“He sat down and scored some great cover tunes from the ‘60s era, and got some great people together – it started as an instrumental thing, but when it was coming together, they put the feelers out for a singer, and then my name came up, cause I’ve been performing with my dad since I was really young. “’s always had a great interest in that style of music,” Singh reveals. The Bombay Royale was founded by Andy Williamson, a saxophonist and Bollywood aficionado who was driven by the fact that no one in Melbourne seemed to be performing that type of music live.
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#Bombay royale band how to#
“People say, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to do the Bollywood dance,’” Singh laughs, “but it’s very easy! You put your hands in the air and pretend you’re screwing in a light bulb! That’s what it’s about!” But first, we must learn how to do the Bollywood dance. Parvyn Singh, one of the two singers in this bombastic Bollywood/surf/psychedelic band, was on hand recently to speak with us about the band, the album and the awe-inspiring madness of Bollywood films in general. Their debut album, You Me Bullets Love, was released just last month – and it is a corker.
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The Bombay Royale had first set down to do strictly covers from the gilded ‘60s era of Bollywood, but soon evolved into writing their own material. But I see us as part of the music scene.Enter The Bombay Royale, a local 11-piece musical powerhouse who have taken the themes and soundtracks from these films and have infused them with all the colour, production and energy one would expect from a four-plus hour Bollywood movie. In a sense, we’ve made a niche for ourselves – a small one. We’re obviously not really going for top 40.
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I guess what we’re shooting for might be a bit different from some bands. All I’ve done for the last 20 years is play live, so I do feel like I’m part of it. “I don’t know whether we’re shooting at the same things other people are shooting at, but we are all from that scene. However, Williamson feels an affinity with the local scene. While they’ve long since moved beyond cover band territory, The Bombay Royale are generally thought to exist separately from much of the live music in Melbourne. An Indian audience will hear the reference, but at the same time if you put it alongside the old material it doesn’t sound like that either.” We’re using those guys as an inspiration, but what we’re producing doesn’t sound like that either exactly. By the time we got to the first proper record, there were only two covers on that record anyway. “Some people were friends I’d played with for years, other people I had to really hunt for. “The thing that got the ball rolling was I did arrangements of 25-30 tunes and then went hunting for musicians,” he says. Burman and Kalyanji-Anandji, Williamson was always confident The Bombay Royale could bring something new to this style of music. But, in spite of paying homage to the likes of R. However, purely nostalgic tributes are often either superfluous or dull. Given the specificity of the band’s founding inspiration, it’s important for them to honour and respect the past. We did as much as we could live, so there’s warts on it as well.” “We had to follow up the first one, which was a good record, but it was a development and there’s more co-writing going on. “We’re really happy with how that came out,” Williamson says. The band channel their undeniable technical prowess into a stylistically intrepid collection of songs. Indeed, following on from their 2012 debut, You Me Bullets Love, the diversity on The Island of Dr. There is flamboyance in the delivery, but we do put a lot of care into the way we write the tunes. “The songs we write are actually not particularly comedic. However flamboyant or however you take the stage part of it, musically it was something I was very serious about. “There wasn’t anyone live tapping into that – not that many musicians were even aware there was this awesome pool of stuff. “It was just such an awesome pool of inspiration, musically,” he says. Theatrical considerations aside, when Williamson conceived the band his chief motivation was to introduce the masses to the strength of ‘60s/’70s Bollywood songwriting. But if you look at the original inspiration for the band, the music is really flamboyant and we just couldn’t have got up there in jeans and t-shirts and played. It can be very easy to put yourself into some sort of realm of cabaret or even just taking the piss out of the whole thing.
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“We wear costumes, and it’s a very fine line between how you portray yourself. “It’s a double edged sword,” says saxophonist and band founder Andy Williamson.