Raghu Dixit - Off Beat, On the Beat

Image: Mallikarjun Katakol for Forbes India

About 16 miles to the west of Salisbury, in the south-west of the UK, are the Larmer Tree Gardens, home to tropical wild birds and eclectic music. In summer 2010, Raghu Dixit sat here inside a small wooden shed, playing his acoustic guitar and singing one song in Hindi or Kannada to one audience member at a time. The venue, fittingly called Folk in a Box, was probably the smallest Dixit had ever performed in.

The 37-year-old folk-rocker has had a stage look in place since the beginning of his performing career: A colourful lungi, an equally vibrant Fab India kurta and ghungroos around the ankles. But the moody low lighting rendered the singer into a silhouette. Shorn of the frills, it was Dixit’s voice that had to do all the work.

Midway through ‘Ambar’, a simple Hindi ballad about searching for love, a 40-something Caucasian broke down. It wasn’t the lyrics she was responding to, but Dixit’s big-chested vocals. “I didn’t know whether to stop or continue singing as she went ‘boo hoo hoo’,” he grins at the memory.

We meet Dixit on a scorching summer afternoon in a South Mumbai coffee shop. Like his music, Dixit is of a cheery disposition, generous with his wide smiles and self-deprecatory humour. There’s a sense of straightforwardness when he speaks with his South Indian accent, the easy drawl punctuated with full-bellied laughs.

Dixit is in Mumbai to watch the shoot of a track he had composed using South Indian beats for the film Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge. He good-naturedly pokes fun at the title of the film, produced by Yash Raj Films’ just launched youth-focused Y-Films. Like other alternative independent musicians, Dixit has made his peace with filmi music: The Bollywood paycheques go to finance his international tours.

The visit also means some quality time with choreographer wife of 10 years, Mayuri Upadhya, admits Dixit, who has been touring without a break since the 2008 release of his debut album.

He orders tender coconut water, of course, before settling down to tell us how a gold medal winner in microbiology now fronts one of the most successful bands in the country. Growing up in Mysore, Dixit’s initiation into the arts happened through Bharatnatyam: His engineer father noticed him mimicking a cousin’s steps and packed him off to dance school. The 17 years of training explain the élan with which Dixit wears his ghungroos on stage — while also, perhaps, proving a point to a college-mate, who sneered that a Bharatnatyam dancer could never play the guitar.

It was also in college, however, that Dixit got his first taste of Western pop. “During my PUC [Pre-University Course], I noticed all these rich students who had Walkmans and discussed Guns N’ Roses and Metallica,” says Dixit. “Gradually, I grew to worship Michael Jackson and Wham! But the track that defines those days is Phil Collins’s ‘Another Day in Paradise.’”

From music fan to musician, the crossover happened as a lark. “Antaragni, my first band with violinist friend H.N. Bhaskar, was born while I was still in college. It was just a lot of camaraderie, we had no dreams of rock stardom,” says Dixit. But a couple of years later, Antaragni beat 43 bands at Bangalore’s National Law School college fest, with Bhaskar winning Best Instrumentalist and Dixit the Best Vocalist trophies.  

When creative differences caused Antaragni to disband in 2004, Dixit, too, was broken. But, by then, he had set his sights on Mumbai, scoping the possibilities for an album deal or as a playback singer. In the first of his lucky breaks, filmmaker Shashank Ghosh (Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part II) referred him to Zenzi, a suburban lounge bar that was looking for a musician. The 2007 show floored Hindi film composers Vishal-Shekhar, inspiring them to set up an eponymous music label with the sole purpose of launching Dixit. “His music has his identity imprinted on it. The fluidity is real, not constructed,” says Vishal Dadlani, when asked what impressed him the most about Dixit.  

But the decision to record an album brought to a head the issue of language. “By 2005, I had about 30-40 songs, all in English. But while I could think only in English, I sang with more conviction in Kannada and Hindi, which also reached a wider audience,” says Dixit. Ghosh agrees. “[At my friends’ place] he was this serious boy in a kurta with a guitar. But once he started singing, all of us got lost in the music. I love how he explores Kannada poetry. There’s a similarity with Rabbi (Shergill, who sings in Hindi and Punjabi, referencing North Indian folk music).”

After hearing Dixit sing ‘Gudugudiya Sedi Nodo’, a song set to verse by Kannada poet-saint Sant Shishunala Sharif, Vishal-Shekhar knew the track had to make it to the debut album. Dixit claims he “exhausted my Hindi vocabulary” with ‘Mysore Se Aayi’ and ‘No Man Will Love You Like I Do’, and so songwriting duties were outsourced to Neeraj Rajawat (‘Ambar’ and ‘Khidki’) and Aditya Dhar (‘Hey Bhagwan’).

