Diwali is finally here! The festival of lights, more like the festival of crackers and noise. This is that time of the year when thousands suddenly realize the importance of curbing air pollution……. for a week. These are the same ones smoking cigarettes and hookahs in the comfort of their air conditioned homes the rest of the year. Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely fine with it. These are also the same people who suddenly get patriotic on Independence Day and buy their way out of traffic violations the rest of the year. I’m kind of okay with that as well. What I don’t get, is when people use this behavior to justify lighting crackers. How ridiculous an argument can you have? Pollution on other days cannot re-validate pollution during Diwali. That’s like casting Uday Chopra in Dhoom 4 because he has already done the previous films. What is wrong is wrong, irrespective of what has happened already. At least these people are trying to lessen pollution on that day. What is wrong with that? Even Narendra Modi pretends to like L K Advani for a day on the latter’s birthday. Give the man some credit! Pollution isn’t the only thing wrong with our celebrations. Animals are very sensitive to sound. So many cats and dogs cannot bear the cacophony of crackers. Birds fear for their life while flying. Don’t light fireworks for them, if not anything else.

But we’re here to talk about AKING. I met them at Waves, which happened to be the venue of the first gig of their latest international tour. Not only that, Waves managed to get them to judge their rock band competition, Searock finals too. Getting a well-established band to judge an event and begin an international tour from your college festival is one achievement not many colleges can brag about. Shashwat Verma, their pronites head, seems to have done an amazing job this year. Okay so let me give you a brief intro to the band, before we talk about the interview. AKING is a South African melodic rock band based in Bellville, a suburb of Cape Town. Its 4 members are:-

                                   Laudo Liebenberg – vocals, rhythm guitar (2007–present).

Hennie van Halen – bass guitar (2007–present)

                                       Jaco “Snakehead” Venter – drums (2007–present)

                              Andrew Davenport – guitar (2010–present)

I’m not going to write the interview in a Q and A format because that becomes boring and I won’t really get a chance to add my thoughts. My first question obviously had to be how the band was formed and why they decided to name it AKING (originally aKING). It turns out they have been friends since high school. They were bored and needed to do something. They all lived a couple of blocks from the JAM room where they played. It was more of a garage than a JAM room, but it worked. They soon made it a regular thing. Jaco was initially part of another band. He came over for a few jamming sessions and it just seemed to work. So he permanently joined AKING. Andrew replaced Hunter Kennedy on guitar roughly 3 years since the band’s inception. While typing this article I realised I never asked why. Damn! Silly me. AKING, if you’re reading this, please let us know why that happened. You can reach me on my facebook page, The Campus Box, if you’d like (that was a pretty smooth way of promoting the blog, in the blog :p). As far as the name is concerned, there were way too many bands with the prefix “The”. No matter what name they thought of, they’d find some band somewhere in the world using it. Since Elvis Presley was already The King, they decided to go with A KING.

They got their first album, Dutch Courage, in 2008. They were broke at the time and had got a friend to do the recording of it for them. They made the song in a garage, but there was no looking back since. Their single, Against All Odds, really connected with people all around the world. You needed to be at this concert to see the crowd go crazy to it. They make songs that address questions they themselves ask. Honesty, according to them, is key to the music you make. If you are very honest about your emotions while composing, the music will turn out to be beautiful. They also added how they like to keep their songs a little vague. People then come up with interpretations they had never even thought of, but are willing to accept :p

That’s me with the band

Some of their favourite bands are Queens of the Stone Age, Phoenix, Daft Punk and Black Sabbath. Their advice for upcoming bands is to just work extremely hard on your music and play. It is always a better choice to choose a person who you like than someone who may be a little better at playing his instrument. This is because at the end of the day you’ll have to live like family. When you’re spending your maximum waking time with the band, it better have people you enjoy playing with. Take inspiration from others but ultimately strive to find your own sound. That is what will make you stand out from the crowd.

Here’s what they had to say about this blog:

Rohan Parekh

If you liked this article and want to stay updated with our latest posts, like The Campus Box on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram.