Exclusive | Thank you for supporting: RDB (Rhythm, Dhol, Bass)

RDB (Rhythm, Dhol, Bass) is a band formed by three British Indian brothers Surj, Manj and Kully, hailing from the small city of Bradford in the UK. In 2001, they launched their band RDB whose unique style of blending western genres with traditional Punjabi beats and vocals found listeners all across the world. RDB has collaborated with international acclaimed rappers like Snoop Dogg and Ludacris and have dominated the Bollywood music charts with hits like OM Mangalam( Kambakkht Ishq) Singh is King, Namaste London, De Dana Dan and others. RDB lost Kully one of its key members to cancer in 2012 but they carry on with the vigour and spirit and they very recently announced their collaboration with international artiste T-Pain.

Adgully got an opportunity to have an exclusive interview with Surj and Manj. Below are the edited excerpts.

Adgully (AG): From singing in the Gurudwara to singing in a concert as a pop star, how has the journey been?

RDB: It’s been good. We sang with our father in the Gurudwara and that gave us a great understanding and experience to stand before the crowd and sing. Performing in front of the community at our local gurdwara, playing the harmonium and the tabla  gave us a great understanding of our musical creativity and we mixed this with our passion for technology and started experimenting with sounds. We possessed the knowledge of the musical instruments and the harmonic sound through our childhood experience of singing in the Gurudwara and then living in UK gave us a broader perspective into understanding the different forms of music present. We started with deejaying and it allowed us to understand the pulse of the audience and also it gave us an insight into their likes and dislikes.  So therefore it was a natural progression from there onwards.

AG: Was a career in music always intended?

RDB: Initially no, for it was just a hobby, deejaying was the first and the foremost priority for all the three of us. We always loved music and we realized later that we were making money from it and people were enjoying our music. The best thing is to have a job which you enjoy doing and are also making money from it and we had found that choice in our hobby so therefore it was a right thing to follow.

AG: Do you think it was easier for you to establish yourself abroad than it would have been in India?

RDB: (Pauses and thinks for a moment) I don’t know if it was easier but we were born in England, we lived there…so it was natural for us to begin our career there. We wanted our music to be heard across the world and therefore we developed the RDB TV and this was in pre-youtube days, this allowed us to reach out a much larger audience with people listening to our music in India, UK, America, Russia- an entire gamut of global audience.

AG: Do you have plans to collaborate with Indian artists in the future?

RDB: We already have as we did in one of our projects called Yamla Pagla Deewana. We collaborated with Sonu Nigam who is amazing in his work. We are working on the individual tracks as well where we have artists from all across the world participating to create an international genre as such.

AG: Bhangra is an essential component, there is also an international element distinctively heard in your music. What kind of new flavours are you going to bring into your music? Will we ever hear the regular Bollywood tadka in your music?

RDB: We make all sorts of music and from day 1 we have Punjabi elements into our music because that is our roots and we shall never forget that. We keep on experimenting in terms of our genre. We are collaborating with international artists and creating music in different languages, currently there is a project which we are doing with a German pop star. We try as much as possible to create an international genre with our music so that we can be heard by as many people as possible.

AG: Any International Artist who you want to collaborate with?

RDB: If Michael Jackson was alive we would have loved to collaborate with him.

AG: You had a plan to open a studio in India. Is that happening soon?

RDB: We are still in the process of it we will let you know soon.

AG: What other Bollywood projects do you have at the moment? Do you enjoy working on Indian projects as much as the international ones?

RDB: We have around three four music projects that we are working on as well as several Punjabi projects. The way things work in Bollywood is very different for people come to us with a deal and they have specific sound in their mind to which we agree to cater to and then a deal is struck.

Yes we do enjoy both for Bollywood allows us to be closer to home while the international projects give us a wider audience.

AG: A message to your fans:

RDB: Thank you for supporting us and liking whatever we have been doing in our career. (By Rabab Rupawala [rabab(at)adgully.com]