Lounge Piranha Break Even

Lounge Piranha played an entirely sponsor-free gig on Saturday, Feb 13 at the Alliance Francaise in Bangalore. The alternative act organised the entirety of the event themselves including arranging for two opening acts to perform with them – singer-songwriter Gowri and Hyderabad alternative band Native Tongue.

Guitarist Abhijeet Tambe tells us what happened

I thought the gig went great. We had about 200 people and we went slightly above break even point in terms of the collection at the gate. but that’s cos Native Tongue enough were cool enough to agree to my rather vague proposition of “I’ll pay for your bus tickets and cabs and you can crash at my place but I don’t know whether you’ll get paid anything more or not.” And for that matter Gowri was a real champ about the whole thing too. I believe that auditorium can hold about 300 but after that it starts getting really cramped. So with 200 it wasn’t totally packed. But there were enough people in there to get a feeling that something cool was going on and a nice strong vibe to play to as being on stage was concerned.

Gowri kicked it off with some good ol’ singer songwriter stuff. It was just her and her acoustic guitar and I thought that was great, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone so comfortable on stage alone with just an acoustic guitar. A few songs later she was joined by Gaurav on bass and another guy on drums and they pulled it up another notch. Native Tongue came in after her and fully lifted the energy level. They did a nice tight set, what you could expect from a well rehearsed 3-piece outfit, and they had a nice receptive crowd to play it to as well. Lounge Piranha went on last and we had our usual rounds of jams, mishaps, idiot humour and some very good musical moments as well. We had a dancer on stage for our first jam and a choir backing us for our last song of the night ‘Hand Hole’.

I talked to Gowri and Baba from Native Tongue after the gig and I think everybody’s very happy about the gig and looking forward to doing more things in the future. As far as Lounge Piranha is concerned, we’re fully on for doing this again in a couple of months or so.

If you’re a Mumbai band and are looking to play one of these shows in Bangalore, get in touch with Abhijeet.

Check out these pictures from the gig, taken by Pervez Rajan.