Various – ‘A Strange Light From the East’ (Cherry Red)
I’ve looked at the influence of Eastern music before, though in the classical, jazz and avant‑garde arena, where musicians approached the tradition with a sense of study and apprenticeship. This new set comes from a very different corner.
It rummages through the dustbins of pop, rock and novelty, and there’s something satisfying about being here. These musicians weren’t trying to master ragas or talas, or, please God, they weren’t trying to. They were trying to change the air around their songs. They reached for Indian sounds because they wanted a new colour, a new mood, a way of making a familiar track feel slightly altered. More plainly, many simply wanted to create music for people taking drugs.
Underneath all of that sits the quiet truth that Indian and Eastern influence gave them something else too. It gave them a badge. A way of signalling seriousness at a moment when psychedelic music was being written off as lightweight. A way of stepping out of trouble. A way of saying: this isn’t just pop, this is connected to something older, deeper and wiser. It’s remarkable how many musicians used that badge as a kind of cultural shield, and how thin the borrowing often was. A sitar line here. A drone there. A modal loop that hints at cyclical structure without ever committing to it. You listen to some of these tracks and think: is that it? Is that all Eastern music had to offer? It leaves a slightly bitter taste because it reduces a vast tradition to a chiming garnish.
The picture becomes clearer once you start looking at the musicians themselves. Big Jim Sullivan is the easiest place to begin, partly because he was everywhere, and partly because he never treated the sitar as a passing fancy. He’d already played on more hits than most people could name, and when he picked up the instrument, he learned it properly. He taught half the London session scene how to handle it, slipped it into pop arrangements with a kind of practical confidence, and then recorded under the name Lord Sitar as if it were the most natural extension of his work. His sitar work gave pop records a kind of borrowed gravitas, a way of sounding more substantial without changing their basic shape. The bitter taste comes from knowing that the seriousness was often decorative rather than structural.
The tone shifts when you move to John Renbourn, who approached Indian influence from a completely different direction. He’d already spent years exploring medieval and Renaissance music, and when he picked up the sitar, he didn’t treat it as a psychedelic prop. He treated it as another way of tracing the long, winding connections between modal traditions. His sitar version of a fourteenth‑century dance isn’t trying to sound mystical. It’s showing how two distant musical worlds share a common spine. Renbourn kept following these threads long after the craze faded, folding them into his wider work with a quiet persistence that feels entirely his own. He wasn’t chasing fashion. He wasn’t chasing the badge. He was chasing structure, and he understood that Indian music is built on cycles, not just colours. Renbourn is the exception that proves how rare genuine engagement was.
The story tilts again with The Misunderstood, a garage band with cosmic ambitions. Their use of Indian modes came with the same raw intensity they brought to everything else. Their tracks feel like dispatches from a group trying to break through the ceiling of the garage and reach some other plane through fuzz and feedback. Nothing about their use of Indian influence is delicate; it’s pure propulsion, not ornament. Indian modes gave their wildest ideas a kind of implied legitimacy, a way of framing their chaos as something spiritually charged rather than simply loud. Their story turned chaotic, and they didn’t stay with the sound for long, but the acetates they left behind became cult objects because they capture a moment when Indian influence collided with garage rock in a way that feels both accidental and inevitable.
The mood shifts again with Nitai Dasgupta, whose track carries a stillness that doesn’t need to pretend to be spiritual. He wasn’t borrowing from the tradition; he was part of it. He kept working in devotional music long after the psychedelic era ended, and his presence here feels like a quiet anchor. His track ‘Baitha Tano’ exposes the badge for what it was. A shortcut for Western musicians who wanted the aura without the discipline. Hearing Dasgupta in the middle of all these experiments is like stepping into a room where the furniture finally makes sense. His phrasing, his pacing, his sense of space, all of it reveals how thin some of the other borrowings were. A sitar line is not a tradition. A shimmering texture is not a philosophy. A repeated figure is not a cycle.
