Kula Shaker

In April 1993, as Suede release their self-titled album, throwing open the doors to the britpop era, on the other side of the world an upper-class London lad named Crispian Mills is steeping himself in Indian culture and spirituality: in ways more or less direct, these two concurrent events will prove crucial to the fortunes of the band soon to take the name Kula Shaker.

Exactly four years later, in April 1997, during an extensive tour of the United States, Crispian Mills makes contradictory statements to the New Musical Express regarding the presence of swastikas (a symbol, it's worth remembering, rooted in that very same Indian culture) on stage during the band's shows. The remarks are likely misread, and the fair-haired English frontman's apologies follow soon after — too late, regardless. Within the span of four years, the rise and fall of one of the decade's finest bands is complete. It matters little that the London outfit is still capable of writing great songs: the public and press have already turned their gaze elsewhere.

In the meantime, however, Mills and his bandmates — Alonza Bevan on bass, Paul Winter-Hart on drums and Jay Darlington on keyboards — had already managed to release their masterpiece. "K" comes out on 16 September 1996 and breaks two records, becoming the best-selling debut in its first week and, more bizarrely still, sending a single performed entirely in Sanskrit, "Govinda", into the British top 10 for the first time. The song captures perfectly the search for a precarious balance between the mysticism spiritually guiding the quartet and its translation into the prevailing britpop conventions of the mid-Nineties — a search that finds one of its absolute high points in the song's soaring chorus.

Released on Columbia, which signed the band after catching them live at a contest for emerging acts, "K" distills from its very cover art, drawn by Dave Gibbons, the inherent blend of sacred elements and pop instincts contained within the record. While two Krishna figures hold court at the centre, all around them blooms a gallery of far more earthly portraits, real or invented, united by a single initial: the letter "K", naturally. King Kong, J.F. Kennedy, a couple of knights, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Martin Luther King, Karl Marx, Boris Karloff and so on, jostling side by side and on top of one another.

But if "K" sold 850,000 copies in the UK, and at least as many across the rest of the world, it's thanks to the sheer force of the singles that preceded its release in the preceding months. Starting with "Grateful When You're Dead": the death of Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead, the year before, becomes a fitting pretext for staging a loose tribute, one that ranges from the surging funk-rock of its first half to the measured psychedelia of its second (present, in truth, only in the album version, retitled "Jerry Was There" and enriched with Floydian echoes).

The revelation arrives with “Tattva”, which peaked at number 4. Steeped in spirituality and psychedelia, carried by a groove that's sly yet almost languid, the track perfectly embodies the London band's musical manifesto, marrying the erudite, “learned” side with the more catchy, pop-rock one. Sixties English music is reread through Nineties sensibilities, forging a brand new, thoroughly extroverted taste bold enough to also rest here on essentially funk metrics.

“Hey Dude” went to number 2, thanks to an assaulting cadence built entirely on guitar syncopation and wah wah. Mills' entrance is epochal, his nasal timbre constantly shifting in expressiveness, from aggression to whisper, while the words slide through an euphoric prosodic see-saw.

The lyrics paint a picture of modern life and its neuroses, particularly the symbols of power that have come to sum it up (money, cars, jewellery and so on), culminating in the line “On a Friday night I saw everyone looking for a bit of honey, to ease the pain”. Kula Shaker's honey isn't necessarily drugs, as many hastily assumed at the time — it seems instead to represent the very pursuit of fun, an obligation that becomes part of the depersonalising anxiety it's supposed to cure. It's no coincidence that in that same verse Mills, or rather his alter ego, describes people strolling through the city as a series of photos for gravestones.

Even though everyone is too busy dancing to it, overpowered by the rhythm section's torrential physicality, this is one of the most introspective songs of the decade.

Seven of the thirteen tracks were produced by John Leckie, one of the most important producers in rock history (Be-Bop Deluxe, Xtc, Felt, Fall, Stone Roses, Elastica and Radiohead, just to name a few). Leckie is probably the one who pushed the band toward a meticulously detailed sonic fresco, an approach that wasn't unusual in the golden age of Britpop, but wasn't a given for a band with such a strong live-take attitude (it's no coincidence that their shows are perhaps the most powerful and best-played of the entire movement).

“K” is a technicolor explosion, full of the most unusual sounds to be unearthed. The instrumental “Sleeping Jiva” rests on the sarod of Indian master Wajahat Khan. Darlington's Mellotron colours “Tattva” (mimicking both flutes and strings) and drenches the piano-led “Magic Theatre” in melancholy, as it also seems to do with the closing “Hollow Man”, only to see it morph first into an acoustic vignette and then into an electric jam. Even when Britpop conventions briefly take over, as in “Start All Over”, the arrangement still manages to veer off course, specifically with vaguely baroque horn parts.

While the electric organ propels the garage-rock convulsions of “303”, almost a foretaste of Hives, the hammering piano of “Knight On The Town” pierces through a luminous rock'n'roll, perhaps a hint aimed at Stone Roses' failed second album.

Indicative of the album's cross-pollinating ambition is “Temple Of Everlasting Light”, which blends Andalusian-flavoured acoustic textures, raga influences, carpets of tabla and distorted electric solos.

A transcultural approach that many reviews highlighted at the time, from Nme, which described them as “Verve in ethno-berserk mode”, to Q, which underlined the bluesy nature of many riffs (evident, though tempered by the rest of the framework, which sits rather far from those territories). Not all the press was enthusiastic, though — Melody Maker, for instance, published a deranged article penned by Neil Kulkarni, mixing insults with cryptically racist jibes.

Nowadays, many years on from the initial enthusiasm, Kula Shaker boast an audience that still happily follows them live and enjoy the love of any self-respecting Britpop fan, but the critics only remember them sporadically, dusting them off as a bizarre period postcard during the odd Nineties retrospective.

And yet “K” was much more than that. Scan through the last twenty years of rock music and you'll notice there isn't a single album — aside from the band's own later ones — that could be said to resemble it.

The symbolism was ostentatious, sure, but never in bad faith. Mills would go back to India and remains in close contact with local musicians and religious figures to this day, proving it wasn't a passing seasonal fling. Given that the production is beyond reproach and the quality of the arrangements just as much so, might the almost adolescent enthusiasm underlying this volcano of harmonies perhaps be an issue for some?

That would be a shame, because if Nme's journalists in 2016 don't get it, Nme's journalists in 1996 had, by contrast, understood everything: “Massive, vertical grooves of multidimensional power pop. As big as the horizon itself. Incredibly self-assured, musically gifted, gloriously hedonistic”.

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10/09/2016