Watch: The Police at Rang Bhavan, Mumbai (1980)

Nostalgia. It’s that special moment of pure unadulterated love for the past.

Symptoms include:

• a faint smile on your face
• sheer glee
• that eagerness to talk about every detail you remember from that day.

An archeological expedition into YouTube saw the unearthing of one such prominent nostalgic moment. A golden egg of a video was dredged from the ethers of the internet that documents The Police gig that happened in 1980 at famed rock haven Rang Bhavan in Mumbai. This was the first British rock gig that India had witnessed, and it was The Police’s first world tour. With 5,000 attendees, it was a sold out gig at the rate of Rs 10 – Rs 25 for tickets. Where in the world today, could you use the shrapnel in your pocket to go for a gig by The Police? Many more witnessed the gig from the by lanes around the venue, and the more adventurous lot scaled the walls and crashed the concert.

According to eyewitnesses from the gig, the most striking attendees you could not miss were the elegant Parsi ladies in the audience. They supposedly settled in to listen to “a police brass band from jolly old England” and soon found themselves in the midst of a rock mosh fest.

Taking an in-depth look at the video, one will notice that Sting looks wrinkle free, but yet still so intense, and broody. And this blonde, blue-eyed boy, doesn’t fail to patronise his Indian audience with a sense of Aryan arrogance, when Sting claims in a Rolling Stones interview in 1981 with James Henke that he was educating the masses of the right rock etiquette

One of the best moments of my life was in Bombay playing for an audience that had never seen rock, that had no idea how to behave toward it… Throughout the show, I explained that this is dance music, please don’t sit down—stand up on the seat or just dance. And by the end of the set, they did! They clapped in all the right places. It was quite emotional.

He must have failed to notice that many people in the audience sang along to his songs, even though none of The Police records where available in India. The power to pirate, and smuggle the music into the country allowed for a significant fanbase. And even if there were ignorant patrons, there were enough and more British and American satin-clad and beaded hippy refugees  who were leading the way for locals to follow suit and in-sync.

I may not have been alive to witness The Police’s Rang Bhavan mania, but it is reassuring to see that rock fans of yesteryear, are still the same as rock fans of the present generation. The sea of sweaty faces, blood curdling shrieks, the sing-a-long to every word belted in musical unison, and the sway-dance-bob to the rhythm and beat of every song.

Rang Bhavan, though inactive now as a rock venue (due to a court order in 2003 which declared it a silence zone), looking back at this video, truly makes you feel like future generations have missed out on something – a flavour of rock that may never be revisited.

So to soak in that bath bubble of nostalgia, check out The Police in Mumbai video below.