Sunshine ON HIS SHOULDERS

Jagan has sung over a hundred jingles and was the voice behind Hutch’s You & I,one of the most popular jingles in recent times and the Happy to Help jingle of Vodafone.
It was when he was doing a jingle composed by Shantanu Moitra two years ago that the music director told him that “he has a song in mind which only Jagan can sing”. That was Give me some sunshine. When Jagan recorded it,he had “no clue it was for such a big film”. “The song was recorded before the script was written. Raju Hirani had told Moitra that he wants a song to inspire him before he can start writing the film,” he says.

At 19,all Jagan wanted to do was rock shows. But now he’s putting work for his rock band Dream Out Loud—it was formed in 2006 and an album released the following year— “on hold” because he wants to “concentrate on Bollywood”. “When I started out,I wanted to have a rock band. But one after another,my bands kept breaking up,I drifted towards jingles and now I have landed in movies. Singing is my journey and I’ll go wherever it takes me,” he says.

That journey began when Jagan was in Class VIII. His uncle from London had got a cassette of an Elton John album which had a booklet of lyrics inside it. “That was the first time I was reading the words of any song. And I started singing them aloud,” he says. Much later,in 1987,he had a chance encounter with Aurora,a rock band.
He was 19 at that time and got a chance to be a back-up singer of the band. When he reached the practice bad and began singing,“it felt so right that I decided that singing is what I want to do for the rest of my life”. He ended up being the lead vocalist of Aurora at a rock show. “The first time I was on stage was a rock show,” says Jagan.

Soon after,Aurora broke up and Jagan formed his own rock band called Krysys,which did covers of English songs. The band lasted five years after which Jagan left for Hong Kong where he formed a band called Matchbox. Two years later,he returned to Mumbai to put back Krysys together till he got a call from Dhruv Ganekar of the band Chakraview (Ganekar is now owner of Blue Frog club in Mumbai) to join his band.

Unlike most English rock bands in those days,Chakraview was doing more originals than covers. But it also met a sad end in 1996. The audience was “hostile to originals” in those days and would boo the band away. Once it got to a point that Jagan even hit a member of the audience. None of the originals got recorded,Ganekar left for LA to study music,the drummer also left for the US and eventually “the band just fizzled out,” he says.

The singer went into depression,compounded by the fact that his family didn’t support him. “I come from a well-to-do business family. They thought I was wasting my time,” he says. Jagan decided to cope with,not fight reality. “None of the English rock bands in this country have lasted more than 10 years,you can count those that have. The scene is evolving only now. With the internet,you can record at home and upload songs.

In my days,it was like this: you form a band in college,you do the whole circuit,abuse everyone around or you don’t get support etc,then that’s it. The musician or singer gets into a job and the fire dies out,” he says.
So,Jagan stopped “abusing” and decided to go with the flow. He came out with a Hindi solo album Musafir in 1999 which did average business and only when his parents saw him in a music video on TV,they “finally but reluctantly accepted” his choice of work. His contacts from the rock scene got him through ad jingles.

Rupert Fernandes,Jagan’s friend who also had a rock band,called him for a couple of jingles including You & I. Despite the fact that the jingle was all over TV and on phones as a caller tune,Jagan “got no work till a little more than a month” after he had done it. “I thought that this is it,now I’ll be flooded with work but funnily,people thought it was an international track,” he says.
Jagan made a small entry into Bollywood in 1999 when Vishal Dadlani (of the Vishal-Shekhar duo),whom he knew since his rock days,offered him the song,Hum Naujawan in Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi. That was followed by a lull till he started getting more regular offers for films in 2007. In 2008,he scored his first high point in Bollywood when he sang Zehreelay in Rock On!!,besides also acting in the film. It was the shooting of Rock On!! that “threw the laziness out of” Jagan. “I saw how hard people work on the sets. That,I guess,is the case with everyone except musicians who are lazy and work at their own pace,” he says.

Most of Jagan’s film songs have English lyrics or Western beats but he says those are the ones offered to him. That though is about to change soon. “You’ll see me singing a lot of romantic duets,” he says. “Bollywood offers me songs that I,as a rock singer,once thought were beyond my range. And when I am able to sing them,I am surprised at myself,” he says. The film industry,he says,has now become a platform for once pop/rock singers like him or Mohit Chauhan to reach out to a larger audience. “Nowadays,we don’t have benchmarks like Kishore or Rafi anymore. When Farhan Akhtar’s songs in Rock On!! did well,it was a defining moment in Bollywood—there’s room for all kinds of voices,” he says.