Why The Mavyns Are Mumbai’s Most Interesting New Band

Vivek and Varoon Nair of The Mavyns at their November 2009 gig at Blue Frog.

If you’re going to have a band, you might as well as give it a name people can remember, or at the very least, pronounce. But then The Mavyns, possibly the only band from our city we’ve been truly excited by in the past six months, are in the business of doing things differently. They’re the most retro-sounding group we’ve heard in years but they’re not a cover band. They have a sound seeped in the 1960s but none of the members are above 25. And that name? It’s a term used by author Malcolm Gladwell to describe “almost pathologically helpful” people in his book The Tipping Point.

The name has caused much confusion, starting from the quartet’s first performance which took place in 2008 at one of the open mic nights organised by Bandra bar Zenzi. Hostess Monica Dogra couldn’t quite make out their name, and consequently, the all-male band was introduced as The Maidens. They frequently get called The Maa-vins and even The Mayans. Hopefully, when the band takes the stage at the Blue Frog on Wednesday, April 7, the announcer will get the pronunciation—that’s the “May-vins”—right.

The gig is in celebration of the band’s first release, which they’re rather amusingly referring to as “an official bootleg”. The album, entitled The Mavyns Lick the Blue Frog, is a recording of a concert they played at the venue last November. We’re not quite sure how that makes it a bootleg but the Mavyns were clear about one thing from the onset: they were never going to do bother with things like record companies.

Capitalism is something they’re still getting their heads around, the band says. The album will be given out for free, which is fitting for a band named after a type of people who, as defined by Gladwell, believe in freely “sharing and trading what they know”. Gladwell however is not the band’s hero. That would be Jacque Fresco, founder of The Venus Project, a US-based organisation that proposes the adoption of a “resource-based system” instead of the current monetary system to solve some of the planet’s biggest problems, including poverty and war. “Competition need not drive human spirit,” says Vivek Nair, the keyboardist of the band who shares with his band mates—brother and bassist Varoon Nair, guitarist Pradeep Mathews, drummer Kristofor Mendonca—a love for both the music and the mood of the 1960s.

“Honestly, we’d be a lot happier if we had been born in the 1960s,” Vivek says. “Actually no…I’m a lot happier now because I can live the spirit of the ’60s. I have the choice of learning from the mistakes that were made in the ’60s that made it die out.” The Mavyns are doing their best to make the era live on through their songs, in which one can detect the two biggest influences of The Beatles and Jack White, the frontman of the popular garage rock bands The White Stripes and The Raconteurs.

Their sound is further defined by the members’ individual tastes. Mathews cited “Downtown Baby”, a head-bop inducing romp of a tune, as an example of the varied ingredients in The Mavyns’s music, which is described on their page on music website Reverbnation as “rock/folk rock/blues/soul/jazz” . “The song and the name were inspired by [Billy Joel's] ‘Uptown Girl’, [Ray Charles'] ‘I Got A Woman’ and [Frank Sinatra's] ‘The Lady Is A Tramp’,” Mathews says. The Mavyns are a pop group, he says, albeit one that takes the polish of the Beatles and roughs it up with punk aesthetics.

The D-I-Y philosophy makes them far from perfect as musicians. They’ve performed only a handful of gigs since they formed in 2007, and a couple of them have been marred by loose playing. But even when they fall slightly short on chops, The Mavyns get by on the sheer grooviness of their material. More importantly, they know when they’ve had a bad night.

Right now, The Mavyns are not as naive as a college band nor as cynical as an established act. Their sound is raw but flawed, infectious but improvised, inspired yet imaginative. They could be the most indie Indian band of them all.

You can pick up  a copy of The Mavyns Lick Blue Frog at the band’s gig tonight. You can also download the album for free from www.indiecision.com.

LocationBlue Frog
Mathuradas Mills Compound
Opposite Kamala Mills
Tulsi Pipe Road
Lower Parel

Phone4033 2300

Relevant DatesApril 7

Hours9.30pm

Ticketing & Price InfoRs300