In Post-Soviet Goa, No One Can Hear You Psy: Part One

Did you hear the one about the 'music journalist' who lobbed in to Paris Hilton's 'Ibiza of India' without doing any research?

Gather round folks, and bring some popcorn. It goes a little something like this...

Most of my overseas travel has revolved around music - discover event, file away news clipping or web link somewhere, plot and scheme, fly there, write about it, Profit (or at least subsidise beer expenses). 2002 - Berlin Love Parade and Benicassim. 2008 - Miami WMC and Coachella. 2009 - Underworld in Hong Kong. And so on and so forth.

This little jaunt to India was the first overseas pilgrimage I've made that isn't based around a music event, but a sporting one - specifically watching the might of Steve Smith and his mates in the Australian cricket team getting their arses handed to them by the Indians in the fourth test in New Delhi. You can read about my adventures there over at The Roar, if you're that way inclined (not that there's anything wrong with that, etc).

Still, there were some a musical reasons for being in India. Firstly, I'd been through a brief phase in my late teens where I could only deliver pizza for Eagle Boys while listening to sitar and tabla recitals in my car.

Secondly, The Beatles wrote a fair chunk of The White Album, including my all-time fave Blackbird, just up the road from Delhi in Rishikesh.

And thirdly, a scene from a dance music doco that I'd seen many years earlier (possibly Better Living Through Circuitry) had stuck in my head. A scene of hippies, on a Goa beach, dancing their dreads off to some cranking psychedelic trance sounds in broad daylight.

Was Hilton's Twitter statement that Goa was the 'Ibiza of India' true, or did some of the old Goa as (quite literally) blazed by the '60s/'70s hippie movement and '90s psy-trance pioneers remain? It was up to me to find out, then share my findings with an unsuspecting world.

I raced back from the desolate post-Skynet wasteland of Agra to my Delhi digs late one Thursday afternoon, booked my flight into Goa for the next evening, took to Expedia to book a decent looking hotel in the vague vicinity of the airport in Vasco da Gama, and arrived under cover of darkness to find myself staying somewhere near the centre of Bumfuck, Goa. Population? One bumbling hack with the smallest backpack in India.

It was the Goan equivalent of deciding to mount a serious assault on the nightclubs of Surfers Paradise, then setting up camp in Lismore. I looked to my copy of Paul Oakenfold's 2011 reboot of The Goa Mix for comfort, to find that only one track from the two discs had actually synced to my iPhone. This didn't bode well.

I was staying in Betalbatim, halfway between the gutter and the stars. The nearest beach centre was Colva, a nondescript shorefront with barely measurable waves and beach bar/restaurants (henceforth known as shacks) bearing Anglo monikers like Bob's and Benny's and Luke's Place and, umm, Dominick's. Because at some stage in the past decade the Russians have discovered Goa in earnest, and their numbers far outweigh any other tourist group on the 100 kilometre strip.

I checked the Goa Times for any sign of local gigs (all manner of Google searches proving fruitless), and only found the local franchise of DJ Sasha playing at Bikini Brunch (presumably all-you-can-eat) on Sunday. It seemed this wasn't the place for me, so I took Saturday off from the world and shifted further south on Sunday.

Palolem Beach - aka paradise. Where the sand is lined by beach shacks under an endless row of palm trees; where shore breaks just big enough to bodysurf roll in all day long; where nubile Russians work on their tans, then read books, then work on their tans, then swim, and repeat until the end of time. I could see why Jason Bourne hid out here for a while.

The shacks are named after other exotic locales, like Cuba and Havana and the Gold Coast's own Cocktails and Dreams. I plumped for Sunday sunset at Cafe Del Mar, but it seems to be Jose Padilla's night off the decks - the tuneage pumping out sounds like Erick Morillo tribal electro circa-2006, though it turns out to be an Ibiza 2012 compilation playing on shuffle. Perhaps Paris was onto something?

I discover a flyer for a bonfire party happening later that night at Cozy Nook, with "full sound" and "fully stocked bar". The flyer artwork was a little on the simple side, but perhaps Goan promoters like to keep things understated?

The venue turned out not to be the stretch of beach I was pointed towards, but a venue made from a series of stone huts nearby - and the word "bonfire" was something of an overstatement. The opening DJ didn't fill me with great hope either, leaping between tracks that appeared to be ripped out of other people's mixes, but then the unmistakable bubbling acid synths of Hardfloor's monstrous Acperience 1 reared their head and my ears pricked up... until it was slammed straight into Gangnam Style. This could get ugly.

I crossed paths with an English gent at the bar who roughly fit the original Goa hippie mould. Phil from Northampton was in his 50s, with shaved sides and black dreads pulled back tight under a baseball cap; a recovering drug addict who was now a self-confessed "born-again Christian" on a "mission from God", and who clearly remembers moments from his past lives. Phil was here for his fifth consecutive season for reasons unclear, before moving on to his true purpose of helping out the needy in Agra. I never quite did get to the bottom of how he was going to do that, but his heart seemed to be in the right place.

We were joined by a businessman from Oman, who sounded like a not pompous version of J Peterman from Seinfeld, who'd come here to unwind for Easter. Phil talked about the changing face of the party scene here, and the silent discos that happen at the south end of the beach on Saturdays - I'd missed the end of the sixth season by one day. (MISSED GIG COUNT: 1!)

The second DJ had managed to build up a little bit of a dancefloor, and definitely had the girls dancing if not the chinstrokers (i.e. me) impressed. His music taste was impeccable, with classics from Man With The Red Face to Moloko - Sing It Back (Mousse T's Feel Love Remix) to, umm, Deep Forest. This was interspersed with smatterings of deep driving gear, and his programming was all over the place but at least he was mixing. Then he dropped the Jason Nevins remix of Katy Perry's I Kissed A Girl.

I'm the world's biggest KP fan (in the sense that most other Katy Catz are half my size), but this was more Gold Coast than Goa so I took my cue to leave...

The next day at the southern end of Palolem I'm approached by Lola, a young bazaar worker. She must be in her early 20s, usually works in a field in Karnataka south-east of here, but comes up to Palolem for the winter/spring tourist season to work at the family bazaar. She starts work at 9am and works through until 10pm every night, when she goes home to look after her children, cook and clean.

The tourist season is dying down - today has been particularly slow. She invites me to her shop. I'm trying to divest myself of stuff I don't need; Lola's very existence relies on selling stuff to people like me. She needs to sell me stuff more than I don't need it. I buy a silk shawl. It's a deep green and the pattern is lovely.

Does she go to the parties down here? "Headphone parties," says her brother, motioning to nearby Neptune Point.

But what about Lola? She shakes her head.

"What do you do for fun then?"

"I don't have time. I go home to cook and clean.

It's time for me to move north. Above & Beyond must've named their label Anjunabeats for a reason, so let's see what this Anjuna Beach place has to offer...