Glastonbury on his mind

For India's tight-knit indie music community, Glastonbury is the holy grail of festivals. Despite several festivals mushrooming around the country, the five-day festival in the UK reserves a place of reverence for homegrown artistes. This year, experimental electronic musician Donn Bhat joined the ranks of Raghu Dixit and Shaa'ir and Func. His performed a live set on June 26, with sarangi-player Suhail Yusuf Khan and drummer Ashwin Andrews.

He was excited. And nervous. "It's a huge thing for me to be playing at Glastonbury. Some of the biggest bands and artists are playing here. The whole size of the festival is about 500 football fields put together… with some 100 stages of performance," the Mumbai-based Bhat said in an interview a day before his performance from Glastonbury. This year, the festival saw The Who, Florence + The Machine, Foo Fighters, Motorhead, to name a few.

Bhat started his career by playing in bands like Friday the 13th and Orange Street when he lived in Delhi way back in the early 2000s. Andrews, who performed with him at Glastonbury, was the drummer with Orange Street. In 2003, Friday The 13th picked up the best band award at the Great India Rock festival, while Orange Street picked it up in 2005. Bhat then went solo, even after an extensive tour with Orange Street, and came up with his first solo album One Way Circle in 2006.

Soon after, he left for Mumbai, where he took up a regular day job in advertisement. In between, he also composed a song for the sleeper hit Vicky Donor, along with former Orange Street vocalist Anirban Chakraborty in 2012.

At around the same time, he formed Passenger Revelator, a band which is essentially him and a string of successive collaborations. In 2014, he came up with his second album Passenger Revelator, which featured a variety of acts including Baul singer Malabika Brahma and Farooqui. Three of the songs from the album were featured in MTV's Bring On The Night.

Excited as he may sound, for Donn Bhat, who was born Anant Bhat, this is not the first time on the big stage. His song Disco Disco, for his second album Passenger Revelator is shot on a documentary music video Suburban King/Top Girl, which was selected in the South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival in Texas for the Best Music Video category in the Short Film Jury Awards early this year from among 5,000 entries.

Last month, Bhat performed at the Sakifo Festival at the French Reunion Islands. Featuring a group of govindas during the dahi handi celebrations during Janmashthami in Jogeshwari East, called Jai Jawan Govinda Pathak, who hold the Guinness Book world record for being the tallest human pyramid, the seven-minute-long video was directed by Mumbai filmmaker Aakash Bhatia.

Bhat says that the video now tells its own story while riding on the energy of the track. "The song ?is about going back to retro sounds with a contemporary aesthetic, a time between Helen and Action Shoes and CGI animation. The most obvious thing would have been to represent the same in a video… These are real people with real struggles and real courage in the face of reality, contrasted with a tongue-in-cheek song that says 'do your own thing and have fun'?."

Bhat identifies himself essentially as a songwriter. "To stick to one genre is now outdated but songwriting is not, so I would like to think of myself as a songwriter first and foremost," he says. "?I'd like to think of my music as organic electronica, as rock meets a singer-songwriter vibe.?"

His influences, like his music, are varied. "I grew up idolising guitar players like Joe Satriani and Jeff Beck. Much later I heard Leonard Cohen who remains a legend for me, I'm not much of a jazz player but I think Miles Davis' Bitches Brew was a landmark album which actually paved the way for everything cool after. Nicholas Jaar is someone who I think is doing electronica right nowadays," he says.

In India, he was inspired by Envision, who he thinks wrote music which was way ahead of their time. "Also, Trilok Gurtu is probably my favourite Indian musician. Danger Mouse, the producer is incredible and I love how he produces the Gorillaz or Gnarles Barkley or the album with Sparklehorse," he says.

The next, a new EP called Connected, will have four songs and features Toy Mob, former member of Envision, Suhail and Anand Bhagat on percussion. "I'm very excited about the EP I'm working on now. I think it is essential for me to not have pre-conceived notions of what I want to create until as late as possible in the writing and production process. That keeps the element of surprise going and allows one to make 'mistakes' which actually lead to something original," he says.

Birthday boy at Glastonbury
This year's line-up at Glastonbury could not have been more interesting even if it tired: the environment-loving Dalai Lama (who turns 80 this week), balaclava-wielding Pussy Riot, substitute-headlining Florence and the Machine, and nearly-trolled-by-a-lame-comic Kanye West. See through toilets and vegetarian food was promoted by the organisers, who are in the middle of a six-week clean-up routine of the muck left behind by 1,70,000 revellers. And despite his infamy, Kanye West's disruption by comic Lee Nelson was most possibly booed off stage for his unimaginative antics. What was disturbing was the enormous flag put up by a fan of a screenshot of Kim Kardashian's leaked sextape with Ray J. The flag, supported by some, drew flak for the public shaming of a pregnant woman in front of her husband and thousands for no purported reason.