Peter Cat Recording Co likes to do things its own way. Made up of five musicians, it was up to the 6-month-old son of one of them to have the final word on the name of the new album. How? He drew lots. And when the time came to announce to the world, PCRC had a few elephants devour a large edible model of a vinyl sporting the title, Beta.
It’s not for nothing that this adventurous Delhi band describes itself as a “factory of ideas”, best exemplified in their music, the videos that accompany some songs, and the way they navigate the world of live shows and the streaming universe.
Now PCRC is on a massive 78-date world tour of the United States and Europe which will conclude with six gigs in India in December. A big deal for any band, more so for an Indian act pursuing a unique kind of genre-bending music that comes out of a fiercely independent mindset with a “never give a ..ck” attitude. Variety described PCRC as “India’s best-kept music secret” for years after witnessing first-hand the success of their spring, fall and winter tours of 2023 and early 2024, outings that had them perform in 30-odd venues in the US and Canada, followed by concerts in Europe and even New Zealand and Down Under.
It’s been a magical ride for this Indian band, starting off as it did sometime in 2010. Beta is their third “official” album out, but loyalists in India know them from earlier oeuvre showcased in several unreleased offerings (Sinema, Wall of Want, Climax, Transmissions, Happy Holidays), some of these with a different lineup. Their music goes beyond genres, embellished at times with bold sonic patches playing over layers of intricacies made up of ornate instrumentation, including fuzzy guitars, cool bass lines, lively horns and subtle piano. With Beta, their palette is larger, giving PCRC’s pop a big-band heft. Crooner vocals belting out straight-from-the-heart lyrics combine seamlessly with buoyant choruses. The songs have an all-encompassing universal feel to them with shades of India, a bend in the melody line here, a dholak there. Listen, sing along. Or dance may be?
PCRC is on a tour of 78 cities of North America and Europe, hitting places like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Berlin. At some venues the band will share the stage with American trio Khruangbin.
PCRC is Suryakant Sawhney, the principal songwriter who plays guitar and harmonium, and sings like Frank Sinatra—“I get that a lot, take it as a compliment” __ Kartik Pillai on guitar and horns, Dhruv Bhola on bass and samples, Rohit Gupta on keys, horns and woodwind and Karan Singh on drums. Their 2022-23 live shows included songs from the album Bismillah and the earlier, Portrait of A Time: 2010-2016. So how did they come here, now on the cusp of a second bigger and better world tour?
Suryakant believes it has a lot to do with their innate individuality as a band. “We have been completely isolated from the music business and never really ended up working with people who are from the music industry which, in a funny way, worked out best for us,” he told The Telegraph Online in September 2022. Staying out of the “industry system” meant that from early on PCRC are the producers of their own work. They write and record their music, and mix it themselves. Over the years they have learnt and gotten better at it, to the extent that even for their new album Beta, almost all band members took turns and chipped in as production engineers for different songs.
Good, sagacious marketing skills helped too, courtesy the team at Pagal Haina (artist managers) whose co-founder Dhruv Singh believes the decision to go on a North American tour in 2023 paid off. “I think the biggest factor has been that we were able to play 30 sold-out shows. Because till that time, even though North America was PCRC’s biggest audience in terms of streaming and listeners online, we didn’t really know how that would translate to ticket sales,” he says.
The tour provided an indication that it’s not just streaming numbers (526.3k monthly listeners on Spotify). The PCRC fan base is active and expanding. The band members were blown over by the experience. “When we were playing everybody was singing along, the riffs and the trumpet parts; they knew all the little gaps. It was very nice,” recalls Kartik. Surya felt as though they were tapping into some sort of a common culture they had created. “Everybody was getting it,” he says. Karan did not even think they were in another country. “The crowd was so welcoming and so into it… as though we have been here before. There was no ice to break,” he exclaims.
Suryakant in performance at the Electric Ballroom, Camden, London. Instagram: petercatrecordingco
The best part is that over 90 per cent of the audience at the gigs weren’t Indian or from the diaspora. “That was a tell-tale sign that PCRC’s music was finding listeners overseas,” adds Dhruv Singh, recounting how there was a bunch of fans that followed the band across California and attended four-five shows. And this was repeated in concerts across the UK and Europe in November-December 2023. “We sold out shows there too, across London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rotterdam. Then we went to Australia and New Zealand in January-February 2024 and the shows in Sydney and Melbourne were sold out,” he declares triumphantly.
Pagal Haina is determined to ensure PCRC’s forthcoming 2024 tour is bigger and better. The band is making more money from the shows this time as the venues have gotten larger, on an average at least upwards of 1,200, the largest being 2,500. It has William Morris Endeavour (WME) as its booking agent for world (except India) tours and in addition to a tour manager who joined the team last year, Pagal Haina has brought in a tax consultant. When a band needs a tax expert, you know it’s on a roll.
