#PastForward: Guitarist Chris Avinash discusses Bengaluru's music evolution, from original rock to cover band culture

Music does not just thrive in Bengaluru, it often defines the streets, hangout spots and emotions that you feel living your everyday life in the city. Be it original or covers, one element during performances that always encourages innovation is the instruments that personalise popular tracks to the artistes, livening up the stage. This is a constant that has existed in the city for decades, with only the consumption of the audience changing and dictating the type of music we see being played in and around the city. This notion is upheld by Bengaluru’s Christopher Avinash, aka Chris Avinash, known for his magic with the guitar alongside his music production and composing.

The musician, known for his association with city bands like Retronome and Strange Brew, offers a pragmatic and unfiltered side to our Past Forward exploration of culture in Bengaluru. Discussing the high-energy and raw power performances driven by many college fests in the ’90s to the adoption of Bengaluru’s identity as a global dynamic entertainment hub and a hotspot for popular musical artistes internationally, Chris shares a landmine of insights during our chat.

Recollecting the high-powered era of rock festivals in colleges, Chris highlights that original music really thrived during the ’90s and early 2000s. Referring to festivals like Autumn Muse (by St John’s National Academy of Health Sciences), Vibrations (by Dayananda Sagar Institutions) and Strawberry Fields (by National Law School of India University), Chris highlights that the prerequisite in the English bands’ performances was original compositions. Growing up on a ‘staple diet’ of such concerts, innovation for original music was an obvious attempt on Chris’ part. Playing in small pubs and taverns in the city defined bands like his, leading to them developing a creative still set and forging a distinctive identity for the city.

The late 2000s, however, witnessed bands in Bengaluru switching to playing more Bollywood and regional hits, as Chris explains. “During the 1999-2000 period, the city started opening up and by the year 2005-2006, you had a slight shift towards the people working here (pouring in from outside the city). The kind of work culture had also changed. If you needed to survive as a band, you could do originals, risk that and get to the top,” he observes.

“As a guitarist, I’ve seen this city evolve and I’m okay with it. There’s no controlling the progress and growth of a city along with the number of people in it. They have to be entertained and we have mixed bands like us who do a lot of covers. We get called for a lot of these usual gigs where there’s a mixed audience. That’s how I’ve seen the city grow. That’s how I’ve seen the good side of it. And frankly, I don’t see a bad side to it. Some musicians continue to do English and in niche places, jazz. They’ve held out and they have gotten their gigs. But it’s been rough for people who have not been able to adapt to this requirement. That is largely due to the city’s explosive growth, especially in the 2000s.”

When asked about which genre reigns over the live-music scene of Bengaluru today, Chris does not shy away. “Film music,” he tells us. Highlighting that they’ve had the most recall value he explains how being part of cover bands helps one sustain and thrive in the musical scene of today. “If you’re an Arijit Singh or a Shreya Ghoshal, you have film songs, which you can do live. You’re sorted, then! Then we have way lower-rung bands who are copying and playing covers. We are a cover band; we copy. What we do is, we try to make it a little more fun, a little more creative for us,” he explains, further highlighting, “there’s no great science or greatness and glory and ego. We are just doing stuff that is done to death and the people love it. You can’t change that dynamic. You could, if you were doing your own stuff, but we’re not going in that direction.”

Focusing on the prominence of cover bands, he dubs such outfits as, “the poor man’s everybody.” Bringing a ground zero perspective to the ‘past and future’ conversation, Chris feels innovation is not as encouraged as it used to be in the city. With many years of experience within the musical space, he concludes with the following thought for Bengaluru musicians of today. “The A minor has remained the A minor. The pentatonic scale has remained the same. Each of us uses it differently to our own advantage. We strut it in a certain way. Other bands, other front-men have different struts. There’s enough space and more for all,” he concludes.