UncategorizedCategory Archive

Thats right folks, Thermal And A Quarter is on tour of Scotland and England as of 14:03 GMT. Welcome folks!

 The dates as of now:

 24th May 2006 – The Barfly Glasgow, along with The Fallout Trust and Futuro
 25th May 2006 – The 13th Note Cafe, Glasgow
 05th June 2006 – The Hold at The Admiral Bar, Glasgow
 09th June 2006 – The Sketch at The Govan Festival, Glasgow
 10th June 2006 – Doctors Tonic, Welwyn Garden City, Herts, London
 14th June 2006 - Nice n Sleazies, Glasgow along with His Girl Friday, Codeen and   Kingston

Ten years ago, there was no direct flight from Bangalore to London. I’m not even sure if there was a direct flight to Colombo. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t. We were second-rate citizens then, you see. Our not-yet-metro Bengaluru was still bickering over auto-rickshaw fares. Today, we are debating whether or not to have a Bangalore Metro, a la the Tube in London.

But the fact is – the boys flew out from Bangalore this morning. They were up all night, packing, fretting, too excited to sleep. They ganged up at Rajeev’s place, bags and baggage and hard-cased guitars included. Mr. David Pascall flew in from Chennai. With the visas. And the other David (not Rzhude, but Dave Brubeckku, Rajeev’s kitten) found lots of interesting odds and ends to play with.

And this morning GMT, they will arrive in London. And on they go to Glasgow, where they will make the gig at the Barfly just in time.

Watch this space, and our space at MySpace for gig schedules.

Yes, yes, there has been the long silence. But of course, we are all busy and all tied up with various things and the rest of the usual excuses, including excessive soporific heat, binging on ice cream, the price of booze in begumpet, the altered mating habits of the blue-throated Madagascar warbler and so forth.

Ta daaaah! Here we are again. Or at least, here I am again.

Poor old Annavaru. Just after we heard ‘eef you come today’ too. That was quite a strange couple of days.

Anyway. We played a really cool stadium gig recently, at this Acharya college place way out in the Hesarghatta boondocks. And when I say stadium, I mean stadium. The venue was HUGE, and there was this typical hangar-style stage in the middle of it. Must have been 2 or 3 thousand kids there, and perhaps about three of them had heard our music before. Which is great. It’s really cool to get a ‘fresh’ audience every once in a while.

Was a short gig – just 40 minutes – and we did all our new material, premiering three brand new TAAQ songs, Tell It Like It Is, Chameleon, and 1996. The latter has been around for a while, but we’ve been chicken to play it live – you know, those lingering doubts about whether a song is ‘ready’ yet. Needless to say, it was the one that rocked the most here. Fun gig. Sound was a bit strange. (I go up to the sound guy and say, hey, you know the whole PA is just a bit too harsh, right? Way too much highs? And he looks at me and says ‘eh? I think it’s too muffled, we need more highs’. That was a success – you’ve been going too long without earplugs bro.)

In other news, we’re back on the blogs! Oh, I already said that.

Anyway. We played a really cool stadium gig recently… Erk. I’ve said that too.

Ok, I’ll just sign off for now and really collect my thoughts.

ThermalAndAQuarterly, our online newsletter, was born as a simple text mailer when the rest of the world was going orgiastic on flash-based direct marketing. Now, with the evolution of the Net and web technologies, we are proud to present a new, improved version that’s only about ten years behind the times. To get one the next time we publish one, fill out this form.

Sign up! Or better still, spread the word.

Sorry, this is completely arbitrary… In the tradition of ‘If you come today’ here’s another Indian English music video (SORRY, WONLY AUDIO THIS TIME) that reflects the rich musical tradition of Namma Bengalooru.

Haavina Hede – My name is Raj Raj Raj

And of course, thanks for the guitar, Dad. Wish you were here.

N. Lewis & Son. They’re the guys who made my first electric. It was cherry-apple (after shining on shirt) red, probably hacked out of one single railway sleeper, with white pickguard, two red blobs with ‘Lewis’ proudly stencilled on them (in gold, btw) for pickups, 24 badly filed frets, 6 sticky open-back tuners, an output jack from the grand old Ahuja days when everything had to be screwed on, and a neck that was twice the thickness of the body – so the guitar would sort of gently drift down on that side, the balance being all wonky you see. How I loved that guitar.

I got a special cable made – fiddly screw-on  plug to banana plug – so I could connect up to the 25-year old Cosmic LAB3000 Solid State Hi-Fi amp at home, hooked up to some pinewood-cabinet Jensen speakers (with some arcane thing called infinite baffles) that I still have. What a sound. Turn the volume up to Stun and you got a kind of brittle, breaking-glass overdrive that was just so….so…. amazing! And every afternoon I would crank out the riff to La Bamba and play that solo, to the appreciative ears of a pretty auntie who lived next door. What. A. Trip.

The Ventures and The Shadows – they were the guys who really got me playing guitar. I learnt nearly all of their hits, and through the old Cosmic, when warmed up enough, sometimes even the sound was right. Pipeline. Walk Don’t Run. Tequila. Mexico. Apache. Shadoogie. Foot Tapper. Wow, I still remember those names. What bands.

The guitar’s still around somewhere, and I know it’s still completely unwarped, untwisted, and those pickups still probably work. If I can find a cable with an out-of-date jack, maybe I’ll try it someday. Plug it into the Podxt LIVE, through my Planet Waves cables into the Carlsbro or even the nice boutique Tube amp and see how she can sing. Long trip, eh?