Indian Ocean can never compose item songs: Rahul Ram

Indian Ocean have composed for a sizable number of films besides their albums, but the band’s vocalist Rahul Ram says they will never do an item number for any Bollywood movie. Rahul, one of the founding members of the group, said they have nothing against item songs but they refrain from composing them as they […]

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Indian Ocean have composed for a sizable number of films besides their albums, but the band’s vocalist Rahul Ram says they will never do an item number for any Bollywood movie.

Rahul, one of the founding members of the group, said they have nothing against item songs but they refrain from composing them as they lack skills to do so.

“We have been approached for item songs on certain occasions. But we have never given it a go. We are not opposed to it but I feel there are people, who can do it better than us. We are not qualifies to make such songs. Hence, we don’t think we will ever do it,” Rahul told PTI.

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The singer-cum-bass guitarist said there have been occasions when people have approached Indian Ocean to compose for songs in movies and they have rejected it outright as the scripts were “horrendous”.

“Once a producer approached us for just one song. We asked for the script and it was horrendous and there was no place for our kind of song in it. We declined to work for them but they kept on insisting, saying they would just put the songanywhere. That does not work for us,” he said.

Indian Ocean, also consisting of Nikhil Rao, Amit Kilam, Himanshu Joshi and Tuheen Chakraborty, has contributed to the music album of films like “Black Friday”, “Satyagraha”, “Gulaal”, “Peepli Live” and the latest “Masaan”. Rahul said they are choosy about the kind of films they lend their name to.

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“People who come to us by and large want our music. If somebody comes to us and asks us to do a David Dhawan film, I don’t think we can do that. We do very little films, and it depends on the content mainly,” Rahul said, adding he prefers working on individual albums, while Amit likes composing for films.

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The band is basking in the success of “Masaan” as a lot of people are attributing the film’s success to the haunting tunes of Indian Ocean. “It feels good,” Rahul said, about the positive response from critics and audience for their tracks “Tu Kisi Rail Si”, “Bhor” and “Man Kasturi”.

Talking about how they came on board for the film and his association with director Neeraj Ghaywan, Rahul said, “Neeraj approached us in October last year. We met and he told us that Varun (Grover) is writing the lyrics. The number of songs kept evolving over the period of time.

“But one song which was there right from the beginning was ‘Tu Kisi Rail Si’. ‘Man Kasturi’ was composed by Amit while we were stuck in traffic one day. I had prepared a slower version of ‘Bhor’ but Neeraj wanted a faster one. I was finally able to convince him to select the first version.”

Rahul said that recording “Bhor” was a lot of fun as they did a live recording while standing in different places in the studio.

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Indian Ocean will next score the background music for a Marathi film, which is about sexual abuse.

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