Interview: The Bicycle Days

“Oh, there’s been plenty of turbulence.” Bangalore psychedelic/alt rock act The Bicycle Days are talking about all the sexual tension within the band as we sit on the roof of Hard Rock Cafe, Pune, in the middle of the afternoon, lounging around in this makeshift lounge – atop the venue where they were scheduled to play later that evening. It’s the first day of the Bacardi NH7 Weekender, and in the background there’s loud growling metal emanating from the Bacardi Black Rock Arena. We’re a few hours away from their reverberant performance, which eventually left the audience in an unexpectedly heady haze of amazement. “We fight over every song, until it comes out and actually becomes a song. I think it’s the sexual tension.” Rahul Ranganath, the guitarist, lunges at his fellow band members as everyone collapses into laughter.

The band just turned a year old a week ago, they announce with a proud fondness. “Speaking of age, you know he’s only nineteen years old?” They point at Ranganath, the youngest member of the band, who then protests, “I’m twenty!” And everyone refuses to believe him. That’s the kind of band they are, they’re essentially five close friends – constantly ribbing eachother and bound by affectionate deprecation. They’re unquestionably indie kids, vocalist Karthik Basker is wearing a purple tshirt from Pigflower – the artistic enterprise of Lounge Piranha‘s drummer and guitarist. Bangalore is sparkling with young independent psychedelic and electronic acts of late, now more than ever before, mini-Portisheads and mini-Mars Voltas mushrooming through the city.

The prime reason for the band’s formation was the bassist’s uncontrollable cocaine habit. Well, something like that.
I asked them, “What prompted you to seriously pursue music?” Bassist Paul Dharamraj shoots back, “Getting kicked out of college.” The boys laugh and collectively nod in agreement, until I have to ask, “What – you all got kicked out of college?”
Basker explains, “No, just Paul. For um, allegedly smoking pot.” “Coke actually, the story’s grown better over the years,” Dharamraj adds. “We’d all been playing on different projects, pursuing our musical interests,” says Basker. Rahul continues, “I was studying in Chennai when Paul got kicked out of college, I was still in college – and I finished it.” Everyone looked pointedly at the bassist. “We started a band called Blushing Satellite. Paul got kicked out so I decided to move to Bangalore – because I had finished college.”
“So Rahul used to be in this band earlier with Paul – okay actually we just wanted to play Strawberry Fields. Simple,” concedes Basker. “Strawberry Fields was our first gig ever. We were runners up. The band came together and – we didn’t know what the hell we were doing because we had just jammed twice before we went on stage. It was just four of us, Nikhil (on samples) joined later.”

“Our songwriting happens in many ways. We’ve written very few songs together -  ‘Circles’, ‘Sobered Anthem’, ‘No Battery’ – that’s like an instrumental. Then there’s ‘Zorbing In Space’. The thing is, we’re very lucky that Rahul has a recording setup at home. We can experiment, put a lot of things together, produce it ourselves,” Basker says. “So basically, with me and Nikhil – it happens in many different ways, sometimes with lyrics, sometimes the drum lines, so it’s very hard to follow a structure because everyone is coming from very different backgrounds. We all have our own ways of working,” Ranganath adds. There’s some fanatic screaming happening in the vicinity, we pause for a moment to investigate the source, before returning to the conversation.”A song could start out a certain way but end completely differently – that’s happened with a lot of our songs. There’s no connection to what it was when it started,” Dharamraj continues.

The Bicycle Days’ lyrics aren’t always entirely discernible, with the vocals lapsing into robotic/android sections and resounding all through a venue (or headphones), songs cascading onto themselves with long delays. Basker says of his songwriting process, “I think about what’s happening around, and it’s a vent – yes. It does happen sometimes that I make a conscious effort to sit down and write a song, but sometimes I just take a song on stage and just completely change the lyrics and go mad with everything. A lot of psychobabble happens. It’s really about what I’m thinking/feeling right now, and music is the best way for me to vent.”

When you try to deconstruct TBD’s music, you see a large grounding in The Mars Volta, with wisps of Radiohead, and their own exploding psychedelia. Sometimes there are deadpan samples announcing John Lennon’s assassination, some soaring vocals surrounded by ringing harmonics and echoing electronica, each song contributes slowly to a building atmosphere. When asked about what they personally listen to, each band member lists their own set of individual influences. The guitarist says definitely, definitely Tool and The Mars Volta. Basker is into Radiohead, and Queens of the Stone Age. Nikhil Narendra, who does the samples for the band and plays laptop, he’s into The Prodigy. All of them collectively agree that the one concert that changed their lives was: Bryan Adams, before dissolving into more hapless laughter.

There’s a lot of unnoticed talent burgeoning underground within the country, sometimes you have to be deeply within the scene to find it. The band recommended these acts as their favorite new music: Adam and the Fish eyed Poets, No Safe Word, Rosemary, Peter Cat Recording Co, Gowri, and Sridhar/Thayil. As for collaborations, Basker has his heart set on the band someday performing something with the entrancing songstress Susheela Raman.

Three members of the band- Nikhil Narendra, Shreyas Dipali and Karthik Basker, are definite that they want to make their careers solely out of music. Paul Dharamraj, has gotten back into college and is training to be a journalist. They released an EP last year 42 (stream here), which made it to our top five EPs of 2010 list, but that’s material they don’t play live anymore. The band is working on a lot of new material, but there are no concrete plans of an album yet. We named them the most promising indie of the year, and with every listen, that pronouncement only becomes stronger.