Bring on the dhol

It's the musical equivalent of a car that goes from 0 to 100 km in five seconds. Before Punjabi dhol metal band Bloodywood had been booked for their debut European tour last year, the band had never played a single live gig. They had already amassed a sizeable fan following online, with their videos getting millions of views. But it's one thing to record a song and put it up on the Internet, and quite another to play in front of an audience of 15,000 people.

Yet, that's what they did at the end of a whirlwind tour that had a penultimate pit stop last August at Wacken Open Air in Germany, the world's biggest metal music festival. And a new documentary called Raj Against the Machine charts this journey that the band underwent, highlighting how an Indian act was able to transcend borders with their unique blend of Indian and western influences. It begins by showing how the outfit played a couple of gigs in Delhi and Bengaluru to prepare for the big stage. Vocalist Raoul Kerr tells us, "There were friends and family at the show in Delhi, and they were chanting the name of the band when we went up on stage. But none of this was recorded. Even then, when we finished our set at Dong Open Air [their first concert in Europe], the crowd started the same chant on their own. And for them to do that with no visual reference - doing it just the way it happened at Delhi - was massive. It was one of the many surprises and set the tone for the rest of the tour."

This chant became a sort of soundtrack for the next 20 days that the band was on the road, travelling across Germany, France, Russia and the UK. The documentary captures the emotional upheavals that the six members went through (there was even a moment when they invited a fan on stage because he had arranged with them to propose to his girlfriend there). But it also highlights the sort of universal appeal that music can have, with scenes of a Caucasian crowd singing along to Ari ari, the Punjabi song that Bloodywood does a cover of. Catch it to get a sense of the potential that Indian independent music can have, which, sadly, is largely untapped in our own market.

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