On an otherwise quiet Saturday morning, I follow the sound of faint drum beats into an empty Madras Centenary Hall. The seats are dusty and the doors partly open.
On stage, a couple of men tug at the strings of their guitars and beat the drums playfully. Suddenly, there is a loud chorus from outside, and a troupe in baggy shorts and T-shirts (a few are in veshti and one of them has Bob Marley-like dreadlocks) marches in, lugging cases bearing their guitar, violin, bass and keyboard.
The 16-member-strong Thaikkudam Bridge looks like a group that has come on a jolly jaunt rather than for a sold-out performance, organised by the All India Malayalee Association, scheduled to take place that evening.
Half the band members, including the founders Govind Menon, who has a thick curly beard and looks like a doppelganger of Sam Beam from Iron & Wine, and his cousin, Siddharth Menon, take a few minutes off to talk before the sound check.
“We hardly practise; we hardly have to, given all of us are professionals, and are involved with music on a daily basis,” says Govind, even as he makes himself comfortable on the floor leading to the hall, while the rest arrange themselves around him. “Unlike other bands, we don’t have all-night jamming sessions. Mostly nobody turns up anyway, and if they do, it doesn’t go beyond 8 p.m.,” says lead guitarist Mithun Raju, and everybody breaks into loud laughter.
The members have performed to a crowd of over a lakh at several venues in the U.K., Malaysia, Singapore, most Gulf countries and Thailand, popular music festivals such as NH7, have over five lakh followers on Facebook, and are gearing up for their first U.S. tour next month. But, there is no sign of pressure — they seem like a bunch of people who want to have fun with music.
“It has always been that way. We never thought we would be this famous, everything just fell into place... it was more of an accident,” recalls Govind, thoughtfully running his hand through his beard.
The year was 2013. Govind had been working as a keyboard programmer in Kollywood for almost seven years, along with Siddharth, who was looking for a singing opportunity. That’s when the duo heard about the music programme called Music Mojo on Kappa TV, and approached them. “But, they wanted 12 songs from us if we had to be featured,” says Govind. He quickly got in touch with his friends, friends of friends, and ex-colleagues, who converged to produce the 12 songs, jamming for hours in an apartment near Thaikkudam Bridge in Kochi (hence the name), and then diverged soon after, to their respective cities and lives. They had no idea that they had together given birth to a bunch of videos that would go “so viral that we found it only right to get together again to see how far we could take it”, he says.
Soon, the band got the opportunity to perform at Model Engineering College, Kochi, and were overwhelmed by the response. “People banged their fists on the door of our dressing room, and security personnel helped us to and from the stage. It was crazy,” recalls guitarist Ashok Nelson.
“Similarly, during a performance on the Palakkad Fort grounds, the van was weighed down by fans hanging on to it. We had to stop the show for a while because the security wasn’t able to handle the frenzy. We were given special orders to not exit the stage for an hour, because it was that jampacked,” he adds. In another show in Mavelikara, Kerala, the organisers requested them to sing less-popular ‘sober’ numbers. And once, an obsessive bunch of fans followed them long after they had left the venue.
The band performed in all kinds of venues — colleges, wedding functions, shopping festivals... Slowly, Thaikkudam Bridge became part of what they call the Malayalam rock movement, which also includes bands such as Avial, Motherjane and Job Kurian Collective.
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“Now, there are tonnes of bands coming up, and we are glad that it is part of the mainstream,” says Mithun. “...but we are still struggling,” adds Govind in a whisper. “You wouldn’t believe, we had one performance every two days when we started off. Once, we did three performances in one day — one in Dubai and two in Kerala!” says Ashok.
“We just wanted everybody to know about the band, the album. Now, we are more choosy about the shows; we probably do five to six a month,” he adds.
Today, Govind and the band are in a mood to experiment with Tamil songs. In Saturday’s show, for the first time, they performed a mash-up of melodies by Santhosh Narayanan, A.R. Rahman and Ilaiyaraaja. While their popular numbers, such as ‘Appozhum’ (an adaptation of a song from the 1983 Malayalam movie Kadamba ) and ‘Fish Rock’ had people headbanging at the mosh pit, the Tamil fusion numbers were received with gentle swaying. The event was their idea to gauge the reaction to their Tamil songs, and the concert probably might have cemented their decision to go ahead with bringing out a Tamil album. “Malayalam, English, Hindi or Tamil... one thing that we have realised over the years is that good music sells. And, ours is good,” says Govind.
