Andrew Mackay: Scoring in Bombay

Classically trained English composer and musician Andrew Mackay spent several years in Bombay where he held the unusual position of composer, orchestrator and conductor at a major Bollywood studio. He is also half of the creative partnership behind the highly respected fusion ensemble Bombay Dub Orchestra who, again unusually, represented Asian music at the first BBC Electric Proms. Chris Patmore spoke with Andrew about working in India, and projects past and future, over iced tea in Camden on a rare hot English summer day.

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How does an English composer end up in India writing scores for Bollywood movies?

I’ve been going backwards and forwards to Bombay since 1993, recording and doing different things. I hooked up with a guy called Garry Hughes and we were producing a cover version of Kashmir. I was doing the arrangements and Garry was producing, and he said, “Why don’t we go to Bombay and record a full string orchestra, to get the authentic Indian strings?” I got the original string arrangements for Kashmir, reworked them and got an intro and outro. This was for Warner Brothers and we convinced them to let us go out there and record it. On the plane, on the way back from Bombay, we said we should take advantage of the situation of having met all these amazing musicians, so let’s do something ourselves. We spoke about it for another three years, then spent the next three years making the first Bombay Dub Orchestra album, and that’s how Bombay Dub Orchestra began. Then I did the first Indian film called Little Box of Sweets, which was made in 2004 and is just about to get a release: an independent film, beautifully shot in Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, an Anglo-Indian story set in a Christian community of a village. It’s a beautiful film, and I scored that, and it was done at Yash Raj Studios in Bombay. It was screened a couple of years later at MAMI (Mumbai Film Festival). We went out for the screening, had a really good time and went down to Yash Raj Studios to meet the engineer and various people, and the guy said to me, “What are you doing for the next 20 days?” So I said, “What have you got in mind?” He said, “We’re doing a movie and we need someone to orchestrate it.” So I said, “OK, I’ll do it.” The main studio at Yash Raj had the composer Ranjit Barot, who is one of the world’s leading drummers, writing and he had a team of people working with him. I was in another room, orchestrating, then we’d go into the main live room and I’d conduct the orchestra. We did this over a period of about 18 days. I thought, this is quite good, I quite like this. It’s hard to get these opportunities in London. So I had a chat with a few people. Then we did the second Bombay Dub Orchestra album, and I decided to move out there. It seemed like the right thing to do. There was no one there doing what I was doing. I love music, I love Indian music and the whole mix of it. I put everything in storage and moved out. From then on I was scoring or doing something musical almost every day, which is a complete blessing.

Read the rest of the interview in Film & Festivals Issue 29