As tricky was the issue of the band. Wary after the Antaragni experience, when he found himself policing the band-members over rehearsals and appearances, Dixit was certain he wanted a loose group. “More than them being great musicians, it was important that I vibe with them. I saw Gaurav (Vaz) while he was tuning his guitar to play with another band at a coffee shop. I went up and asked him if he’d join The Raghu Dixit Project (TRDP).” The open-ended collaboration, set up in 2007, now has five members, including, besides bassist Vaz, lead guitarist Vijay Joseph, violinist Karthick Iyer and drummer Wilfred Demoz.

With TRDP, the balladeer sings about girls from Mysore (‘Mysore Se Ayee’) and smoking away the blues with a pipe (‘Gudugudiya Sedi Nodo’). But there’s none of the lyrical drama that you find in, say, Indian Ocean’s ‘Ma Rewa’ (an anthem born when the band’s bassist Rahul Ram rallied with tribals against a dam on the Narmada), despite their shared folk-rock mould. Dixit has no pretensions on that score. “I just make happy songs. I want to entertain,” he says.

In 2007, TRDP did just that during its pre-album splash on Avsem beach in North Goa at the Big Chill Festival, with their well-crafted Baul-Carnatic-Reggae-Gypsy hybrid backed by a boisterous rhythm section. Industry and critical groundswell followed. “To me, Raghu Dixit has everything that all great ‘world music’ artists possess,” says Amit Gurbaxani, music writer and senior editor at Mumbaiboss.com. “I see similarities between him and Afropop singer Angelique Kidjo, who performed in Mumbai recently. They both have great stage presence, their music seamlessly blends genres from across the globe and their voices have that rare ability to convey emotion straight to the heart, whether it’s joy or pain.”

Unlike Pentagram and Indian Ocean, the most successful Indian bands which worked the Indian tour circuit for a long time before seeking international exposure, the fiercely ambitious Dixit set his eyes on the UK as soon as he had notched up hit appearances at the SAARC Festival in Delhi (2007), the Roots festival in North-East India (2008), the Rajasthan International Folk Festival (2008), among others, within a year of his
debut album.

It helped that the music business had evolved significantly since the Pentagram days, with music agencies making successful inroads into the international festival circuit. Vijay Nair, founder of event and artist management agency Only Much Louder, which signed up Dixit, planned TRDP’s international debut in an industry showcase at the Gibson showroom in London. “At the end of 45 minutes, we had all those serious people jumping with us,” says Dixit.

Among the ‘serious people’ was Paul Knowles of the UK talent management agency Jenral Group. As with Vaz, Dixit went with his gut feeling and asked him to manage his band for the UK market. Ask him to explain the decision and Dixit shrugs: “He looked like a good man who wouldn’t
cheat me.”

One festival led to another. Talent scouts at the Lovebox festival, Dixit’s first UK appearance in 2009, found him a spot at WOMAD (World of Music Arts and Dance) fest, which he calls his breakthrough performance. “We rocked the crowd and sold 200 CDs,” he says of the biggest world music platform for international artists.

A strategy that in retrospect looks like a game-changer was born in some very smart thinking. For instance, the decision to tour the UK first: Given the number of big-in-UK artists who are wooed by the giant music industry across the pond, Dixit’s half-hints (on his blog at www.raghudixit.com) about bringing home a Grammy can’t be seen just as a throwaway joke.

Dixit had no qualms about investing his own money in his music. Going by the advice of Knowles and Robert Horsfall, a lawyer with Sound Advice (a UK company that advises stars such as Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant), he spent Rs. 40 lakh touring the UK in 2010. “We made Rs. 11 lakh,” the singer laughs. “But this year we’re breaking even, which is incredible.”

After three trips split over three months in 2010, Dixit had impressed the industry, played 30 gigs and signed on with Peter Gabriel’s record label Wrasse. One of their appearances was at The Great Escape (TGE) Festival, organised by Martin Elbourne. One of the main artist bookers for Glastonbury, Elbourne, pushed the band into this year’s line-up. TRDP will perform at the John Peel Stage, the legendary venue for breaking indie acts.

“The first thing that struck me about Raghu was that he was such a fabulous performer,” says Elbourne in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “The entire group has a high level of musical intensity that I’ve seen in few bands. We’re hoping that the John Peel performance will be televised.”

The John Peel Stage holds about 9,000 people in the tent and about 30,000 outside, says Elbourne, adding that Dixit had just been booked for not one but two stages, including the Left Field Stage at Glastonbury. With acts such as U2 and Coldplay featuring at the festival this year, Glastonbury will be Dixit’s biggest mainstream performance yet. It may just top winning the Songlines Music Awards for Best Newcomer in 2011, presented by the reputed British music magazine by the same name.

Next up: A second album by the end of 2011, a possible collaboration with an international band, and a packed tour calendar. Including America.