A continuing series of live music, featuring jazz and rock acts from around the country, at one of Bangalore’s popular nightspots, was scheduled to host Virgil Donati — labelled the “wildest drummer in the world” — on August 1. While music lovers in the city geared up for the show, the organisers of the event got a surprise notice from the police. They were told that no restaurant in the city could host live music anymore. Recorded was fine but not live.

In a hurried move, the Virgil Donati-Brett Garsed show was postponed to August 6 and moved to a regular auditorium in the city.

Bangalore, once known as the Pub City on account of a pub culture, finds itself stretching at the moral seams as a small but increasingly international and modern lifestyle vies with conservative administrative mindset. Misadventures in the framing and interpretation of new laws have not helped matters either.

At the heart of the latest clampdown on live music and dancing at restaurants is ‘the licensing and controlling of places of public entertainment (Bangalore City) order, 2005’, introduced in May 2005 and targeted in particular at the ‘dance bars’ of the kind banned in Mumbai. Taking umbrage under loopholes in the then existing public entertainment rules, dance bars had emerged all over the city in early 2005. Several police complaints were filed against these bars.

The 2005 order, however, clubbed all entertainment spots under a common banner — not differentiating between dance bars, discotheques or regular restaurants with live music. After the order was introduced in June 2005, all public entertainment spots were forced to pull the plug on live music and dancing. Many restaurants even warned owners against allowing patrons to sway to recorded music being played at their establishments. 

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