Adarsh Gourav: ‘Music Has Always Been a Part of My Life’

If you were at the second edition of Lollapalooza India in Mumbai in January, chances are, you may have spotted actor-singer Adarsh Gourav headbanging along to Chennai act Skrat. “I was like, fuck, these guys still have an audience, which is great to see,” he says over a call.

The actor who recently appeared in films like Kho Gaye Hum Kahan as the fake-it-till-you-make-it Neil Pereira and in the series Guns & Gulaabs as Jugnu, is also a big fan of U.K. prog metallers Tesseract and their vocalist Dan Tompkins, specially from when the British vocalist fronted Indian prog band Skyharbor. “We grew up watching [metal bands] Bhayanak Maut and Scribe,” he adds.

Gourav’s prog connection comes from being in the erstwhile Mumbai prog band Oak Island, who even released a five-track EP called Aliens Can’t Jump in 2014. The band even went on to jam with Indus Creed’s Uday Benegal for a brand-sponsored collaboration. Eventually, life caught up with the band members who had just graduated from college and needed to choose between giving it their all as a niche indie band or branching off. Many years later, Oak Island songs are very much online, but The White Tiger actor began forging new paths as a solo singer.

Following the release of Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, he teamed up with singer-composer Rashmeet Kaur for a new, chill reprise version of the bop “Ishq Nachaawe.” In recent months, there’s also been the (wholly unrelated) single “Kho Gaye” with composers JOH aka Joash Benedict and RUUH aka Reuel Benedict, “Bechaini” with composer-producer OAFF and contributing to the song “Banjare” from the movie Woh Bhi Din The, where he’s also an actor.

In an interview with Rolling Stone India, Gourav talks about his roots in music and how it came before acting, plus his upcoming role in Alien, a prequel series to filmmaker Ridley Scott’s 1979 cult sci-fi/horror movie. Excerpts:

Rolling Stone India: What is it like working on the Alien series and committing time to the project? Does it take you away from other projects back home?

Adarsh Gourav: To be very honest with you, I haven’t really thought about it that way. The only way I’m looking at it right now is that it’s a massive opportunity for me as an actor, to be working on a show which is possibly one of the most prestigious IPs in the world. Alien is one of the most iconic films to have ever been made, not just in terms of the story, but also in terms of the design part of it. The kind of technicians and artists who worked on Alien and the kind of effort it took to make that film… it made Ridley Scott who he is today.

Noah Hawley is directing it, who’s made shows like Fargo. So I just feel like I’m very lucky. And I feel like anything that is of quality does need time, and especially when it’s sci-fi, and it’s being made on a big scale… it takes time to make, so I understand that it’s going to take like four to five months, but I feel really good about it. I feel good about the fact that I’ll be in Bangkok. I’m very excited to be working with the cast. Last year, I was already there for a month, so I kind of got to know them all in person and they’re all really awesome.

Where did your interest in just cinema knowledge and being a fan of films come from?

I wasn’t much of a cinema watcher till I started acting myself. Growing up, television wasn’t an important aspect of my life. It was pretty much just school and then just being outdoor, playing. Television would be restricted to one hour a day. It wasn’t like a rule imposed by my parents or anything. I just didn’t feel like sitting in front of a television when I knew that all my friends were playing downstairs.

The only thing that I remember growing up watching was [pro wrestling] WWF, cricket and Cartoon Network. My grandfather would watch Discovery and NatGeo. I started watching those channels too. But films happened to me much later. By the time I was 15 or 16, was when I actually started watching and investing in films and sort of taking out the time and discussing films, etc. It happened pretty late.

Was that the case with your interest in music as well?

No, music has always been part of my life. I started training in Hindustani classical since I was four and a half years old. So I’ve been involved with music for almost 25 years now.

When I started out, of course, it was in the standard classical and then when I moved to Mumbai, a couple of years later, I was involved in a couple of bands. I used to sing for a band called Steep Sky and then I used to sing for a band called Oak Island. One was an alternative rock band, one was a progressive metal band.

Around when I was 15, 16 years old was when my brother gifted me this hard disk which had discographies of bands that he used to listen to, and I was introduced to English music through my brother. That had the Pink Floyds of the world and Led Zeppelin and, you know, Tool and Karnivool and Porcupine Tree and all these bands.

What was it like being part of the Indian indie space with Oak Island? I remember that you were part of a [indie compilation] Stupiditties album as well. You had a collaboration with [Indus Creed vocalist-guitarist] Uday Benegal as well.

I’m shocked that you’ve heard of Oak Island’s music. There weren’t too many people listening to our music. How do you know all this, man?

To be very honest with you that time, it was a lot of fun. Also because there were no responsibilities as such. All of us were kids who grew up in Bombay, so we didn’t have the stress of paying rent and stuff, you know. So it was it was a really nice scene, yaar. We were just having fun with our music. Steep Sky – we made a couple of originals, we used to participate in a lot of college festivals, playing these random shows, making the odd buck here and there if there was some corporate show, spending a lot of time in the jam room.

It was a great time in my life where I didn’t really care about what I had to do in life. I wasn’t really thinking about what my future would look like, or what my responsibilities would be like. It was a time that represented a lot of freedom for me.

What happened with the band? We’d often heard of indie bands just say that there was no scope for growth, only some would really ‘make it’ in terms of playing festivals and touring.

I guess that’s pretty much what our narrative is as well. In 2015, I graduated from college, and Oak Island was pretty active. But then, I mean, all of us also had to start thinking about what we really wanted to do with this band. Like, where does the band take us? Do we just continue playing these one-off corporate shows? Will that make us enough money? We were all 21-22 years old by that time, so we had to sort of start thinking about the future.

One of the plans was to look into going to the States, becoming a touring band, figuring it out. But honestly, I think all of us were just hit by life. We were like, ‘Fuck, we need to make a decision, and it will be a tough one.’ And then I think, I don’t know who the first one was… one of us was like, ‘Oh, but I need to also do this.’ And then I said, ‘Oh, but I also have my acting career and I need to focus on that.’ And then my lead guitarist, Garreth [Pereira] decided to go to Australia for his MBA and Anmol [Bhat, guitarist] was involved in something else.

So we had basically just disbanded. It died its natural death. It had to happen one day, I feel, unless all of us had the courage and the guts to be like, ‘We’ll go, like, two years without food, without anything.’ But I don’t think any of us had that courage at that point in time. I chose acting and people chose something else and then ultimately, the band disbanded.

You now have your own music coming out, like “Kho Gaye”. It’s all a bit new for you, right?

Right now, I’m doing something with OAFF as well.

Right now, I feel like I’m very lucky that I don’t have the pressure as a musician to make something for the masses. Because I feel like that’s when you start coming under pressure and start sort of… I don’t know… compromising on what you like, versus what you want to do [and] what people will probably like. I don’t want to ever fall into that trap.

I have the comfort of being an actor, and I have a job already. Music is purely a passion project for me. So I want to be able to do exactly the kind of music that I would like to listen to. I would like to use all my influences – Hindustani classical to jazz, to progressive metal, to psychedelic rock to all these kinds of genres that have influenced me, I hope to bring all of them into the kind of music I create.

You’ve worked with Rashmeet Kaur and now with OAFF. Any other Indian indie artists you’d like to collaborate with?

I would love to collaborate with Sid Sriram, I’m a massive fan. I would love to sing for A.R. Rahman. He’s not independent by any means [laughs] but he’s had the biggest influence on me and my musical tastes, so it would be my dream to sing for him one day.