“We’ve got all the characters that really help us maintain that personae as a full group, so with the band you have The Skipper, who’s Andy, the leader of ‘the bad guys ’ he’s the leader of this big gang of thugs, which is all the musicians, and so we have The Jewel Thief and The Railway Mogul and The Kung-Fu Dentist – and so he’s in charge of them!” she gushes. How the hell, I ask, do they keep things so organised? The secret, Singh tells me, is everyone knowing his or her place in the band. Hell, these cats are so much more than that – they put on a full-blown stage production, complete with intensely intricate orchestrations, secret agents, plot twists and bandit masks. One aspect of The Bombay Royale one may notice right off the bat – besides the fact that there are 11 of them onstage – is that they don’t just play music.

“I started singing and we found Shourov later and it all came together and – voila! – here we are!” So there I was in this tiny room with all these white guys, and they were doing all these songs from my childhood, like I grew up with all this stuff!” Singh laughs loudly at the recollection. “I went down and saw these guys, there were in a tiny studio in the Hope Street Warehouse in Brunswick where we did our initial rehearsals. “He sat down and scored some great cover tunes from the ‘60s era, and got some great people together – it started as an instrumental thing, but when it was coming together, they put the feelers out for a singer, and then my name came up, cause I’ve been performing with my dad since I was really young. “’s always had a great interest in that style of music,” Singh reveals. The Bombay Royale was founded by Andy Williamson, a saxophonist and Bollywood aficionado who was driven by the fact that no one in Melbourne seemed to be performing that type of music live. “People say, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to do the Bollywood dance,’” Singh laughs, “but it’s very easy! You put your hands in the air and pretend you’re screwing in a light bulb! That’s what it’s about!” But first, we must learn how to do the Bollywood dance. Parvyn Singh, one of the two singers in this bombastic Bollywood/surf/psychedelic band, was on hand recently to speak with us about the band, the album and the awe-inspiring madness of Bollywood films in general. Their debut album, You Me Bullets Love, was released just last month – and it is a corker. The Bombay Royale had first set down to do strictly covers from the gilded ‘60s era of Bollywood, but soon evolved into writing their own material. Enter The Bombay Royale, a local 11-piece musical powerhouse who have taken the themes and soundtracks from these films and have infused them with all the colour, production and energy one would expect from a four-plus hour Bollywood movie.

Bombay royale band