Fifteen years ago Someplace Else was all about shimmer, stilettos and the turntable. Its first steps towards live music-dom from a teenybopper’s disco-dream-come true, was peppered with some apprehension alright. Then Hip Pocket, with Nondon Bagchi in lead, took up the guitar and the drumsticks when the DJ and his fans were still warming up for the party ahead.

This was 1997. Twelve years hence, the strobe lights and disco balls have made a quiet exit for other venues and Someplace Else (which hosts bands six days a week) is the first name you take when you think of live music in Kolkata. And for almost a decade now, also the last.

In sharp contrast to the sixties and a greater part of the seventies, when the whole of Park Street came alive to music with sun down, music lovers in the city today religiously troop into just one destination for their live dose of rock, jazz or blues. Music, it seems, have shrunk to just one haven in the city — SPE.

“There seems to be a lack of vision here. When a venue invests in a band, it is fair to expect profits. But then they also have to realize that the cash registers don’t start ringing overnight. You have to give things some time… and not drive the band up the wall for money,” says Monojit Dutta of the Orient Express. Something that SPE has always refrained from. “They have always believed in the band, in music and let things take their own course. The pub has become a part of an average Kolkatan’s routine not in a day,” adds Dutta. It’s the same lack of tenacity that stares back at you from the decades-old live-music tradition in the city, feels Jayanta Dasgupta of the Saturday Night Blues. “The tradition of live music anywhere else in the country is not even a shadow of the one we cherish in Kolkata. But unlike SPE, other venues here, and in other cities, seem to have little commitment to music. If it’s not big business, they’d either give up or thrust their choice of music on you,” says Dasgupta.

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