NEW DELHI: With the surfacing of a new breed of rock music bands, the capital, that has always been considered by afficandoes as trailing behind cities like say Bangalore and Mumbai with respect to acceptance and popularity of the genre, is now witnessing a sweeping wind of change.
"Delhi is now the best place for rock music. Even two years back there was not such an audience who was receptive to rock music but now it has accepted different genres of music," says Dhaval Mudgal, member of the band 'Half Step Down' that was launched in 2005.
"There are more active gigs in Delhi which pays as high as 20,000 per show and with about 15-20 live shows a month it is really turning out to be a good time for the bands," he says.
Arjun Kaul of 'Prithivi', which has been composing music for the last three years says, "The audience for rock music is growing in Delhi. The quality of production, infrastructure and resources has ensured better events to be organised and better performance, so I feel the music scene is fast changing in Delhi."
The success of like 'Half Step Down,' 'Level 9,' 'Advatia' etc has given inspiration to a new breed of bands to join the bandwagon.
'Stitch,' 'Prithivi,' 'Rampage,' 'Frequency,' 'Inferno' are grabbing the spotlight with their unique renditions.
Kshtij Rawal who heads the eight-month-old band 'Stitch' says, "In these last few months we have performed at a lot of places in Delhi.
Then we got selected for the Rockilution competition that held here recently and we performed at the zonal level."
"Every month there are one or two gigs and each of these pays around Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000. Moreover we participate in different competitions...Every week we try to catch up with each other and have a jamming session," says Akshay Raheja of Frequency, which reached the finals of the Channel V 'Launchpad' programme.
With their roaring guitars, pounding drums and high octave vocals, these gang of boys have suceeded in swaying Delhities to their style of music.
And, surprisingly most of them have not recieved any formal instruction in music. "We all are students of Jamia Milia Islamia. When we started our band we never had any formal training. It is now that I have started taking classes in drums...Being like minded, we always used to talk about music.
It is through these discussions that everything happened," says Rawal.
Although, the music scene might have changed over the years but when it comes to pursuing a profession in rock music, they feel, it still has a long way to go.
"To earn a living out of music and survive purely on self-composed rock music is a little difficult right now. One needs to compose commercial music, jingles for TV and radio for sustainence," says Arjun, who apart from being a guitarist is also a software engineer. All the members of my band are engineers working as professionals in different MNCs, he says.
However, Rawal seems optimistic. "I know there is struggle initially but I know that times are changing and am optimistic that with hard work, planning and a little bit of luck, we can be successful," he says.
