The Blackbirds at Mood Indigo Finals!
Mumbai, December
                  24,2003
Dhruv

                  To sum up Mood I: it was like your biggest dream and your worst
                  nightmare happening at the same time. Like
                  finding a bug in your honey-fried noodles with ice cream. 
                  
                  What is the biggest kick? Sex? Formula 1? Money? I believe it's playing music to a 75,000. Wembley. And
                  the like. And to experience that at Mood I, if even with 1/10th the number of people was one hellofa kick.

                  



Anyway, cutting straight to what
                  happenned at the finals. It was always going to be hard in the finals. But we
                  hoped to do much better than we eventually did. Now the Blackbirds have played a 100 gigs in it's one year
                  of existence: most of them as a two member band with a drum machine, but nonetheless. For us to screw up a
                  song takes a lot of things to go wrong. Unfortunately for us, many of those things happened that night at
                  the Open Air Theatre. 
                  
                  My "rock star" feeling went down several notches the
                  minute I walked on to stage and heard the BC/MC chant
                  go up, heard the "Backstreet Boy" gaali and the
                  various (dis)respects paid to members of my family. This, BEFORE we
                  even played a chord. Our first tragedy though was when
                  Vinit got his acoustic's tuning knobs  stuck
                  in my bass strap as we were helping each other plug
                  in. The guitar DID go off tune, think the E string dropped a step or four. 

We started with "Rain": the harmonies were off initially, but were brought under control
                  as the song progressed, then we covered Back in the USSR and did our first original "I Will". 
Now Varun plays this song
                  with the brushes...and volumes, inspite of sound check were too low for anyone to hear the snare. What made it worse was that
                  we couldn't hear it either on our monitors.
The rest of the song was an exercise in damage control. Enough said. Thereafter,
                  we did My Generation by the WHo and wound up thing's with Bhupal's inspired soloing on another original called That Day. 

We
                  walked off the stage and took one last look at the 8000 crowd: it had all happened too fast. We needed more time, we needed
                  a different kind of crowd...

To
                  end, it would be fair to say that Mood I finals was not the best gig we played. It is unfortunate that it happened at what
                  is our biggest setting to date and for a long time to come.
We did what we came to do. And that was that. There were several
                  lessons for us to learn: several. And we learnt them.