Fossils – Digging Up Dirt

Their third album is indicative of how far Fossils has travelled. While Mission F found the band’s proclivity towards melody-driven music intact, it also threw up a new side – Fossils singing an unplugged version of an earlier hit, composing for the Kolkata Police-organised Friendship Cup soccer tournament and teaming up with singer Usha Uthup to create AIDS-HIV awareness through music; a band for a cause, ’cause this is the band, being the underlying impression. In Apodarthyo, the video album, in between songs, viewers are subjected to footage showing carefully planned band trivia: ‘Rupam walking out,’ ‘Partha using guitar as a sunguard,’ ‘Several takes of Rupam walking down the stairs’ and ‘Unused shot of Deep walking out’ – one of the reasons why some consider Fossils to have become the moshpit of the ego.

In recent times, Fossils have, more often than not, been represented on billboards, television, radio, protest meetings and concerts, page threes of newspapers, rent-a-quote articles, T-shirts and posters by the unmistakably weighty image of its long-haired, stubble-wearing frontman. Recently, music giant Saregama went ahead and – almost as a reiteration of the Islam’s personal appeal – reissued his solo album Tor Bhorsate, which  they had released way back in 1998.

On rupamislam.com – a website that somewhat apologetically mentions in a footnote that it is a handiwork of ‘friends’ – regular news updates are matched by Rupam Islam nuggets like the lyrics from his songs used as advertising catchlines and snapshots from his childhood. This, when the official website of the band remains offline. And when a Bengali version of the title track of Bollywood film Jannat, sung by Islam, is released in theatres in Kolkata, SMSes underlining the feat pour in from Islam’s wife, Rupsa Dasgupta. “These days, if you google Rupam’s name, the first four pages carry news of him singing for Jannat,” she mentions before the South Club concert. The careful buildup of an image almost echoes a Stalinist cult of personality. There is no dearth of takers though – at last count, there are 9950 members in the largest Fossils community on Orkut, 3000 and 2000 odd members in the following two communities, sites where members discuss Islam’s poetry, hairstyle, onstage attitude, the wisdom of singing for a Bollywood film, or whether he is on drugs.

The band’s former manager, Parikshit says that from being a coming together of talent the band has become a “one man show.” Even if that is true, it is not easily apparent in the band’s rehearsals where there is a free flow of ideas from band members, especially from the low-profile bassist Chandramouli Biswas, 32, for whom, the studying of jazz “helps in the opening up of creative possibilities for Fossils.” The basic melody structures and lyrics remains Islam’s though.

A more severe indictment comes from Tanmoy Bhattacharya. The guitarist formerly did duty and shared the stage with Biswas in Kolkata-based alternative rock band Graven Image, and later recorded with Fossils on their debut album. He quit the band when they were on the threshold of success. “The feeling I got was that the whole effort in Fossils was aimed at earning fame, having a steady income and settling down. The music too had nothing that a Western audience will consider as fresh,” Bhattacharya contends.