SPB The God of Playback Singing...In Ten Episodes

Balu's first two numbers in Tamil were smash hits. It was not just the songs that were hits. The singer was as well. What people loved about Balu was how artfully he plaited his fulsome voice with what would become his trademark  musical gimmickry, thus far unheard of in the South. There were the detractors - some felt his singing was too "light" while others argued that his style was too overstated. Till then, the singing stalwarts in Tamil were, without exception, classically trained and sang right from their lower stomach. Seergazhi Govindarajan's booming voice emerged from his naabi and reached the listener, without a microphone or a radio, my cousin used to say. It was a back-handed compliment, to indicate that most yesteryear singers lacked finesse. I didn't say it, my cousin did. I will tell you this though. What Balu brought into vogue was his voice acting; a type of emotive, nuanced singing that had a tinge of Rafi, a whiff of Ghantasala and the timbre o...

  1966 was a turbulent year. The Vietnam War was raging unabated. American President Lyndon Johnson was struggling to disentangle himself and his country from the mess. Mao Zedong had launched the Cultural Revolution with a vow to preserve Chinese Communism. The self-declared republic of Rhodesia was heading for a showdown with other African nations. The year started tragically for India as Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri passed away in Tashkent, in erstwhile Soviet Union, while negotiating a peace pact with Pakistani President, Ayub Khan. In the field of music and entertainment, this was the era of Shankar-Jaikishan, MS Viswanathan, Ghantasala, Devarajan Master, Mohammad Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, TM Sounderarajan, and P Susheela. The Bombay triumvirate, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, and Raj Kapoor and their southern counterparts -  MGR, NTR, Rajkumar, and Prem Nazir - were firmly entrenched as the leading stars in their respective industries.  Internationally, The Beatles clai...

Let us start from where it all began. SP Balasubrahmanyam was born in Konetampet (present-day Tiruvallur district, Tamilnadu), a year before India’s independence, in an orthodox, Telugu brahmin family that hailed from Nellore in Andhra Pradesh. His father, SP Sambamurthy, was a Harikatha exponent and his mother, Sakunthalamma, looked after the bounteous family of three brothers and five sisters, that included SP Shailaja, who would go on to become a popular playback singer later in life. A TWIST OF FATE Growing up, in the early 60s, SPB had a typical Indian, sub-urban dream: to become an engineer, qualify to be a khaki-clad gazetted officer in his native Nellore, and ride around in an official Jeep eliciting salutes from his subordinates and the public. He was definitely artistically endowed. He sang and won prizes in music competitions, acted in school plays, and even formed a music band of his own, but had never taken his talents seriously. He enrolled into Jawaharlal Nehru Technical...

  Let us get one thing straight as an arrow, folks. Sripathi Panditaradhyula Balasubrahmanyam , aka SPB aka Balu is the God of playback singing. Well, you may shrug your shoulders and say, that is too much of a sweeping encomium, even for someone as accomplished as Balu. Bestowing godliness upon a musically untrained film singer just because he is the recent sentimental favorite, is not how it works, you may argue.  You may further  contend that India brims with eminent musical talent that can perform unfathomable feats. Artists that: hit perfect pitch effortlessly; sing chittaswarams at the speed of Usain Bolt; utter swerving sargams @ a thousand rpm without moving a facial nerve; and milk the essence of seventy-two melakarta ragas in an eight-minute kirtana. So, what is the big deal about this Balu guy, you may ask? My counter to you would be: Yup. I get all of that (ok, I don't). But  when it comes to film music, the most popular and the most egalitarian form of m...