COVER STORY: Ankur Tewari’s Multi-facetted Musical Life

Good Luck Café, a typical Mumbai-style Irani restaurant near Bandra’s historic Mehboob Studio, is a favorite haunt for Ankur Tewari. The informal seating and the anonymity here helps him enjoy sitting with strangers of various stripes, talking to them, and listening in on their conversations. “If you go and have chai there, you can easily drop into these people’s conversations and hear so much,” he says excitedly. “You get exposed to so many lives. I like the idea that you can share your table with someone you don’t know. It’s very intimate when you sit across the table and talk to strangers. It’s kind of in sync with my life.”

Tewari lives in Bandra, and much of what he does revolves around here (including the cover photography for this article was done on his building terrace). Good Luck Café in that sense is an integral part of his life. It has provided him with rich material for the many songs he has written for himself and others and of course his work as a poet. Songs like “Parwaana”—the opening track of his new album Akela—are drawn from his time here. “I don’t know if it’s entirely true, but I remember vaguely a person talking about the love of their life and how they will go to any extent to be with their love. I don’t know if the whole song is from there, but one part of the emotion comes from a conversation I had at Good Luck,” he says. 

The psychedelic and brooding Akela with its eight tracks is Tewari’s first full-fledged album in more than a decade, notwithstanding an occasional EP or his work as a lyricist for other singers. It comes at a very hectic period in his career. He is currently at work on the second season of Coke Studio Bharat, where he is designated as the ‘creative architect’.  And then there is his work on a growing list of films and OTT shows, where he is designated as the ‘music supervisor’. The term is a new one, signifying the evolutionary change underway in the near-century-old history of Indian film music. The old-style, all-encompassing music director who composed every song in the movie as well as the background score,  is slowly making way for the ‘music supervisor’ whose job is essentially to curate a collection of independently produced songs by a diverse range of singers and musicians that fits in with the theme of the film.

Tewari hit the big time as music supervisor with Zoya Akhtar’s 2019 film Gully Boy, loosely based on the hardscrabble growing-up days in Dharavi of Indian rap pioneers Naezy and DIVINE. The critically acclaimed movie was a landmark in the history of Indian popular culture, not just because it transformed the likes of  DIVINE, Naezy, Sez on the Beat, MC Altaf, MC TodFod, Emiway Bantai, KR$NA, Brodha V and others into national superstars, but also in the way it transformed Indian language hip-hop into, arguably, the most successful genre of music in the country since the time in the 1980s and 90s when Biddu Appiah made ‘indipop’ a national craze with the likes of Nazia and Zoheb Hassan, Alisha Chinai and others.

Gully Boy proved to be a transformational film for Tewari. His friendship with Zoya Akhtar proved to be serendipitous. As he told The Telegraph in 2019, “When she approached me, I knew that it would be challenging but good fun, and I’d have some learning from the project as I went with it.” But he was a musician imbued more with rock, so how was he going to do justice to a movie about rap? There was a lot of “homework” involved, as he recounted in a 2019 interview. “I, frankly, had no idea about the scope of work and the fact that I would be collaborating with so many musicians. I just went with the flow and we almost worked one-and-a-half to two years on the music and it ended up being a big collaboration,” he said. Playing festivals across India, Tewari had shared green rooms and backstage banter with hip-hop artists, which he says made him curious about the rap scene, especially the gully rap of Mumbai which proved to be crucial in his work as the curator.

The film opened doors for him to work as a music supervisor in a variety of films and OTT shows over the next few years,  including Modern Love: Mumbai, Gehraiyaan, A Suitable Boy, Yeh Ballet, Made in Heaven, and others. As with Gully Boy, some of these films proved to be career-making projects for some of the musicians who worked for him. Gehraiyaan, for example, was the break-out film for composer-producer and composer duo OAFF and Savera.

