Bombaystic Sounds

"Do you know what?” Parvyn Kaur Singh, who shares vocal duties with Shourov Bhattacharya in The Bombay Royale, Melbourne's finest purveyors of vintage Bollywood movie scores meets Tarantino surf and disco, admits, laughing, when asked if she ever imagined, growing up, that she'd end up in a band in Melbourne making the kind of music her parents would have been listening to back in the '60s and '70s. “I kind of think I knew that something like this would happen.”

Though her parents are Indian, Singh actually grew up in Adelaide and originally moved to Melbourne to do university, but a music career was inevitable – her father has toured extensively internationally with his eponymous ensemble Dya Singh, a Malaysian-born Indian master of the traditional sacred music of the Sikhs though he only turned professional in 1995, nonetheless releasing 22 albums along the way. Parvyn Singh inevitably became part of the family band (an Indian Kasey Chambers perhaps?) but, naturally, as a teenager growing up in the '90s, she was thinking more pop and indie rock than Bollywood.

“That's really true,” Singh agrees, “but I'm really grateful for how it's turned out. I think [The Bombay Royale] is perfect for me – it's exactly what I've always wanted to do. I mean, I remember when I first went to go see the guys, they were rehearsing down at Hope Street warehouse and yeah, I walked into this tiny little room and there were ten of them in there all jamming away to this old Bollywood stuff that my parents used to listen to and it was like, 'What is going on?' [laughs] 'Where am I?' It was crazy.”

The ringleader behind all this craziness is saxophonist Andy Williamson, who is also a major player in Public Opinion Afro Orchestra. “Well there are few people around Melbourne who are really into the old Bollywood stuff,” she continues. “Andy's a bit of a collector of vintage vinyl and so he had some great vinyl Bollywood stuff and really wanted to be in a band that played this stuff live and was looking around for who was doing it and then realised that no one was. And so it was kind of the sort of thing that was in the pipeline for a long time but it was just finding the right people that really loved the music as well. He got a few friends together and found Shourov and myself to sing along and voila!”

Bhattacharya, singing, as does Singh, in Hindi, Bengali and English, was the other necessary and vital component not only because of his voice but visually, as the male lead to Singh's sultry temptress demanded of all Bollywood movies. “Yeah,” Singh explains, “he's The Tiger, and he fills that role of the handsome, rugged Bollywood hero. On stage we have this story, there's always this back-story of what we're performing, and there's kind of this love triangle between The Mysterious Lady and The Tiger and then The Skipper [Williamson], who is the bad guy. He's the head of the gang of dacoits – dacoits is the word you use for bandits in Bollywood – and he tries to get in between The Tiger and The Mysterious Lady, and The Mysterious Lady is a sly operator; you never quite know what her personal intentions are or her motives, so, yeah, it's this funny little triangle thing and characters that we're building up as we go along as well.”

So there's a touch of the notorious Bandit Queen in Singh's Mysterious Lady? “There's a touch of everything, from Kill Bill to a James Bond girl to Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft,” she giggles. “The Mysterious Lady is fulfilling all those fantasies and desires of many women around the world! And certainly of me.”

It's all there of course on the debut Bombay Royale album, You Me Bullets Love, with a suitably villainous film clip accompanying the title track. While there are a couple of classic Bollywood pieces reinterpreted by the band, it's basically all new originals in that classic style. “With doing the covers,” Singh continues, “I mean, that's where it all started, and then the style. All of the musicians in the band really dug the style and Tom Martin, who is our guitarist, really got on board and had some great ideas for some riffs and some funky grooves and beats, and so he would come into a rehearsal and start playing and Shourov would just start scatting on the top and I would start making melodies and then it grew just naturally.

“Some pieces were already pre-done, like Bobbywood for example, our bass player Bob Knob came to us with the charts all written out. So it's really been a collaborative effort that everyone's got involved in. It's a really funky and just a great style of music where you can actually get away with anything. So you can have that sort of cowboy western-style thing and then break out into like a disco dancer-type groove at the same time. So the sky's the limit for what we are creating and it's good; we're just letting it flow naturally. Whatever happens, let it come out.”

For a project long in the planning, at least for Williamson, The Bombay Royale have made their mark remarkably quickly. They've only really been out there gigging for around 18 months or so, but they've played local festivals Port Fairy and St Kilda, appeared on both Spicks & Specks and RocKwiz, and had a track featured in the opening credits of a Bollywood heist film set in South Africa called 31 Million Reasons, and were invited to play the international world music Sakifo festival on Francophone Reunion Island, well east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. “We did the Australasian World Music Expo and the director of that saw us at our first show that we did at Hope Street warehouse in the back of Brunswick,” says Singh. “That first show was packed to the rafters and these key people were there and gave us a chance, gave us the support for Femi Kuti at the Expo and the people from Reunion saw us and just fell in love with it, so we got to go over there, and then WOMAD has come on board and we did WOMADelaide and WOMAD New Zealand this year, so it's kind of like this dream run.”