One of indie music's most popular names, The Local Train arrives in the city for a gig, to prove how Hindi music is slowly serving as an alternative to Bollywood
A band that lives together stays together. That’s the rephrased idiom you could use to describe The Local Train, a four-member outfit that shares a flat in South Delhi. Vocalist Raman Negi takes us through a typical day in their lives. Imagine a house with wires snaking out of every room, connected to gear placed in a common area, where they thrash out tunes together. In the mornings, when the four of members surface, one of them who has an idea — say, it’s a particular hook that’s been running in his head — takes it to the others to see how they can contribute. Each then takes time to ideate, before they get together again to compare notes and piece a track together, a process that can be compared to furnishing an empty room. The drummer, in a manner of speaking, adds a comfy sofa with his beats, where the various elements of music can rest. The bassist adds a solid teakwood table with his underlying groove. The vocalist puts up a few paintings with his lyrical structures. And the guitarist contributes with a shimmering chandelier made of his leads and chord progressions.
This is exactly how The Local Train composed songs for the two albums they have released in the past, Aalas Ka Pedh in 2015 and Vaaqif last year.
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(From left) Ramit Mehra, Paras Thakur, Raman Negi and Sahil Sarin
Negi joined forces with drummer Sahil Sarin, guitarist Paras Thakur and bassist Ramit Mehra in 2011. And each has helped the other cement a place in independent music where the band can safely be counted as one of India’s most prominent Hindi indie acts. Almost all their songs have over six million views on YouTube. They in fact, consider their band to be a product of the Internet, which is the only medium outside of live shows that they employ to disseminate their material.
The fierce independence that this offers has worked in their favour. And it also shows how independent band-based Hindi music has now filled a void that the Indipop of the ’90s left behind after its artistes got eaten up by the same industry that they served an alternative to, Bollywood.
Ahead of their Mumbai concert, Negi says, “If anyone wants to see how India’s music is growing, you have to put things in context. Hindi, as a language, has taken over different genres, whether pop, metal or hip-hop, and can now be considered a replacement for Bollywood. And the real power of this change is in the fact that even if you’re broke, you can still make your own sound that didn’t exist before because unlike film music, here, there are no rules you need to
play by.”
On: June 5, 9 pm
At: FLEA Bazaar Cafe, Oasis Complex, Lower Parel.
Log on to: insider.in
Cost: Rs 1,500
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