Wicked Diaries: Mumbai

 As a note up top, I do have editions of these for the show's stops in Bahrain and Dubai, but given the current geopolitical situation, it seems in bad taste to publish them at the moment. They'll stay in the drafts for now.

I don't really know what's worse. Being the kind of white guy that comes to India for the first time and totally finds themselves in the way that you imagine, or not having any kind of self-actualisation. I fear that I'm somewhere in the middle, and neither result is great. For the three weeks I spent in Mumbai, I certainly, saw, experienced, and learned a lot in a very short amount of time, lots of which I'm likely to still unpack over the weeks to come after I get home, but seeing this city through the lens of being there for work primarily meant that the whole experience was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I'm not a big fan of real tourist mainstays; I find that whenever I've been to a landmark major enough to be an essential visit, a lot of the time is spent dealing with people hassling you as opposed to experiencing the place itself. As a result, I really like to take a place in just by being a pedestrian, and Mumbai proved excellent for that. On the other hand, that pedestrianism being truncated every mid afternoon in order for us to get to work, meant that there was a whole side of the daily cycle that we rarely saw. The number of restaurants and bars and experiences that would have probably led to that annoying-gap-year-student-epiphany that were never visited are certainly a shame when you've flown this far and there's this much to do.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't feel changed. Not in any large fundamental way. There are a lot of wild things I saw, and there is a lot on my mind that I want to talk about, both in relation to the show, but also to my personal experiences in India. And there is definitely something that I've had a bigger realisation about than most other areas of my life, and that's what I wear.

Drip

I've been known to not really have much of a dress sense. I currently have on some three-quarter length beige cargo shorts (I'm sure you know the ones) that are at the absolute end of their lives. Not just literally (although they have plenty of small tears and frays in them) but also as a mainstay in the wardrobe. On my feet I have a pair of Asics Gel Kayano-30s that, while amazing shoes, I have run 250 miles in and then worn everyday since maxing out my running distance in them. Amazing shoes, but absolutely knackered. I think it's time for a change. But what does that say about me already? Surely, if everything you wear is already a kind of fashion statement, then what am I currently saying about myself? What could I be saying differently now that I'm older?

The inciting incident for this was a trip to a tailor that had been recommended to us by someone we met back in Riyadh. They said that they get all their suits made here, and that we absolutely had to pay them a visit. Sure enough, half of the orchestra ended up getting suits tailored by him. I was on the market for a suit and a few shirts. This process was the first time I'd tried on clothes that were actually made to fit me, and that really felt like a watershed moment. This suit made me feel distinguished, powerful in a way that the previous suits I'd worn felt much more like a chore and a formality. That feeling of confidence and deliberateness could probably be achieved with my whole wardrobe if I was able to distil what I already like about the clothes I wear, and what I should be looking for when replacing the stuff that is finally giving up the ghost.

The upshot of this is I've taken a step back at the kind of clothes I gravitate to in everyday life, and I'm trying to figure out what the statement is with it. It's not possible to not make a statement with your choices of clothing, so I figured now is a good a time as ever to actually understand what I've been saying until now, and what I can do to be more deliberate in case I'm saying something I don't want to.

I sat down with my journal, and started penning The Big Drip Manifesto. I itemised every kind of clothing item, and listed what I like and dislike about all of them. I'll save the specifics for when I post the manifesto itself at some point.

Just writing down my preferences and dislikes like this made something clear to me that I had never really considered - I did already have a style. I presumed that trying to abstain from playing the game would mean that I didn't have to worry so much about it, but in reality that has probably been letting me down.

So where did that leave me? Did I throw out all my clothes and go on a shopping trip with the girls? No. But I was in India, and that did give me a chance to poke around and see what spoke to me. Now I had this handy manifesto of what I liked and what I wanted to say, I was able to use that as a guide to seeing past the chaos of the bustling markets, and hone in on what I felt would actually suit me. That wasn't necessarily to limit my choices either, but more to see what kind of things dovetail onto the aesthetic I'm already trying to cultivate, and then elevate it a bit. I got a couple of beautiful shirts from a local shop (handily called, "the shop") that just about adhere to my clean, minimal, breathable shirt style guide, but have an additional fun style pop on them. One of them is a white shirt with blue floral/wildlife patterns, and the other is a kind of cream shirt with fun black markings all over it that look like small birds' footprints. I also got some house pants because I've wanted some forever. I wore the cream shirt and the house pants to the end-of-tour drinks and felt excellent.

