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Blowin’ in the wind

PHOTO: M. VEDHAN

SOFTLY STRUMMING Mark and Nivedita at the concert

Maggie8 — a two member band (the truncated version of the original band which consists of a trumpet, piano and drums; due to logistical issues they couldn’t bring everyone down here to Chennai) made up of Mark on the banjo, and Nivedita, on the bass guitar, enchanted the audience who had assembled at the Alliance Française, braving the rains and the maddening evening rush-hour traffic.

The show was named ‘A Gust in August’ and as someone said at the end: it truly lived up to its name.

Notes fell down from Mark’s banjo and Nivedita’s bass like raindrops falling outside and the music rose up in whiffs, coiling and moving up, filling the audience like the smell of earth after the rains and transporting them to the lost place of their imaginations, evoking nostalgia and heart-ache in turns. All this came coated with a generous dollop of mellifluous harmonies sung by the duo who took turns to sing the bass and the high-octave parts, to ease the beautiful pain caused by the music, because as Mark described their music later, it was essentially tragic, mournful and ethereal — qualities more easily associated with loss and absence. This was reinforced by the projection that went on in the background, a sort of visual counterpoint to the music since it showed footage from a carnival that featured exaggerated, exuberant celebrations. (This post-modern ironical treatment of the music by juxtaposing it against footage not necessarily relevant to it can be found in the films of Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino — remember Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan singing in the background during the jail-break sequence in “Natural Born Killers”, whereas in “Reservoir Dogs”, Tarantino accepted that using 1970s music was to emphasise the orgiastic violence through counterpoint.)

The band mostly played their self-compositions characterised by the Beatlesque harmonies they seemed to specialise in although Nivedita did tend to go off-key at times. One could sense a lack of practice in her bass-playing as well but as she had picked up the instrument just a year ago, she still has time to improve. Mark seemed the more professional of the two as he sang and played with panache and perfection.

Most of their songs had both Hindi and English lyrics and the content varied from the sublime ‘Nightly Eyes’ — a lovely piece of songwriting and singing from Nivedita that reminded one of S.D. Burman’s songs; she said the song was to prove to her father that the money he paid for her violin lessons ‘hadn’t gone down the drain’ — to the bizarre like the one about a man who married his goat.

The duo’s future plans after they return to England include cutting an album, although they are yet to sign a they still don’t have a contractwith a music company.

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