They rocked campuses long before indie music made any noise. And Indian Ocean is still going strong. In a chat with eye, they slam music companies, fret about becoming Bollywood musicians and tell us why they want to sell their own music

Tell us about the live-in-concert DVD which you’ve just released.
ASHEEM CHAKRAVARTY: We are primarily a live band. We love to perform and we’d rather be heard on a concert ground than on a tape or CD or radio.
AMIT KILAM: The DVD is a recording of our show on November 18, 2006 at the Garden of Five Senses, Delhi. It has the best of our old tracks but has a new one too—Bula Raha Hai, which is also one of the compositions of the film Bhoomi. The show was done for the DVD and that’s why we didn’t publicise it much and yet some 3,500 people turned up for it. We hired eight cameramen, reined in cinematographer Sanjeev Kapoor and got hold of musician and editor Chintan Kalra (who plays the bass guitar for Parikrama). I, too, sat through the edit. It’s a complete Indian Ocean product though EMI is handling its distribution.

Why didn’t you give the task to a big recording company?
AMIT: We’ve been frustrated in the past by cameramen and editors who’ve made videos of our shows. They almost always focused on the vocalist just because he happens to be singing and the guitarist just because he’s moving a lot. That’s unfair. Other members are doing equally important work for the music.
ASHEEM: Our band has no leader or even a lead vocalist. I do a lot of singing but other members do equally important work. Photographers and cameramen in India have no sense of music. Quite often, a shutterbug has asked us for the lead singer so that he could fix his camera on him. And it is silly that when the tabla is playing, the camera zooms in on the guitar and vice-versa.
AMIT: Band culture is very new in India. There are just a few popular bands that are doing something original. Ours is a predominantly soloist nation. All our classical musicians are soloists. Except for the folk musicians perhaps, who are a poor lot and don’t get the publicity they deserve.
RAHUL RAM: We’re also sick of music companies that usually want the rights. It just happened now with our DVD. I mean it’s our music but this company said they would have the copyright over it. That’s disgusting. We wanted no such situation.  

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