Feature - God Bless Leo
Srinath Girish
The girl was halfway through the song (and singing it well too) before I realized that she was singing a song in ENGLISH.
For years – throughout my entire school years, in fact – I thought that Indians were supposed to sing only Indian songs in public. It was not something anyone had told me, just something I assumed to be. English songs were those sung by bizarre- looking (mostly white-skinned) individuals on the jackets of LPs, with nice-sounding strange names. Nice boys from good families didn’t listen to such songs, much less sing them.
You hear parents telling their offspring how they struggled when they were children, how they had to trudge 20 miles to the nearest school to get an education, they (the kids) don’t realize how lucky they are, etc., etc. Well, I had a pretty good childhood in that sense, my school wasn’t too far from home. But I know what I can tell my son – your daddy had to travel more than 500 km. to hear songs in English while you, you lucky kid, need just turn on the hi-fi!
Yes, my early acquaintance with pop, jazz, rock-and-roll and all that sort of thing was confined to my yearly summer vacations with my cousins at Madras(Call it whatever you want, it is still Madras for me and will and many always be!). There I first heard ABBA, Cliff Richard, Boney M, the Beatles, the Carpenters, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and many others. I had to absorb as much data as I could in a few weeks so as not to appear the country bumpkin before my sophisticated Metropolitan cousins!
Back home in laid-back Calicut, I had to unlearn my newly-acquired knowledge as fast as I learnt it. It just didn’t do, in my home environs, to be heard singing “Mohammed, the Black Superman” when required to belt out a few bhajans at twilight. No pal at school, however bosom, tended to appreciate a soulful rendition of “Blowing in the Wind” when the latest Yesudas hit was doing the rounds. Any attempt to educate my scant audience would elicit reproachful responses like “Sing something we can understand, God knows we just tolerate you as it is!”. If any friend vacationed with cousins at Madras and listened to western music like I did, it was a closely guarded secret. When Rafi, Kishore, Jayachandran, et al., were singing away to glory, why bother over the songs of the Sahibs?
Now don’t get me wrong. I loved all the great masters aforementioned then and I always will. It is just that, for a long time I felt that my liking for bilayathi music was something I had to keep in the closet (something like being gay!). I am talking about the 70’s here, a time when the Raj hangover was still throbbing away and people who liked English too much were regarded by the man on the Kerala street as somewhat deficient in patriotism.
Then, in 1981, in the Main Hall of Malabar Christian College, I heard this girl sing “Please Mr. Postman”. I heard the crowd swaying in time with the rhythm, I saw it cheer the singer with great fervor when she stepped off the stage…..and I realized I was not a leper, after all. There were others in this world who shared my taste. It was possible to sing such songs on stage and not get spat at!
There was no stopping me from then on. I began buying, begging for, borrowing (and on some shameful occasions, even stealing!) cassettes of this musical genre. The Eagles began to adorn my racks alongside M.S Subbalakshmi. The strident sounds of Kraftwerk had invaded the halls of my house, long used to Binaca Geet Maala by way of entertainment. The pained expression on my Grandma’s face when she first heard Donna Summer’s “I Love to Love You Baby” was phenomenal. Afterwards, she always used to refer to it as “that song the girl sings in the toilet”!
A new obsession had begun to gnaw at my adolescent mind by then. I wanted to sing an English song on stage. I had already stuttered my way through “Dektha Hoon Koi Ladki Hasi” (remember that fun song from “Sanam Teri Kasam”?) sans any bodily harm by the very discerning audience at college, which was famous for showing its displeasure in very plain terms.
I formed a band. A band of sorts – with a drummer who didn’t like slow rythms, a guitarist who wouldn’t have recognized a chord if it punched him in the face and the lead singer Yours Truly, who couldn’t figure out the words of a song if they were too big. We tried jamming some songs, with firm belief in the adage that practice makes perfect and the conviction that we certainly couldn’t get any worse. We persevered, though we knew in our hearts that we were no good.
And then the college competitions brought Vinod Hutton, a talented guitarist from my batch, into my life – along with Mr. Leo Sayer. The bigwigs of our batch decreed that Hutton and I, with my ragtag outfit, would represent our class in the western music competition. Finally, a real musician to jam with! At practice, Hutton quickly caught on to the fact that he would have to drown out the rest of the music with his electric guitar if we were going to get anywhere. He seemed to find me acceptable, however. After trying out a few songs I knew, he fished out a cassette from his pocket and asked me to listen to it.
At home that night, I listened to Mr. Sayer for the first time. The moment I first heard “More than I can Say”, I knew it was THE SONG.
We won the event hands down. There was virtually no competition. The Christian College crowd took to that song like it was Manna from Heaven. We were famous overnight. All of a sudden, girls were smiling at me in the corridors, girls who once had never noticed that I inhabited this earth. Guys were giving me jealous glances, guys who once never gave me the time of day.
I must have handed out at least a hundred copies of the lyrics and dictated thrice as many more (Let me tell you this, it is great reciting that song looking deep into the eyes of some femme fatale, even though her interest in you is purely academic!).
I dined out on that song for months. None of the songs I sang after that were received so warmly by any crowd. Even now, so many years later, sometimes I come across a person who looks vaguely familiar and he stares at me and says with a smile, “Hey! You are the More Than I Can Say Guy!”.
But in that day and age, for a few ecstatic moments, I knew what it is to thrill an audience. I knew what it was to give pleasure to so many people. I knew how it felt when the rhythm gets to your feet and your voice soars high and sweet…
I knew what it is to be a star.
I will never have a chance to tell Mr. Sayer how grateful I am to him. But let me do it this way – God bless you, Leo and Thank You.
I owe you more than I can say. |
