‘I am the devil, so that way everybody works for me,” he quips. This funky singer has more connections with Hyderabad than just biryani. This Telugu says he has over a hundred relatives in Hyderabad. His father, P.L. Raj was a well known film choreographer from our state. Can he speak Telugu? No! Comes the answer.
Leslie Lewis is still holding on tight to his place as the one who made fusion music popular. Even the man's fashion sense is fusion incarnated, with a purple kurta on long brown pants.
An oxidised silver pendent and of course, with all those rings on his finger, Leslie is good to go.
From jingles, Leslie has come a long way, briefly reigning over the remix scene in India. The composer and singer produced quite a few roaring successes like Paree hun main and Rahul and I . “Remixes are good; they bring back nostalgia in a new tune. Nothing much that can go wrong with it…” he says. Currently riding on a high wave with Coke Studio, Leslie wants to revive the charm of fusion music.
“It's amazing to see people from different backgrounds, more importantly musical backgrounds, come together and make an entirely different sound. You have a folk singer from the North East, then you mix it up with guitar twangs and you spice it up with another voice from another part of the country. It's brilliant,” he says.
For music puritans who are sceptical of fusion music, Leslie has only one thing to say, “There is no care-taker of music to keep up its sanctity. Music should be about doing what you like and what sounds right to you. It's not necessary that everyone has to agree with a particular sound.” Colonial Cousins, he says is his hobby. “It's the kind of music I like to do on the side.” Leslie feels that there is a great deal of talent out there, especially on social networking sites, “It's great everything is so accessible and it's easy to get noticed. But it also means that you have to skim through a whole lot of people who are not that good.” Now busy with his Coke Studio concerts, Leslie signs off with a thought, “My music is youthful, I feel I can relate to the youth. I still believe I am young at both mind and heart!”
