Bertie at Princeton Club

We told you we'd be there and we were. Not just as — as the skies poured forth on Saturday, July 28 evening, it seemed half the city and, well, almost all of St. Xaviers College gathered at the Princeton Club off Anwar Shah Road to witness magic woven by a man in a beret named Betram da Silva. Supported by able bandmates in Pink Noise, Bertie — as everyone better knows him — evoked the now-forgotten art of storytelling through his immense repertoire of songs.
Whistles and cheers followed the very first note of the opening track — JJ Cale and Eric Clapton’s When This War Is Over. Dressed in a white shirt, jeans and the aforementioned beret, Bertie was all smiles from the word go, singing his heart out. You wouldn’t have known that he had a temperature running.
As promised, the ‘tone-down’ nature of this gig was apparent, with Bertie’s acoustic lines melting into the collective mesh of Amyt Dutta’s bluesy guitar tones, Gyan Singh’s well-balanced bottom-end bass playing and Jivraj ‘Jiver’ Singh’s sensitive percussive support. The chugging, acoustic piece Willie’s Song, about Bertie’s brother, also saw its debut at the concert.
The pub was packed, right from the edge of the seat where the young ones lined up to squat on the floor, all the way to the bar. And everyone was lapping up the music — note for note, word for word, syllable for syllable.
“That is encouraging, because I’d have understood this genre of music to be dead and gone in this city. Considering Calcutta was the place for folk and country rockers — basically, singer-songwriter music — that would have been really unfortunate. But I’m pleasantly surprised at the response,” says Bertie, over coffee in his drawing room a few days later. It’s easy to see that the present Dean of Arts at St. Xavier’s is glad getting back to music, writing songs, singing them. To quote Traffic, he’s no Stranger To Himself, 15-year-hiatus-and-all.
All along, however, his repertoire of originals blossomed to include songs like Tinpan Alley — a talking country tune that saw it’s reincarnation akin to rap/hip-hop at the Princeton concert with Pink Noise — and Tina Marie. But then came the long break.
“I shut myself out from 1988 because I realised that music needs full-time attention and that I wasn’t being able to give it all. Sometime in 2003 (smiles), I got interested in classical music, picked up a classical guitar. I also went ahead and bought myself a book on basic reading, for six-year-olds. It helped,” Bertie says with characteristic humour, “Though I realised that I was playing it by heart rather than actually sight-reading.” In a month’s time, short but fully structured classical pieces were born on that guitar. In 2006, the professor wrote a song — the first in about 18 years. “It was a horrible song, but at least it was one,” he laughs. Gradually, the music and the words flowed on a more regular basis — till it was “like the old times.” “I’m taking it one step at a time and I’ve taken two tiny steps till now. Let’s see where this is headed,” says Bertie.
Someplace Else will see Bertie’s debut with Pink Noise on August 18. However, given the propensity for penning pensive, personal songs where lyrics are of supreme importance, the natural progression for Bertie’s music, as he suggests, is the concert hall. “Gyan Manch and Kala Mandir are two venues which held concerts where an audience would sit and listen. You know, there’d be a first set, then an intermission where they can mess around (laughs) and come back for the second set. I want to revive that scene — posters, fliers, tickets to a concert — the creative gamut. I’m sure there are a lot of people music playing good, meaningful music in this city it’s quite possible. We have to start somewhere,” he states.
We’re all in with you, Sir.

Published in t2, The Telegraph; sometime in 2007