Tewari’s early success, of course, was, with his own band The Ghalat Family. Formed in 2009, they’ve gone beyond Hindi rock band cliches to become one of Indian indie’s most beloved bands with  hits like “Mohabbat Zindabad” and pull off spirited tunes like “Sabse Peeche Hum Khade.” The band is still going strong with multi-instrumentalist Sidd Coutto, bassist Johan Pais, guitarist Gaurav Gupta and drummer Vivaan Kapoor. Tewari as the frontman continues to be the face, comfortable on stage, joking with the crowd while goading them to sing along. 

His major musical digressions in the early part of last year when the boundaries between India’s indie scene and mainstream music industry first began to blur. From his stint at music channel Pepsi MTV Indies (which helped bring in artists for Gully Boy) to co-founding poetry platform Kommune, and now Coke Studio Bharat, his skill has been at finding the right artists for the right song. “Even when I was in school, my dream has always been to be in a band and work with other musicians, and Coke Studio Bharat puts me in a very interesting place where I can work with musicians I probably wouldn’t have collaborated with myself,” he says. 

It’s great for one’s personal growth, Tewari believes, to be surrounded by everyone, from folk musicians to singer-songwriters to electronic producers and hip-hop artists, often in the same room, considering the scale and ambition of Coke Studio Bharat. From OAFF, Savera, Jasleen Royal, and Burrah kicking off with “Udja” to seasonal songs like “Holi Re Rasiya” with Ravi Kishan, Amaan, and Ayaan Ali Bangash and Seedhe Maut, to “Khalasi” with Aditya Gadhvi, Achint, and Dhruv Visvanath, and more, the collaborations in the first season, early this year, were carefully stacked to avoid the pitfalls of having too many cooks in the kitchen. 

Historically, this is what made Coke Studio in India a hit or miss across seasons, showrunners, producers, and curators in its initial four-year run from  2012 to 2015. The show which was originally conceived in Brazil in 2007, had become a big part of Indian musical consciousness via the massive success of the Pakistani version produced by the redoubtable Rohail Hyatt, which Indian fans feasted on YouTube. So it wasn’t surprising that Coke would launch a local version in India sooner than later.

Composer-singer Leslie Lewis (from indie-pop act Colonial Cousins) was the curator and producer of the first season of The Indian. Since then, producers and curators have included the likes of A.R. Rahman, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Ram Sampath, Salim-Sulaiman, Clinton Cerejo, Amit Trivedi, Sachin-Jigar, etc. 

The four seasons that Coke Studio India ran allowed indie artists, underappreciated folk heroes, and Bollywood hitmakers to come together in a way that hadn’t been seen before. The Wadali Brothers, The Nooran Sisters, Kutle Khan, Mame Khan jammed with Papon, Kailash Kher, Sona Mohapatra, Raftaar, Vijay Prakash, Siddharth Basrur, Pentagram, Agam, and Advaita, among scores of others, spurring powerful compositions that launched a few careers in the music industry. The producers and curators were at the center of it all, treating each song release like an all-star project. 

After a hiatus of eight years, the show made a comeback earlier this year, with a new home on YouTube (it was on MTV earlier)  and re-branded as Coke Studio Bharat. Tewari with his experience working with cross-genre musicians was in some ways the obvious choice as the curator. “[It’s great] to just be a fly on the wall and see how people are operating, be part of the discussions when they create a song together,” he says.

Like Coke Studio Bharat, Tewari’s upcoming project as the music supervisor, lyricist, and composer for  Zoya Akhtar’s soon-to-be-released. The Archies has been a collective endeavor for Tewari. Based on the iconic Archies comics, it is set in the year 1964 in an Anglo-Indian community. Tewari deep-dived into the Anglo-Indian culture of that time to conceive the music for the film. “I started researching about the music that was happening in India at that time, tried to find some recordings, tried to find bands, and interviewed many people. And the palette emerged from there and it’s very exciting,” he says. 

The Archies provided him the opportunity to work with Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy who composed the main tracks for the film. “Because I love their music so much,” he says, he was  “very nervous” working with them. But the ease they brought to the project, he says, melted away the anxieties. “They never made me feel as lesser at any point. They made me feel at home and they are such good collaborators,” he adds. He likens watching the trio in action in the studio as “energy bunnies”, just throwing ideas and collating them. It was their non-verbal cues though which amazed Tewari. “I think the three of them can read each other’s minds very well. There was some telepathic stuff happening between them,” he says with a laugh. 

Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy not withstanding, Tewari is credited as the music supervisor, lyricist, and composer for the film, for the numerous tracks that he has produced. He put together a band for the film called The Islanders featuring drummer Jehangir Jehangir, bassist Nathan Thomas, guitarist Zohran Miranda, saxophonist Rhys Sebastian, and vocalist Aria Nanji. “Tejas’ voice just matched Archies’ personality, played by  Agastya [Nanda], while Shivam Mahadevan is the voice of Jughead. Overall, the soundtrack makes you feel easy, it makes you think about simpler times and easier days, especially with how the world is right now. It like really feels like a warm hug,” he says.

For Tewari, his work on films, which started nearly 20 years ago with a largely forgotten movie called Let’s Enjoy in 2004 is about staying relevant in the moment. “Sometimes in life, my biggest fear is being irrelevant as an artist, which is an actual reality, because there is nobody who stays relevant forever. The idea is to try and keep up with the times, trying to understand what’s happening and tell the story of now. Specifically, try and tell a story that is relatable now,” he says. 

Born in 1977 in Brussels to a father who is a metallurgist and engineer and a mother who came from a drama background, Tewari grew up in Roorkee and Bhopal before eventually working in hospitality in New Delhi and moving to Mumbai for music. “To be very honest, I’m only very good at this and this is something that gives me a smile at the end of the day, ” he says, “I studied in the hotel industry, I tried to be a hotelier but I realized very early that I wouldn’t be a good hotelier and I’m not enjoying it more than anything else.”  

His love for the arts, he says, came from watching his mother directing student plays as part of the dramatics society at Roorkee University.  He saw actors prep, rehearse, make costumes and stage sets, and get on stage. “That definitely was something very important for me to ever feel the urge to be on stage myself. I think it started there,” Tewari says. His first experience as a singer came after he became part of his school choir. And he hasn’t stopped singing since.

He is as passionate about music, as he was when he first started out.  “I’m really having fun. It feels like you’re in an amusement park and you’re taking this ride and that ride, and overall having fun. As long as that’s going, I’ll keep going.” The admission price to be at this  amusement park, according to Tewari, is to “pay in patience.”  “Sometimes you don’t get instant returns so you have to be very grounded, because the moment you fly, you also have to be prepared to come crashing down. It’s full of thrills. If you see it as a game, it can be exciting. If you take it seriously, then it can be very scary. So I never try and take my career so seriously that I start getting nervous or scared. I keep on reminding myself to keep having enjoying the fun that comes with it.”  

Tewari doesn’t like to talk about dividing music into genres. When asked about the stylistic choices that made Akela a psychedelic, sometimes dark trip that is rich in textures and ambient elements, Tewari says his advice to singer-songwriters is just “follow the story”. “For me, I don’t like to say, ‘I write these kind of songs.’ Genres, for me, are made by people who sell music. It’s good that music needs to be sold, but when you’re approaching songwriting, you don’t think like you’re writing a singer-songwriter song, or you’re writing a ballad, or you’re writing a rock anthem or an EDM track; you just write after you’ve felt the story.”

He admits he’s bad at multi-tasking, so he prefers to immerse himself in one particular project at a time, whether it’s his own material or working with other artists for screen or otherwise. To that end, Tewari is reluctant to share any details about the next season of Coke Studio Bharat. All he would say is that it is targeted at the current generation of young India, in all its diversity. “What we’re trying to do with Coke Studio Bharat is tell the story of the new, emerging India, which has the youngest people in the world. I feel that we need to talk about stories and pain points that the young are feeling and yet have a dose of tradition in it,” he says. The goal, he says, is to make traditional music cool but also write new stories in different forms that could become ‘folk music 2.0’.  “Bob Dylan was writing ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ when the Vietnam War was happening. I want to write about our times through our folk and with the voices of the young, ” he adds.