The only other fun bit of fashion I acquired (for myself) is a 500 rupee watch from a stall at a market in Colaba Causeway. It's all plastic, it costs about £4, but it's a dark green and has Urdu numbers on the watch face. My section of the manifesto about watches specified that I much prefer an analogue watch face to digital, and I don't like it to be too ostentatious; I've never spent more than £30 for a watch. I also really like that this is a wearable, functional souvenir. It blends in with a lot of the kind of stuff I wear, and a lot of the stuff I want to wear.

Food

Man, the food was good. I kept a note of all the amazing food I ate, but some of the greatest hits are:

• Vada Pav (specifically from Aram, iykyk)

• Medu Vada. I developed a serious addiction to these. I'm yet to get my fix since coming back to the UK, I may have to take matters into my own hands and learn how to make them

• Freshly made Masala Dosa for breakfast every morning had me feeling like a king.

In general, food in India was fantastic. I've been vegan for a minute now, and one of my concerns was there being an abundance of ghee in everything. Luckily, most spots we went to had options (multiple!) and none of it felt like a compromise or an imitation of something else. It was all fresh, fun and flavourful. I'm sure I did inadvertently eat a ton of stuff with ghee in it, but I'm not losing sleep over that. There's only so much you can move the needle in some places without being culturally insensitive.

I'd heard a lot about the dreaded Delhi Belly before going out there, and my experience was no exception. About a week and a half into the trip, I was finally struck down with it, and it took longer to shake than I care to admit. The experience of having crippling diarrhoea while the theatre bathroom plays a one-minute loop of Defying Gravity literally all day is something Black Mirror-esque.

Cool Stuff I Saw

Kanheri Caves

The Kanheri Caves are a huge Buddhist cave network in the hills of the Sanjay Ghandi national park. It takes up a huge amount of territory in the northern part of Mumbai, it's shockingly expansive. You have to take a golf kart 8km from the park entrance, passing through wild leopard territory while you do so. Upon arrival, you're greeted by multiple generations of monkeys, all ready to rush you if they see you opening your bag to get anything.

The caves themselves are pretty remarkable. Dug into the hills, it's a network of what used to be living quarters, temples and dining halls 2,000 years ago. It's very well preserved, and the caves also provide a nice respite from what is usually blistering heat on the exposed hillside. There are a couple of large domed caves that have an eery, almost alien kind of reverberation in them, and the security guards are always more than happy to sing to you to demonstrate it (for a tip, naturally). The views from the top of the hill are spectacular, with the bustling, noisy ridiculousness of the city stretching out one way, and nothing but forest-covered hills going the other.

Chess Promenade, Title Waves

I'm a bit of a chess dork, so when I heard that there was a stretch of promenade on the beach where people regularly hang out and get games in, I knew I had to check it out. It was just my luck then, that when I turned up, I found a host of deserted chess tables. There were two guys loitering at one of them, but when I asked them if they might fancy a game of chess, they looked at me like I'd just asked them to rob a bank.

Nevertheless, I had another place on my hitlist for this part of town, and I was not to be deterred by my lack of chess success. I considered getting an Uber, but I decided I was going to walk it, and that was a great choice. I ended up getting delightfully lost in the backstreets of Bandra, where I stumbled upon the aforementioned shop where I bought those shirts. Men with wooden carts loaded with vegetables also did the rounds in this neighbourhood. The whole thing felt nicely off-the-beaten-track, which felt like a nice contrast to the rest of the city, the pace of which feels like a fiction to those who haven't been.

My target was Title Waves, a bookshop that had come recommended. On the flight over I'd read The English Teacher, an Indian novel that I found in Oxfam and bought for £1. This felt like a good a time as any to read it, and it was... fine. I wanted to see more of what Indian authors had to offer, and this shop didn't disappoint, with a great selection of books that are only published and distributed in this part of the world. The books I picked up were:

• The Miniaturist

• She and Hers

• Acts of God

• Real Time

  
  

  At time of writing, I've only read The Miniaturist & She and Hers. I want want to make more time for the remainder, especially as I have a lot of travelling to do this summer.

  
  

National Museum of Modern Art

This museum was dope. The atmosphere, the curation, the really exciting and different paintings, I had a wonderful hour or so taking this all in. I feel like it requires mentioning because this wasn't something that came up as a thing to check out, but I really implore people with any enjoyment of art galleries to give this a go if you're in the area.

Miscellaneous Mumbai

There were so many incidental amazing things, that I'll just rattle them off here:

• A huge open-air fruit market. We bought a crate of mangoes and ate them all in the hotel lobby, they were unreal.

• There was a square where everyone played cricket, 35 degree weather be damned. Our keyboard player ended up getting roped into it, and did at the very least hit a ball. A wonderful place to spend your time if you're ambling.

