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Beta test: How Peter Cat Recording Co. is gearing up for a 77-city tour
Five months. Three continents. A 77-city tour. Peter Cat Recording Co. is living every rocker’s dream. How did they pull it off?
Who would have thought, even a decade ago, that a five-piece Delhi band, which plays jazz-based compositions and sings in English, would launch their third album with a 77-city tour across North America, UK, Europe and India? A decade ago, Peter Cat Recording Co. was barely five years old. Now, New York City, Chicago, Boston, Nashville, LA, Montreal, Vancouver, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Milan, Zurich, London and Barcelona are on the tour. Most gigs are already sold out. My, how they’ve grown!
The new album, Beta, has 13 tracks and is squarely within the band’s soundscape: Gypsy jazz and ballroom dominate, there’s a horn section, many songs show off the musicians’ Indian Classical roots. Dhruv Bhola works the bass and samples, Suryakant Sawhney is on guitar, lyrics and vocals, Karan Singh is on the drums. The band has added new instruments to the line-up since 2009. Kartik Pillai, who plays the guitars, horns and woodwind, learned saxophone. Rohit Gupta, on keys, horns and woodwind, now plays clarinet and sax, and contributed to synth bass and electronic drum sounds. “It’s exciting to pick up an instrument and figure out if it fits with a song,” he says.
The changes have worked. But Peter Cat Recording Co.’s success comes largely because audiences have changed too. And the band’s found a way to make music that is at once universal and intimate.
Close to home
When they played in north America last year, Peter Cat Recording Co. were largely playing to folks who’d discovered their sound in the pandemic. “People were not looking for party music, but something more personal and intimate,” says Sawhney. “We were Brown dudes, but they identified with it. The music went past our identity. I’ve grown up listening to Western music and TV, like anyone else in the ’90s. We all absorbed Western culture. In a way, we are just throwing it back out.”
And they’ve been unafraid to make their work personal. Their previous album, Bismillah, featured clips from Sawhney’s own wedding video. To settle on an album name for Beta, Singh got his toddler Araan Tatak Singh to pick a slip of paper from a few options.
One song on the album, Suddenly, was released last month. It’s in memory of Sawhney’s father Vikas Chander Sawhney, who loved Western music and passed away when Sawhney was a teen, leaving just him and his Indian-music-loving mum. On YouTube, one user, @tarushdas1088, says the song “made me feel everything I feel for my mom. She’s a single mother as well.”
It’s validation for Sawhney. “I won’t write songs about driving flashy cars at night. Because that’s not the life experience I am having,” he says. “For me it’s hard to fake doing something. It only makes sense to make your art honest.”
On the band’s YouTube channel, listeners have left messages from as far away as Chile and South Africa, asking them to come play there. “Therapy isn’t enough,” comments SamarthAmin-yl7ni. “I want Suryakant Sawhney to moan in my ears.” User joshua01096 says he’s “lowkey proud that PCRC is more famous outside India than India”.
Bhola says that in the West, music lovers prefer music that fits a mood rather than a genre. “In India, people hear us and say, ‘Oh it’s rock/jazz’, even though it’s a more complicated and complex beast,” says Sawhney.
Living the dream
The tour kicks off in August and wraps in December. It won’t be quite like Almost Famous (2000). The idea of debauched, freewheeling rock concerts died with the ’70s, says Bhola. “And touring in a van or bus is not as comfortable as people imagine it to be!” Instead, it’s professionally managed, precisely scheduled, hard work.
“Indian musicians need to see their work as a serious business and not flip-flop around like stoner dudes,” says Sawhney. “It’s taxing on your personal life if you’re married or in a long-term relationship. You need two weeks to settle down when you return, because there’s a sort of disconnect to reality when you’re on tour.”
Singh, for the moment, is trying to figure out where to house his dog, and how his wife will raise Araan by herself. “We signed up for it,” he admits. It doesn’t mean it’s easy.
What helps are hacks that would make ’70s rockers keel over and cringe. Sawhney cuts down on smoking and drinking on tour because a musician can’t afford to be sick, tired or hung over. “There’s nothing more disappointing for an artist than playing an underwhelming show. We aren’t 27 anymore. We’re actually trying to make a career out of it, and live longer,” says Sawhney.
From HT Brunch, July 13, 2024
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