“Coming from India but earning in dollars has tax implications. And we needed an expert to ensure we don’t end up losing most of our money,” explains Dhruv Singh and declares: “I don’t think any Indian act, let alone band or solo artist, even from Bollywood, has done a tour of this scale. This is the first.”
Musically, Beta the album is majestic with 13 songs, yet deeply personal and intimate as PCRC usually are. [TTOnline review here]. It was recorded in the most unlikely of places ranging from an abandoned old house in Goa and a furniture shop to a desert town in California. Parts of it got done during the 2023 tour. We’ll let the musicians speak for themselves.
Recording philosophy
Suryakant: “The album jump started in Goa, where after a long period of not really feeling anything special was happening, we did have a couple of really nice sessions. One was in this old abandoned Goan house where we would record in the middle of the night in winter. And the other stint was at a makeshift recording studio we set up in a furniture shop, which my friend owns. That also proved to be a nice place and we got some ideas going in. This was during the Covid outbreak.
“All of this encapsulated our recording philosophy which means we like using different spaces, not confining ourselves to classic studio space because of technology, et al.
The big idea in Beta
Suryakant: “Flowers Are Blooming” serves as an over-arching song. I think of that as the cloud cover of an entire planet. Once you cross that song, then People Never Change starts with the dholak. To me it feels like you are slowly zooming in into a place and time, into a particular story. From then on, it moves to a different time and place.
My songs are jumping through different times of my life. 21C is talking about my relationship with music as something which has given me the life I have, but has also taken away a life I wanted. Black and White talks about me and my married life. There’s a certain biography… it’s like markers.”
The idea of the dholak in People Never Change
Karan: “That was Suryakant. He found this sample we didn’t like initially. But it grew on us. Some things were funny, the ektara and dhol stood out. We are all attracted towards folk sounds, be it Indian, Russian, Romanian or East European. This also fitted into that universe. That’s why I gave a thumb’s up to Suryakant.”
Foolmuse and Just Another Love Song
Kartik: “I start something and tend to take a sharp turn … to get a full stream of consciousness thing going. I usually end up writing most of my lyrics in one go. The riffs in the song usually come all by itself even if I don’t really know how to sing at that point. So I hit the record button on my phone and let whatever happens just happen. With Just Another Love Song, it was on the New Year’s a few years ago, 2020-21, and it was just me and Rohit hanging out at home. In-between watching old films and music videos, he went inside and recorded some piano. And I went inside separately and sang over his piano. The song came out that one night.”
Suddenly: Ode to a father
Suryakant: “In the year of Covid, or 2021, I spent a lot of time at home, and many nights I would just stay up. There was some idea of a version of the song. The way I write songs is that I will have some loop, which will have some rough words. One night I spent a lot of hours playing it again and again. At some point the lyrics just sort of started writing themselves and then I realized that this song, the mood of it, was turning out to be autobiographical. Initially, it started out as something sad… Then, the more I kept writing it started to transform into something more about my mother actually. It actually focused on that entire arch and not just the idea of loss. Then the day we actually ended up recording it, I wrote all the final lyrics on the spot. I think it’s one of those songs that just feels like it wrote itself. It’s nice when that happens. And a lot of the music, at least the guitars, bass and drums, really just happened on the spot. It was emotional. … And I knew that we had made something authentic and sincere.”
Mother’s reaction
Suryakant: “She liked it. She heard the song for the first time while we were shooting a video for it. She had a real reaction when we played it for her. She’s heard it many times later, says it’s a very beautiful song.”
For all their irreverent nature and self-deprecating humour the boys like to foreground, PCRC has always been very serious and protective of their music. Their album covers are a concept too, Bismillah was a photograph from Suryakant’s wedding, remember? So it is with Beta, the cover featuring a cute boy with a bunch of dollars. The template for the doll is a Feng Shui item good luck charm that Suryakant picked up from somewhere in Chinatown, Thailand, and had scans of. “When the album was over we started to think of the visual direction we needed to take… with my son being there and ‘Beta’ as one of the options, we really thought that this album cover might fit in,” says Karan who worked with him on the final version. Suryakant lets in on another angle. “It is also a fun play on the old ‘Never Mind’ album cover from Nirvana where there’s that baby underwater chasing money.”
Well played. For, PCRC is also big into merchandising and little Beta dolls may just come in handy. During the last tour the band gave away specially designed bindis, which were a big hit. Merchandise, the band has learnt, is another revenue stream which it needs to make the most of. For, even though it was the band’s first North American tour last year, PCRC came back in the green. That almost unheard of feat in the music world was possible only because the band was able to sell merch. Like their music, there was a lot of demand for it too.
PCRC will cap its 2024 world tour with a six-date India tour, concluding on December 28 in Calcutta.
PCRC: The way we are. Photo: Tenzing Dakpa
