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Mumbai was hot and sticky. Got in over two hours late – Spice Jet blamed the weather.

The Juhu Hotel is this slightly run-down looking place, and it’s the home of the Razzberry Rhino, one of Mumbai’s Meccas for live music. The funny thing: the Razz, as it’s called, is this typical pub/lounge thing, inside the hotel, and just outside it is the outdoor restaurant/lawns where they have weddings and the occasional party sharty; it isn’t unusual that occasional Zhari-enveloped aunties and suited-booted uncles sort of wander in to have a look at the tamasha. Surrounded by black tees, goa-tees, and other variants of the hard-rocking variety, they squeak out rather quickly, muttering under their breaths about misspent youth, or ‘too much noise’.

Rithvik, our event manager for the day, effusive and friendly, bought some beers and we chilled on the ‘lawns’ while the hotel staff set up for the evening’s wedding do. The aforesaid staff are also clearly distant cousins of a certain slow-moving south American primate, as it took us nearly 40 minutes to get a chicken sandwich. We also ended up eating a fish starter for dessert.

Sound check was a bit of a joke. The ‘sound engineer’, an underage knob-twiddling maroon, had neither knowledge nor experience, and, I suspect, couldn’t hear very well either. He was the stand-in anyway, the real dude being all washed up in traffic (there was some Bihari puja going on and the streets were clogged; even Bangalore seemed momentarily better for an instant, not including *&#% Gowdagiri).

Medusa, a sort of electronica-rock band on the lines of Prodigy, opened for us. Nice act, some very tight playing by the drummer. The vocalist had attitude but didn’t sing very well. They deserved to get a little more from the crowd. Given Tony’s new fixation, there was no way the guitarist could be playing anything other than a Tele… hee hee.

Rudy’s cronies, old TAAQ-friends Tall Ravi (the wonderful guy who brought down my PODxt) and Chotu found their way to the gig, and they brought a sound-engineer pal along. Huzzah. We opened with Look At Me, and within the first couple of songs, he managed to get a lot of things working. Thanks man.

Good crowd, saw a lot of folks singing along. Always great to see! Played almost two hours. Jupiter Cafe was a nice jam, Intermission featured a small train wreck, Chameleon rocked happily along with Galacktiqua and Hoedown finished up before the Motorbyckle encore. They wanted more, but some sound guy had already pulled the plugs.

Good gig, overall. Hope we do more in Mumbai.