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We recorded “ill get you in the end” and “catharsis” for a show on MTV called MTV-U, which incidentally was the TV Show that launched Cyrus the MTV VJ. I believe he’s also going to be there at IIM for Unmaad.

We were approached by someone from TV 18 to do a shoot. The dude who called us was supposed to come to college to get permission from Father Principle (Princy) before shooting us cos we were still a college band and stuff. On the way to college, this dude lit up a joint in the auto and Vishak and i took a few drags cos we had to keep up the rock star image and all. So we went in for this meeting with Princy totally stoned. Surprisingly Princy said he’s cool with anything except nude chicks in the video J

We then started off the process of shooting the video. This dude wanted us to go to Bangalore Majestic and take off our shirts and play. Majestic btw is this totally F’d up crowded market area near the Bangalore Bus Terminal. We had to use all our diplomacy skills to get him to believe that it was a bad idea. Finally he agreed to do a shoot in college campus itself.

Lights camera action – Bruce and Chandy jumped into this pond which had a few frogs, fish, tadpoles etc in it. Luckily for me i set up the kit on one side and man the trip was completely hilarious. Since there was no sound and amps etc – it was just lip sync and acting stuff. This TV 18 guy then made us set-up our gear on this mound of grass outside the college main block and started shooting us from a maruthi van which kept going round and round that mound of grass. He almost fell off a couple of times.

I wish we could somehow source that footage from TV 18. Somebody, anybody who knows anybody please to be helping digging this one out. It will be fun to watch that one.

But before all this we had to actually get the songs recorded in a studio.

We had exactly 1,000 rupees and expected to put down two tracks.

Going against words of wisdom from the musician gods in Bangalore at that point – which included stuff like “dude it takes 5 days to get your snare drum tuned in the studio daaa” and “Its pointless macha, you cant record 2 whole tracks within 1K ” etc etc, we just went up to Ebby Studios in Banaswadi (this was a completely way out joint in 1996).

The engineer there Mr. Augustine decided to give us a chance. He just said, pay me what you have, don’t worry about the time etc. do your thing. Man that was one of the big moments for TAAQ. So I borrowed Jeff Popes kit, Bruce borrowed Ajay Phillips processor and guitar i think and man we just blasted off in the studio. The result was an instrumental called “Catharsis” and the second one was “Ill get you in the end”. 2 songs made solely by the power of rock n roll.

Power to Augustine from Ebby studios – we are eternally grateful for what he did for us Back in 1996.

Oh and about the MTV-U show: some folks said they saw us, i think some guys in Kottayam said they saw the show, or maybe they were bullshitting after a few bottles of toddy. We never heard from that TV 18 Guy, none of us saw the program.
VJ Cyrus looks like a major body builder and is totally rocking now after 10 years.