• Colaba Causeway is ridiculous, and I loved it. There was one guy on a street corner who approached me every time I was there telling me he could make me a suit in 6 hours. It kind of sums it all up really.

• Near by the Causeway, the Cacao Mill is a beautiful chocolate/coffee shop. Our assistant musical director was a real coffee expert, so to find him in there by chance was an immediate mark of quality.

• I got to briefly hang out with Jack Gardener, Rob Araujo and Porter Bliquez, who were playing in the same theatre as us on the same night, and that was a very special moment. Jack is a real force in the guitar space, and to be able to chat to him as someone who could be called a peer if you squint hard enough felt very vindicating.

  
  
  
  

  Karjat

After the show had ended, I spent a few days in Karjat, a small village a couple of hours south of Mumbai, with some family who'd come out to see the show and were then going on their own travels. There's not much here, but it's worth remarking on because it was such a different environment from Mumbai, or anywhere else I'd been on the tour (or in the UK for that matter). I'd never seen cashew trees before, and the smell is so distinctive that I can remember it now. The wildlife, the nature and the complete quiet that fell on the house when the sun went down was amazing, and such an antidote to the previous few weeks of total chaos. We saw another set of caves carved into the hills, wandered down the local roads, and generally recharged before heading home. I read a lot of One Piece during this stay.

The Mountain

While I was in Mumbai, I was listening to a ton of the new Gorillaz album, The Mountain. The two founding members of the band wrote this album after spending time in India following the loss of both their fathers in a short window of time. This album is excellent. Gorillaz fans like myself love it, and Indian musicians and fans seem to love it, which is extremely high praise when you go to enter another musical and cultural space, especially one so rich with tradition and history as India. If Oklou's choke enough was the defining album of my time in Saudi, this was the defining album of my time in India. But it hit at something that I was trying to articulate at the very start of this post. Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn came to a totally alien and new place, and were inspired. They made art. Why wasn't I able to do that? Not long ago, had I gone to a place as special as this, I would have come back with a book full of lyrics. And yet, all the songwriting I got done was a result of me having to sit down and be deliberate about it. I so desperately wanted to be the kind of western musician who goes to India and has their entire world-view flipped around and is compelled to pick the pen up every time they're not having a new epiphany somewhere. But that just wasn't my reality. Maybe it was the sheer amount of work that this show is on a day-to-day basis. Maybe I was having enough fun and being inspired enough just being there. But I think the answer is probably more complicated than that.

I'm under no illusion about what my creative output is to me - it's a hobby. And I'm at peace with that, it's liberating. Not every aspect of being a professional musician needs to be professional. Some stuff can be for just for you, and writing/releasing music has very firmly been for me. This isn't what I envisioned when I got into the game, but it's where I'm settling for now. Obviously when I was a kid starting in music, my grand ambition wasn't to be a pit player; that grew out of getting more involved with the instrument and having a realistic look at what I had to offer the industry. Nevertheless, it's not inherently romantic in the way being an artist is. I often describe pit work as the musical equivalent of being a line cook. It's repetitive, it's intense, the hours are pretty long (and anti-social), but there's a satisfaction in the rhythm and the repetition and the lifestyle that really clicks for some people, and I am definitely one of those people. But I still need to square the circle of wanting to make the most of my creative impulse, despite there being less and less chance of the stuff I make being heard in the way that I want to. Subconsciously, I think the needle is moving. I'm more likely to spend time on the beach than I am working on a logic session. I'm more likely to read a book or listen to an album than make art of my own to the same degree I did. I think this is fine and healthy, but I miss the regularity that the songwriting bug used to bite. I miss the ambition (or delusion) that if I poured enough of my time into my own music, that some meritocratic force would propel me to stardom. Of course, that's not how this works. And that's OK, I still want to make, produce and distribute art. I never want to compromise on the art I make, and I never want to be beholden to the market in any way. This means that my art will be mine, for better and for worse. I'll still make it, but just with less regularity (and maybe fervour) than I perhaps did once upon a time. I wish I could have had the experience that Jamie and Damon had in this country, but I had an equally valid and rewarding one.

Things are still going great though, objectively. I've just completed a tour of my favourite musical (and am looking at going back out), and I have a huge summer coming up. I think I'm in a great place as a player right now, and I know where I want to make improvements, which is half the fight. I'm looking forward to what this experience and this credit does for my career, but I'm also open to it not doing anything, and I get to go back to chilling by the beach, working on notation, walking my dog and hopefully making some art.

Everything you've heard about Mumbai is true. Go if you get the chance.