The Bombay Royale Have Their Sights Set On Bollywood

Melbourne's beloved cross-cultural band The Bombay Royale have recorded three imaginary Bollywood movie soundtracks over eight years. But their latest, Run Kitty Run, is on another planet. It's sci-fi, Bollywood-style.  

The 11-piece collective - whose most recognisable members are band leader Andy Williamson ("The Skipper") and joint vocalists Parvyn Kaur Singh ("The Mysterious Lady") and Shourov Bhattacharya ("The Tiger") - will launch Run Kitty Run at Max Watt's, fresh from playing Splendour In The Grass' World Stage. "We'll certainly be performing the full album, or every song from that, plus some of our older stuff," Williamson says. They've secured retro-glam troupe Sugar Fed Leopards to support. "It should be a banger!" 

Williamson formed The Bombay Royale circa 2010 to pay homage to Bollywood's classic musical flicks in multicultural Melbourne. "When we first started the band, we actually did play old Bollywood music. We were looking at scores from old Bollywood films and playing bits of them." The Bombay Royale fused India's classical, folk and pop with Western rock, surf, funk, lounge, cosmic disco and new wave - their lyrics in Hindi, Bengali and English. "The original Bollywood soundtracks are exactly that - they're a crazy masala. They just take stuff and play with it."

The Bombay Royale officially premiered with 2012's You Me Bullets Love - conceived as a soundtrack to "some sort of 1970s Bollywood spy thriller". They've maintained that cinematic approach with Run Kitty Run - sci-fi providing the "landscape". "It's not like we have an entire narrative to a film. It's more of a looser sense of various storylines that we'll play around with."

Initially, the saxophonist was the one "driving" The Bombay Royale, but today the outfit's personnel are fully collaborative as songwriters. "There's no one musician in the band that could come up with these tunes," Williamson suggests. "Everyone contributes and brings something to it. It's this shambling collective, cooperative project that, once you get [the music] streamlined and worked and across the line, is really satisfying because it's something you've all created together."

Williamson recalls that it took a couple of years for local punters to 'get' The Bombay Royale, but international audiences instantly discerned their novel cool. The group even hit 2013's Glastonbury. Next, they'll join Hungary's fabled Sziget Festival on an island in the Danube. Alas, the band is yet to perform in India, where they command an enthusiastic fanbase due to their music being synced for the mega Sony PlayStation game Far Cry 4. "We're a big band and, in some ways, it's the hardest place for us to go because it's so hard to make it viable," Williamson despairs. It's "the big unticked box".

And he hopes The Bombay Royale's material might eventually be used in a legit Bollywood movie - a previous such project falling through. "Ironically, there's no one really in India doing what we do, in a way - in terms of that big band sound. So we do seem to be in a bit of a one-horse race right at the moment. I'd love to see a band from India doing something like we do - a big, bombastic, cinematic band with horns and so on. It'd be awesome."