Staying Bombed

We’re sitting in the sun and the guys from The F16s don’t seem to be bothered by it as I keep shifting to avoid getting horribly tanned. They’ve just won the Western Music Acoustyx competition at Saarang earlier that morning, but oddly, they don’t seem to be showing any excitement about it. They open up fairly quickly, and as I talk to them, I find out that they’re more than the stereotyped ‘Rock n Roll band guys’. Josh Fernandez plays the role of lead vocalist and guitarist, Harshan Radhakrishnan is the keyboardist, Sashank Manohar plays the bass guitar, Vikram Yesudas  is the drummer while Viraj Raviraj Yesudas is the other guitarist.

 

 Harshan’s trademark Afro hairstyle bobs up and down as he fidgets around, Josh sits beside me, Sashank sits beside Josh while the other two members Vikram and Viraj (Viru, for short) have been temporarily asked to get food by these three so that they don’t say anything stupid. In the music scene terms, these guys are “tight”, but as Josh says it – “I don’t have friends. I have a lot of brothers. I don’t need anyone else.” There’s an inside joke there, but the guys are nice enough to push the moment along pretty quickly.

I ask them to define themselves as The F16s and Josh is the first one to speak up, “I guess we’re kind of fun. Harshan brings in the electronic feel into the band. Me and Shank have this, very trippy indie vibe, and Vikram and Viraj have this rock and roll kind of feel. We all come together to form one big beautiful mess. Yeah, so we just come together and it comes together as The F16s. I like it, it’s very unique. It’s amazing how we just come together.”

Describing The F16s with respect to how they fare in competitions, Josh explains, “Thing is our band is Indie, and sometimes the judges are metal or from some other genre, and they won’t really like connect and they won’t judge you on that basis. Though we liked our judges this time”. Pipes up Harshan, “Yeah! They liked our band! They liked GOOD music! We’ve lost a lot of competitions like that, because the judges didn’t connect to our music.”

An odd electricity passes between all of them, I notice when we’re discussing the topic of competitions. “The F16s are definitely not in it for competition. We compete with no band. Like, there are some bands like The Shaky Rays and Adam and the Fish Eyed Poets, Sky Rabbit and Your Chin. Bands all over India. These bands are the ones we look up to, we respect them and they make music like ours. There are definitely other metal bands and other rock and roll bands, (Harshan cries “CRYPTED” and gives me the devil horns hand gesture) we definitely listen to them. We keep an open mind, an open ear. We listen to everything. We enjoy everyone’s music. Music is about giving, it’s not about competition. How can you have competition in music?” says Josh, rather emphatically. “Yeah, you can’t compare a metal song with an indie song. It’s not supposed to be like that,” reiterates Harshan. Sashank (or Shank, as he’s better known) speaks up, “If we’re marketing our band based on facebook likes then it’s wrong. I don’t understand, I don’t like the idea of going on facebook and voting. You want to hear a band’s music, then you listen and you like the band.” Josh interrupts with a falsetto rendition of “Music makes you lose control”, and the guys chuckle along.

So then, why do these guys play at competitions, you may wonder, as I did. Harshan throws light upon that mystery, “To keep the band alive. Competitions can be a good way to get recognized. You don’t know who’s watching because in the crowd, there could be anybody, like some event manager who holds big competitions or big shows”.  “Basically we’re all hipsters, okay. We’re all hippies. We don’t like a lot of people listening to our music (laughs). On that note though, we would be honoured to play in front of a big mass of people, we would love to show everyone our music even if they like it or not. It’d be nice,” interrupts Josh.

So far, I’m really impressed by these guys, all in their very early 20s, they’ve had some good experiences and some bad ones, but they seem quite mature. But mature doesn’t mean boring, as I learned shortly. I probe into where the inspiration for their music comes from, and the boys get back to their serious moods. Josh says “Well, My Shallow Lover was from a break up”. “Harshan adds, “That’s what bad break up scenes do”. Josh chortles and very melodramatically with his hand on his heart says “Oh, don’t talk about it.” He continues, “Then there’s this other song called King’s Dream, inspired by Martin Luther King. The song stands for liberation and standing up for your rights and stuff. Then we have Nuke that has a lot of melody and it’s inspired by war.” Harshan goes on, “Our other songs like Lightbulb and You Can Wonder, just happened out of nowhere”.

Opening up on the way they “mesh out” as Josh put it, Harshan and Sashank tell me a little bit about how they find their unique sound. “We’ve actually been really lucky to have found our kind of music really fast, because bands usually take a lot of time, more than even a year or two to find their right sound,” says Harshan. Sashank adds, “We’re more comfortable with each other than anybody else in a band in the city. We’d been playing together in separate bands for three years now. Josh and I, along with the others, were part of The Bishops, and Harshan and I were in Totem. I had this thing in mind, like, why not expand our sound? And there was Harshan with his electronics and cool gadgets and stuff. So I put the word out to Josh and we jammed together-”, “And it turned out great”, finishes Josh. Chuckles Harshan “I went all the way to Tambaram, twice! With all my stuff and everything”. “But totally worth it, right?” asks Josh, “Totally worth it”, answer Sashank and Harshan together.

As I finish the interview, Harshan tells me that there is an EP (Extended Play), or in lay man’s terms, a shorter version of an album with six songs, that they’re working on. “It’s called Kaleidoscope and we plan on releasing it sometime in April. A kaleidoscope blends all those pieces to create a pattern. We’re all mirrors, we reflect each others ideas. That’s what the EP is- reflections of all our ideas”. Josh hears us making small talk and gives me my favorite line from the interview “The F16s is our alternate lifestyle”. For these guys, I couldn’t agree more.