“Come to the front please, I promise you there will be no Bon Jovi songs,” joked Ankur Tewari, as he got on to the stage for his performance at Novotel Chennai’s G Bar, this past weekend. For a musician with over 10 years of experience and 34,400 followers, the gig was a relatively intimate one with low publicity.
The Gully Boy music supervisor was in Chennai as part of his Mohabbat Zindabad tour, which covers metros like Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai as well as smaller towns like Pushkar and Dehradun. Despite packing halls in these cities — “People had travelled from Ajmer and Udaipur to the gig in Pushkar” — Ankur refused to call this a return of the 90s indipop era. “That’s a huge statement to make… We can’t compare these two eras; people consume music differently now with the Internet. But yes, these are good times,” he said.
Good times indeed; it has been a busy year for him. Post Gully Boy , he now has upcoming projects lined up — arranging and supervising music for Sooni Taraporevala’s Yeh Ballet , composing songs for Ruchi Narain’s Guilty , and working with Sony Music on a children’s album coming out on November 14. This, alongside the tour.
Ankur’s style of music — of stripped down acoustics with a focus on lyricism, and a backing whistle here and there — has found resonance among Indian audiences for the heart it shows. The songs’ charm lies in how singable they are — which was proved as he indulged in crowd favourites ‘Sabse Peeche’, ‘Teri Yaad’ and ‘Dil Beparvah’. The latter was released in collaboration with Prateek Kuhad.
Ankur mostly writes in Hindustani, a mix of Hindi and Urdu, and has always maintained that he is as much a writer as he is a singer. “I listen to a lot of music for their lyrics, I believe in words’ power to change something in you.” Describing how he keeps writing (stories, couplets, random thoughts), he said, “I have a few journals half-filled with scribbles, some of these later turn into songs.”
Take his latest song, for example, ‘Aainda’, a track taking a dig at social media trolls. “The idea came to me last year, while playing The Last of Us [a zombie survival video game]. But it became a song in the past three months,” he said, adding, “It felt like everyone is like a zombie right now, infected with hate and spreading that hate. I saw musicians as crusaders, pulling out their guns and killing hate with love.”
As an experiment, ‘Aainda’ was released as a tape as well. “I liked the idea of using old technology to release new songs. It’s not just a file in cyberspace,” he said.
Given his love for words and storytelling, would he be interested in hosting a podcast? It is, after all, where the Internet is headed right now. “I have been featured on many before, and I love them. If I were to host one, it would be on music or writing, where we walk with someone through their journey of creating a particular piece of work,” he signed off.
