New Curators of Indie Music at Hard Rock Cafe

BAJAAO’s entertainment division (leading brand for online musical instrument retail in India)  has decided to take up programming for Hard Rock Cafe, a premier venue for gigs in the metros. soundplunge_test Magazine in an interview with the COO  Shawn Pereira for BAJAAO Consulting and Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. about what it means for young bands looking out to play at Hard Rock Cafe.

BAJAAO to program for Hard Rock Cafe in Mumbai.

What is BAJAAO’s game plan and what does this bring to the table for musicians and music lovers?

Basically BAJAAO is already connected with all the artists and we work with a lot of independent artists and we have always worked with them. While bands are forming, we help them with things such as their NOP (Notification of Practice) form and other things which have been done for the clients before by BAJAAO. With Hard Rock, they will be sending us their schedule and we will do their programming accordingly. We have been working with a lot of bands before otherwise as well, and we also have tie ups with a lot of places.

How would you say it falls under BAJAAO’s line of interest to enter into such a collaboration with BAJAAO?

BAJAAO’s core team is comprised of a lot of musicians – Ashutosh is a musician, I’m a musician, Siddharth is a musician, Himanshu has worked with a lot of bands. So it kind of works out well for us both ways, as both bands and the venue can work with us successfully. We recently did programming for a show at the mall where we did the production, sound, et al. Hard Rock is not the only property we’re programming for, we’ve been doing it for The White Owl, for instance. For Hard Rock Cafe we’re planning two bands per night, so we’ll have a band opening and then one following them. Shorter sets attract much more crowd so lots of original music can be played. We’ll have a two-hour set so a lot of newer bands forced/used to playing covers when asked to perform for two hours- shorter sets kind of brings that down. For example the line-up for the first night in March we have Lightyears Explode, and then we have Post Rock and Skrat for a following night. Hard Rock will be programming a lot of their own shows as well, so their schedule will be sent to us and we will be programming accordingly. They have their own sponsor tie-ups and with television partners, some other bands, but Wednesday and Thursday night performances will be done through us only. They will send us dates and we will program them accordingly.

So will there be any tie-up with Hard Rock Cafe concerning instrumental retail as well?

We’ve done this before; two years ago we were taking care of the sound at Hard Rock Cafe Bombay as well as in Bangalore. So that means basically you rent out the backlight, you take care of the key systems, but this time it won’t be about that at all. Being a more artistic company that we are, and a couple of shows down the way we’ll definitely plan and push for it.

So will you also be looking at an arrangement where people could physically buy instruments retailed by BAJAAO at Hard Rock?

No not at all. There are two separate companies under BAJAAO. The company that handles and works on all these concerts and festivals is called BAJAAO Consulting and Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. And then there is BAJAAO Music Private Ltd. which is into online retail. That is a completely different company, the retail model does not work as a physical store at all, we have an online market and we won’t give up online. So there are no plans of having a store for BAJAAO and display our products outside. I don’t think there’ll be a coalition in that sense, maybe promote a couple of things as a one-off incident, but we won’t be pushing it for retail purposes.

As the curators for their bands, what kind of selective process will be in place, and what kind of bands would make the cut to perform at Hard Rock?

See, at Hard Rock Cafe until now, we’ve seen a lot of bands playing. I myself play for a band at Hard Rock Cafe quite a lot of times. You would assume there would be a lot of covers, but my band plays only original music for Hard Rock Cafe. And there is no criterion as such – as long as you’re a good band and you can deliver a good show, then it is fine. Right now there are a lot of festivals happening, plus a lot of bands have put up their music online, a lot of videos online, a lot of live videos online. So there are a lot of ways of finding out which teenage bands are good. My clients get a lot of new bands from outstation to come and play for whatever budget that he has, a lot of ideas are there and a lot of bands would be considered.

An example of that would be in 2008, when we were involved with this club called B 69. It was run by BAJAAO so that was our in-house sort of metal venue. There we did around 450 metal gigs in a year. And those who performed there were programmed by us, for instance the metal band Scribe, then there were interesting metal bands like Blade, you had your Suman Sridhar, etc, then small indie bands would be there, that kind of vibe. And we played alongside them. It is our job to coordinate with them and we have the resources from where we can pull out and call out on them, so this works very well for us.