Indian Rock - 1980s and 1990s

1980s and 1990s

While the orientalist trend of the 60s and 70s was by the 80s and 90s largely over, India itself continued to produce bands in various styles of rock music, from soft rock and roll and pop rock, to hard rock and metal. In the early 1980s, however, rock was largely overshadowed by disco, which dominated Indian pop music up until the mid-1980s.

With the arrival of MTV, tastes rapidly changed, encouraging bands to harden their style and focus more on underground styles such as death metal, alternative metal, and progressive rock. The 1990s saw the rise of a much larger following of various harder styles for this reason. Bands that had formed in the 80s, such as Rock Machine (who would later be known as Indus Creed) - (including Mahesh Tinnaikar, Uday Benegal, etc.)...altered their style with the influx of newer techniques and influences from the west. Notable suburban metal-blues bands with 60's and 70's metal influences included IIT Powaii based Axecalibre, fronted by Oliver Pinto, Prashant Nair and covered flamboyant guitar-based blues and hardcore metal including ballads. Contemporaries of the time were Easy Meat from Pune and Bands such as Holocaust, Morgue, Dorian Platonic from Assam, Grassroots Revival, Postmark, The Cannibals, Phoenix,Phynyx and Drixian Empire/Dark Crusader from Manipur. Others formed in the 90s with harder styles influenced by the growing split between popular rock, such as Britpop, alternative styles, such as punk, and metal styles, such as thrash. The Indian sub-genre of fusion, which encourages a similar blend of ancient Indian musical traditions with rock music to raga rock, was also carried forward, and is perhaps the most unusual Indian style of rock. It was during this time that Palash Sen's Euphoria surfaced in the Indian scene as a straight ahead English rock band. The band later started writing in Hindi, and gave birth to what is now known as "Hind Rock". Euphoria went on to became India's most popular, successful and commercially accepted Independent act.