Fossils – Digging Up Dirt

These days, the band is holed up in Islam’s Shakespeare Sarani home, fine tuning the 11 songs that will go into their forthcoming album. It’s painstaking work, getting everything in place before the band enters the studio and sends the recording across to Steve Fallone at Sterling Sound studio in New York for mastering. The sound engineer, known to have worked for the likes of Jaco Pastorius, The Strokes and Sonic Youth, had earlier done the mastering of Fossils 2 – a first for a Bengali band going to such lengths.

At the band’s rehearsal, three evenings of toying around finally gets a song into shape. Drummer Biswajit Das manages to weave in his own touch without falling out of the groove, bassist Chandramouli Biswas draws reference to Jethro Tull, and Partha Bose, one of the two guitarists, starts throwing his pony-tailed head around after numerous false starts. As the band starts locking well it becomes apparent that the forthcoming album is likely to advance on the sound that Fossils has popularised in the bustling Bengali band circuit – more intricately layered and patterned, dynamic mood shifts and knotty tunes; there are a couple of numbers too, though, that nods largely to commercial considerations.

Just that a small detail needs to be sorted out – the band does not have a recording deal yet for their next album. Islam, though, oozes cool confidence. “Saregama, Big Music and Asha Audio are interested. There are other smaller labels. Hopefully, before we enter the studio, we’ll decide on which offer works best for us. We can afford to wait till then,” says Islam.

If Fossils now can indulge in options, it’s been a long time coming for Islam, around whose songwriting and composition the music revolves. Born to musician parents, Islam remembers being on stage as a singer when he was a four-year-old, since then going on to be a regular in Kolkata’s cultural circuit. Succumbing to a gnawing need to write his own music, Rupam’s 40 Songs, a two-cassette demo which Islam recorded at home using an Ahuja microphone, a Stranger Cube 80 amp and an Yamaha PSR keyboard, was the result. “This was around the mid-Nineties when I was recording a song a day,” says Islam. “And while handing over the demo tapes to music critics I used to tell them that if they don’t like the third song, they might like the 33^rd,” he smiles, one of the rare occasions when Islam lets a joke crack through an otherwise grave public image.

At his Shakespeare Sarani home, Islam casually points at the small room where he had largely kept himself confined for a particularly turbulent phase of his life, and where much of the songwriting for Fossils’ debut album took place. This was after his mother, the lyricist Chhandita Islam, passed away in 1992 leaving behind a post-teen son grappling with a sudden crisis in the family with the coming of new members (“I didn’t know much about this side of my father’s life.”) Financial insecurities, a precarious love life and a growing disconnect with the world at large only compounded matters. “Since those days, Rupam has remained largely friendless and used to lock himself up in the room. It was mostly to me that he used to read out his poems,” informs Bijoli Das, a long-time governess at the household.

Looking for an escape through music, that too wasn’t easily forthcoming. “There have been occasions when organisers publicly asked us off the stage. We had to bear such insults since our music lacked the traditional Bengali character,” mentions Fossils’ guitarist, Deep Ghosh, 31, who has been with Islam even before Fossils was formed in 1999. At home Islam says his father, Nurul Islam, liked some of his lyrics, but not the sound of guttural rock. “And there were mostly rejections outside,” Islam adds, “even HMV, which released my solo album Tor Bhorsate in 1998, refused to push the album since they thought the music lacked the commercial edge.”