LONDON: If there is one song that will give Goldspot the success they crave and deserve, it's Friday. Siddhartha Khosla, the LA five-piece's Indian-American front man and principal songwriter, is trying to sum up his relationship with a tune he wrote seven years ago - and which, at the band's shows, is the track people know all the words to and cherish the most.
"Today is Friday, it is my day to do what I want," the first line goes, striking a chord with 9-5 wage slaves everywhere - and the audience noisily sing it back at Sid, as he's known to friends and acquaintances. One of the best new bands in America are building up an enthusiastic fan base. "I have a great relationship with this song," he says.
"I love it." That sounds straightforward enough. But then he adds: "Then, once a week, I want to throw up when I think about it. How can I compare it? It's not like a wife or a girlfriend." A pet dog, perhaps? "Right," Sid agrees. "And once a week, it takes a shit in my bed."
When he and his band signed to the British label Mercury in London last year, Sid was putting right a situation that began disastrously eight years ago in the same city. Then, newly out of college and - to the unconcealed horror of his parents - intent on a career in music, Sid and his friend Sanjay had moved to Britain from America and managed to secure an appointment with a leading A&R man. At the time, he was making what he describes as "Indian sounds meets rock". "I listen to it now and it sounds godawful. Back then, though, I thought I was it. We'd spent, like, an hour just getting our hair right.
We go in, sit down, the guy says, 'Okay, let's hear it.' And he turns it off after 30 seconds at the most, looks at me and says, 'This is rubbish.' We just started laughing." Sid grew up in New Jersey, but outside the western rock tradition, singing Hindu bhajans in the temple, and did not embrace the music of his parents' adopted homeland until he was at college.
"Every Saturday night [the evening before temple], my mother would hand me a book and say, 'Here are your lyrics for tomorrow.' The first words of English that I sang were probably at the end of high school. When I started [as a songwriter], I would sing with all these Hindi inflections in my voice, which seems so cheesy now. It took me a long time to work out how to bring those influences in successfully. For instance, the structure of Indian music is different: it often begins with choruses, and there can be long interludes between choruses and verses.
It's a very different approach - not so much in the melody or the instrumentation as in the arrangement." That difference can be discerned on Tally of the Yes Men, Goldspot's debut album. Tracks such as It's Getting Old, Rewind, The Guard and, yes, Friday at once accommodate the three- to four-minute rock-song format and subvert it from within. Vocal lines meander around the stave in a way that is, for the most part, quite alien to pop, but somehow always get back into line in time for the chorus. So, on the one hand, Goldspot have, quite fairly, been described as being influenced by the likes of REM, Radiohead and Coldplay.
On the other, though, they make music that fits in nowhere, that does nearly everything "right", but gets tiny details "wrong". The presence on some tracks of orchestration by the Indian film composer AR Rahman is the most tangible manifestation of the tradition Sid comes from. But for the most part, this is only hinted at, and really becomes apparent only after repeated listens. Sid flew to India for the Rahman recording sessions.
After several years of getting nowhere and batting away his parents' doubts, Sid says that this was the moment when it all came right. "I felt like I was in the temple again. There were 25 string players there, and I got to sing the parts to them. They all looked like my parents' friends - all these men with moustaches and big bellies and no shoes on, taking tea breaks every 30 minutes. It was the most inefficient recording process of all time, but the most gratifying."
Sid formed the band - named after an Indian soda drink - with the Egyptian-American drummer Ramy Antoun, from the ashes of a previous lineup. Their debut album was first released two years ago in America, on the indie label Union. It quickly caught on in their home state, California, where it was championed by the hugely influential DJ Nic Harcourt, and a track was featured on the television program The OC. But local success was threatening to become a comfort zone. American major labels wouldn't bite, beyond fine-dining the band and making vague promises of support. "I ate a lot of good food for two weeks," Sid laughs.
"But when it came to there being a potential business investment around me, people started getting nervous. I remember someone saying, 'Everyone loves the music, they think you're a great performer, but they don't know if an Indian lead singer is marketable.'" Word of mouth had attracted label attention, as it subsequently did with Mercury, and is doing now with the band's growing number of fans - for whom Sid's ethnicity is an important factor, not a stumbling block.
He is a confident, infectious performer on stage, but off it he is hesitant and shy, his attempts to describe his music as halting as his sudden, matter-of-fact snippets of back story are bordering on arrogant. So, when describing how his father twice flew to LA to attempt to dissuade him from pursuing music, he will say, "I went to an Ivy League school, I graduated one of the top of my class", but will later add: "I think that's part of why I'm insecure about my music, and about myself - because I've always had to prove myself. Now, I'm past that."
He pauses. "I think. I hope." He says that the next album is ready to roll, but accepts that this will have to wait. Eventually, he intends to return to the Hindu music of his youth. "At some point, I want to do a tour of India, just singing the old music." His sister, who has just graduated, "wants to be the first Indian senator in the USA". He doesn't go on to say "And I want to be the first Indian pop star there", but he doesn't really need to.
Beneath those shy-and-retiring good manners, the ambition lurks. As that mostly lovable old mutt of a song puts it: "It is my day to do what I want."
Tally of the Yes Men is out now on Mercury.
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