Raghu Dixit Folk Hero

Indian singer-songwriter Raghu Dixit has had an amazing year. Voted newcomer of the year by Songlines Magazine (despite having been performing for over a decade); a hugely successful UK tour taking in many of the summer festivals, including a crowd-pleasing set at Glastonbury that saw his songs shoot up the iTunes charts; plus scoring the soundtrack for one of the new wave of Indian indie films that are breaking away from the traditional Bollywood formula. Not bad for a self-taught musician.

Raghu is one of a growing number of South Asian musicians who are successfully fusing traditional music – in Raghu’s case, regional folk – with Western rock, something Coke Studio in Pakistan have been pioneering for four years. Although his music is primarily folk-based it carries many influences, but what really makes it stand it out is the infectious joy with which it is performed.

We caught up with Raghu in London during his UK tour.

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How did you come to be scoring a film?

The music that I’ve been making is away from what Bollywood traditionally has been, which is why I didn’t find in-roads into the record labels for eight or nine years. Ironically it took two Bollywood music composers to pick me up from a dingy bar where I was playing a gig, and they thought it was worth their money to start a new record label and release my music. In 2007 I was lucky enough to meet someone who wanted to make music for a film in my mother tongue, down south in Karnataka. I reluctantly agreed to make music for that film because I was a little averse to what film music was all about till then, and I never thought I’d fit into the film music fraternity. However, they let me do whatever I could for the film, and they didn’t really tell me which genre, or specify anything, so I just did what comes naturally to me, and one song off that film became a cult hit and it reached even the smallest of the villages back in my home state. Overnight I became well-known, which got my face plastered all over the television, and my voice got blasted on the radio. Within a month I couldn’t walk the streets alone any more. I got featured in the video of the film, so that kind of helped to make my face well known. Since then I’ve done two more movies in my mother tongue, and the second movie I did, called Just Math Mathali went on to be a critically-acclaimed film and music, and the songs of that film, and the first film, are still on the charts, four years after they were made. So I’ve started enjoying the process of making music for films. This year I got invited by one of the biggest production houses in Bollywood – Yash Raj Films – which has started a new branch called Y Films that makes films only for the youth.

Read the full interview in Film & Festivals Issue 29