Many years ago there was a fellow called Chris Hale - a year ahead of me at Woodstock School - who loved music. Western Classical. Hindusthani. Rock. You name it - he played it!
A number of years after we finished school Chris was back in India after having studied composition at the Berklee School of Music. He and a number of young men put together a rock band called Olio - and ended up joining college rock competitions - ending up with radio time when one of their tracks Surulurulu was chosen as part of the Great Indian Rock album that an Indian rock magazine ran in those days.
When I started work with the SHALOM project in Manipur in 1996 we had a wild dream to get Olio to Manipur and play for our rock hungry young people. The dream became a reality and the Olio band drove their band bus all the way from Lucknow and performed at a number of venues in Manipur. The response was tremendous. As an HIV prevention and care programme - we were hitting just the people who were our biggest target group - young people who were prone to or already into drugs...
Chris recently took some of the old video footage from 3 of the concerts that Olio played at on that tour and added it to their studio version of Surulurulu. A noticeably younger, thinner and hairier version of myself shows up in the end of this video wearing a bright yellow Brazil football jersey and giving a talk about reaching out to people with HIV....
Enjoy! Lets rock and roll!
A number of years after we finished school Chris was back in India after having studied composition at the Berklee School of Music. He and a number of young men put together a rock band called Olio - and ended up joining college rock competitions - ending up with radio time when one of their tracks Surulurulu was chosen as part of the Great Indian Rock album that an Indian rock magazine ran in those days.
When I started work with the SHALOM project in Manipur in 1996 we had a wild dream to get Olio to Manipur and play for our rock hungry young people. The dream became a reality and the Olio band drove their band bus all the way from Lucknow and performed at a number of venues in Manipur. The response was tremendous. As an HIV prevention and care programme - we were hitting just the people who were our biggest target group - young people who were prone to or already into drugs...
Chris recently took some of the old video footage from 3 of the concerts that Olio played at on that tour and added it to their studio version of Surulurulu. A noticeably younger, thinner and hairier version of myself shows up in the end of this video wearing a bright yellow Brazil football jersey and giving a talk about reaching out to people with HIV....
Enjoy! Lets rock and roll!
Thanks for sharing this Andi!
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