The age of music albums is over: Lesle Lewis

KOLKATA: Singer-composer Lesle Peter Lewis, more popularly known as Lezz, believes the era of artistes simply rendering songs from a book of lyrics propped below the microphone is over. “The young generation doesn’t want to simply listen to a good song. They want to witness energy on stage. That is what they call a performance,” Lezz told TOI on Saturday afternoon.
The musician, who began his career as a guitarist before moving to composing jingles, producing pop music and finally launching the band Colonial Cousins with Hariharan, feels the style of on-stage performance by Lata Mangeshkar and Usha Uthup that mesmerized the audience in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s was not enough to entertain the new generation of listeners. Perhaps, the only great from the golden era who could past muster with the current audience was Kishore Kumar, known for shows that were filled with verve and energy.
“Audiences now want a powerful visual element to accompany the songs. There’s a reason why youngsters are so crazy about Yo Yo Honey Singh. He offers more than just a song. He brings a complete act on to the stage,” said Lezz, who is launching Rockstars Academy in Mumbai to train aspiring singers in singing and vocal technique; dance and body language; recording technique; stage performance technique; approach to singing and performing on reality TV shows; fashion from a star perspective; fashion from a stage and performance perspective; and make up techniques.
At the end of a year-long course, Lezz and other experts in each field will train students to become Bollywood rockstars. He will compose a song for each individual, record it and release it on iTunes and Youtube. “The tagline of the academy is, ‘If you can be the best, let Lesle Lewis do the rest’. I need passionate students whom I can teach and from whom I can also pick up tips,” he said.
Lezz, who has had has created several hit compositions like ‘Paree Hoon Main’ for Sunita Rao; ‘Janam Samjha Karo’ for Asha Bhonsle and ‘Yaaron Dosti’ for KK, says the age of albums is over. “There is no financial space in making music. Everyone downloads free. We have to get used to the idea of music being distributed free. Once they become popular, the money is in on-stage performances,” he explained.
Apart from reinventing himself as a mentor for young aspirants, Lezz is planning a foray into Bollywood, composing music, writing lyrics and even singing for movies. Influenced greatly by The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, he was one of the pioneers in introducing Indian audiences to Rock and Pop music. But he has never been a part of Bollywood.
“I have been a part of the music scene since 1976 but have studiously avoided Bollywood because my kind of music was not appreciated back then. But of late, I have had a lot of people from the film fraternity express delight after hearing my works on Coke Studio, some of which were composed in the 1970s and 1980s, I feel it is time to explore the territory,” he remarked.
Incidentally, Lesle’s father P L Raj aka David Peter Lewis was a prolific choreographer in Hindi films and established fast-paced dancing and cabaret-style dance numbers into movies in the 1960s and 1970s. Among the films he choreographed for are ‘Junglee’, ‘Professor’, ‘Teesri Manzil’, ‘Sholay’ and ‘Don’.