Malik or Vishal Bhardwaj, but in terms of creativity and seismic impact, this simply wouldn’t hold for Rahman. To make an inexact comparison, they were Rahul Dravid to Rahman’s Sachin Tendulkar: technically sound, dependable, great at what they did but not once-in-a-generation talents. It’s telling that they never won a Filmfare or National Award for best music director as a duo (Lalit and Sajid-Wajid won the Filmfare in 2011 for Dabangg), despite averaging more than one hit album a year from 1991-2001.

After 2001’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Jatin-Lalit started fading. More than Rahman’s dominance, it was perhaps the rise of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy as dependable (and more sonically adventurous) hit-makers that rendered the duo superfluous. Fanaa (2006) was their last hit album, after which they split up. They have worked separately since. In an industry where the great composers have careers spanning three or four decades, 10 years seems like a relatively short time. But those 10 years belonged to Jatin-Lalit.

This piece was published on 18 October 2020.