The Black Beats: the band who kickstarted India’s psychedelic revolution
Psychedelic rock music would be virtually unrecognisable without the prolific influence of Indian music. Although the genre is often credited to the likes of Cream, The Byrds, and Jimi Hendrix, among various other Western rockers, all of those artists borrowed and appropriated styles of traditional Indian music and instrumentation. It is fairly depressing, therefore, that there are a plethora of incredible Indian psych bands that have been lost to the obscurity of time.
Among those groups are the incredibly talented yet disappointingly short-lived Black Beats. Not to be confused with the 1950s Ghanaian jazz group of the same name, India’s Black Beats only recorded a handful of tracks during their short tenure. Hailing from Ahmedabad, in the west of the country, the only record of the group arises from the strange case of the Simla Beat Contest.
The Simla Beat Contest first began in the late 1960s, organised by the India Tobacco Company, the country’s oldest tobacco firm. It was founded in 1910 as a British-owned company with India under colonial rule. In an effort to shake off their problematic past and endear the company towards a younger audience, ITC were keen to link themselves to rock music and the blossoming music scene of India.
First held in Bombay in 1968, the competition grew exponentially, attracting budding young musicians from across the country. By 1970, the music industry had taken note of the competition, with a subsidiary of EMI beginning to release compilation albums of the contest’s top tracks. Although these compilations only lasted two years, they contain some fantastically obscure garage rock and early psych tracks.
On Simla Beat 71, the compilation arising from the tobacco company’s 1971 competition, the stand-out track is undoubtedly The Black Beat’s ‘The Mod Trade’. Although it is unclear whether the title refers to the mod subculture which was running riot over in England at the time, the sounds of the track would certainly endear themselves towards the smart young modernists of London.
An entirely instrumental track, ‘The Mod Trade’ would not seem entirely out of place within the ‘Summer of Love’ hippie scene of America, sounding somewhat akin to the likes of The Doors or maybe even Hendrix. The guitar stylings of the group is undoubtedly the highlight of the song, though the relentless drumming – reminiscent of Iron Butterfly’s ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ – brings the song an almost tribal atmosphere.
The back cover of the Simla Beat 71 album states, “Pop music’s really leapt bounds from those way back days of Bill Hailey and His Comets”, which acts as a good synopsis of Black Beat’s sound. Radical, innovative, and original, it is a crying shame that the Ahmedabad group never released a full-length album.
