
Something about Nandu Leo, a 60-something-year-old who has quietly lived for music for years on end, and still when he gets on a stage goes back to the 70s and 80s songs, brings to mind the image of Hirayama, the calm figure in Wim Wenders’ adored film Perfect Days. Nandu Leo with his unassuming ways, sitting in a corner of the Indian Coffee House in Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram, nursing his cup of coffee, is, like Hirayama, quite a picture of tranquility. He would give no signs of having been one of the best singers of classic rock in Kerala, except on the days he gets on a stage and lets his voice run free, surprising a crowd with a new stock of old songs every year. From 2013, Nandu began a practice of booking a hall in the capital city every year and performing classic rock from the 70s through the 90s in a concert he titled ‘Music for Peace’. This Saturday, February 8, he will have the 13th edition at the Vyloppilly Samskrithi Bhavan.
“That title comes from my father, who told me, when I announced my decision to be a musician, that it was fine, but to make sure that I make somebody happy, make somebody strong. So I do music for peace,” Nandu says.
He was only 18 when he took this call, left the University in Tamil Nadu, and in the same year, had his first performance. It was the VJT Hall – the same venue where he would begin his Music for Peace concert decades later – and the year was 1978. Nandu was part of a college band called Bahm Krüger and that day, they played along with the covers of The Beatles and Bee Gees, some of their own compositions. “We would announce it as a new song by a popular band and two weeks later, when the song would have been well-appreciated, reveal that it was our own,” he says, with a laugh.
Those are the days he still goes back to when he sings today, remembering the early mornings in Madras when he would stand outside a record store, waiting for it to open to grab a rare album with the little money he’d save from skipping his meals. He’d make do with tea in the morning and noon. As he retells the story of discovering the single record of Obscured by Clouds, a studio album of Pink Floyd, you see him relive the joy he experienced as a teenager, in love with the world of music.
Rock and roll had come into his life by chance, when on a school trip, a friend brought a Sanyo player with only two songs in it and they listened to it nonstop – Yellow River by Christie and Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of the Road. Nandu’s memory is impeccable. These are stories from when he was 13, a boy who had loved the Hindi songs of Kishore Kumar (and still does), finding a vast world of western music and plunging right into it. This is the reason he does not like to repeat his songs in his Music for Peace concerts – “there are just so many of them and only the popular ones are played over and over again.”
The year he discovered rock and roll he also happened to listen to the first live concert in Thiruvananthapuram. Nandu, walking back from a tuition class, spotted a strange crowd of people wearing bell bottom pants and with long hair outside the Tagore Theatre, and snuck in to see what was going on. “I saw a four piece band whose lead singer had Afro hair and a kurta. They happened to be the winners that day and I heard the name of the band announced: Beg, Borrow or Steal, and the man with the Afro was Rajasekharan, from Madurai,” Nandu says.
Jesudasan Rajasekharan is now a veteran rock musician in Madurai. Nandu would meet him in his college days in Madras and much later bring him for a rock show in Thiruvananthapuram. “That was in 1980, for a concert we called ‘Now’,” he says.
He had already become part of a circle of rock musicians back then and picked his lessons watching his seniors. The late John Anthony who’d founded the band Karnatriix and Antony Isaacs of the Kochi band Elite Aces were his mentors, he says. Nandu would watch them play the guitar, write down the finger movements, and learn to play.
By 1982, he formed his own band, The Moonstone Band, and had Antony as the main vocalist for the first show in November, at the Senate Hall. Nandu was happy to be the second singer. “I am always happy to be in the background,” he says. He’d shirk from publicity, photographs and even recordings of his own music, for that is the lesson he had picked up from Antony. But that day, in 1982, his father had come to hear him play, and impressed by the crowd, gifted him a walkman, Nandu says with an endearing smile.
Through the 1980s and 90s, The Moonstone had several shows, and Nandu would perform solo or with a band at hotels of Thiruvananthapuram. Those were days when hotels would have live music for diners. “Until the 1990s it was good times, there would be a dedicated crowd for rock and roll. Even for Onam, we’d have different bands play on different days.”
But afterward, the scene changed, surprisingly so since music from across the world would become more easily available on the internet, unlike Nandu’s younger days when they queued up outside a record store. Nandu says that that may be the exact reason that the crowd for live rock music fell, because music was easily available elsewhere.
From 1999 to 2011, he played six days a week at the Muthoot Plaza in Thiruvananthapuram. But then Muthoot closed down, and no one else, not even the big players, were ready to pay well for live music. He had stints, and he still occasionally plays for private gatherings.
After the promising crowd he witnessed for the first Music for Peace concert in 2013 - when they had enough donations to contribute to the Regional Cancer Centre – the interest dwindled. There is still an appreciable crowd, filling the venue every year, but that is because the concerts are free, he says. If they were ticketed, there would not be so many, only a few dedicated lovers of rock and roll would be there, Nandu says. He still does the concert, not just for music, but as a celebration of a gathering of friends once a year. It also makes him happy that his daughter and extremely talented vocalist Cindy has begun joining him on stage for the past few years.
On Saturday, at 7 pm, Nandu will be joined by Sandy Silvester on the lead guitar, Gary Lobo on the keyboard, Shibu Samuel on the drums and Balu on the bass.