The atmosphere becomes stranger once you reach 40 Watt Banana, who feel like they wandered in from a parallel universe. They started in New Zealand’s restaurant jazz scene, drifted into Indo‑Afro psychedelic improvisation, and left behind a track that sounds like a message from a place where the raga craze never ended. Their looseness feels unforced, as if they stumbled into the sound and decided to stay there for a while. The percussion rattles around the edges, the guitar lines stretch and curl, the whole thing feels like a group discovering new shapes in real time. They didn’t become famous, nor build a long career, but they left behind something sincere and slightly out of time.
The oddities multiply once you start digging into the lesser‑known names. The Fifth Estate took a medieval dance tune and decided it needed a sitar, as if the Middle Ages had been waiting centuries for a psychedelic garnish. Their track works better than it should, partly because they were already leaning toward baroque pop, and partly because they committed to the idea with cheerful stubbornness. The Zodiac were operating in a different universe altogether, building their entire project around astrology and acid, folding Eastern instruments into a kind of cosmic theatre that veers between lurid brilliance and total collapse. Chad & Jeremy wandered into Eastern influence through the folk‑pop door, their experiments sounding like dispatches from a group trying to reconcile gentle harmonies with psychedelic drift. The results feel tentative, yet they capture the moment when folk musicians were convinced that Indian textures could make their songs feel more expansive.
The experiments become more chaotic once you reach the groups who treated Indian influence as a kind of musical dare. The Misty Wizards approached it with a sense of reckless enthusiasm, their attempt sounding like a group trying to reach transcendence with equipment that barely worked. Their track sits neatly beside Hi Revving Tongues, whose attempt at psychedelic intensity feels like a band trying to outrun its own limitations. The Stooges pushed the idea into heavier territory, turning Eastern influence into ritualistic tension rather than ornament. Their single track here reads like a footnote from a parallel history where Indian influence seeped into the heavier corners of rock rather than just the psychedelic ones.
The mood deepens once you reach the musicians who genuinely tried to understand what they were borrowing. East of Eden approached Indian ideas with curiosity rather than opportunism, folding them into their exploratory framework with surprising sensitivity. Their phrasing feels investigative rather than decorative. Clark‑Hutchinson built entire pieces around extended improvisation, creating tracks that feel like miniature attempts at psychedelic architecture. These musicians treated the sound as a possibility rather than a gimmick.
The Beatles made Eastern influence visible, but they didn’t start it. Musicians in London and Los Angeles were already experimenting with sitars, sustained tones and extended phrases months and even years before the Beatles travelled to India. Some were doing it out of curiosity. Some were doing it because they were working with Indian musicians. Some were doing it because they were chasing new textures. The Beatles absorbed the culture directly, which gave their experiments a different kind of weight, but the wave was already forming. Once they used the sitar, everyone else felt permitted to try it, and many took the easiest route. A sitar in a bedsit in Crouch End. A sustained note on a four‑track. A repeated figure that gestures at depth without ever touching it. Musicians who couldn’t afford a sitar slid a piece of wire under their guitar strings and hoped no one would notice.
Once you move beyond the better‑known stories, the picture gets harsher. There are musicians here whose attempts have not aged well at all. The Mirage sound like they were handed a sitar and told to make something “far out” without any real sense of what to do with it. Their track creaks under the weight of an idea that never quite lands, the Indian colouring sitting on top of the song rather than inside it. The Twilights fare little better, their Eastern gestures feeling more like a marketing decision than a musical one. The Lemon Pipers add touches that feel like a trend‑chasing gesture rather than a deep engagement. These are the moments where you can hear the badge being pinned on, the seriousness being faked, the hope that a borrowed timbre might disguise a lack of conviction.
Other names leave behind curios that are more interesting than successful. Spirit fold Indian touches into their pop in a way that feels half‑committed, as if they were testing the waters without wanting to get fully wet. The Hubbels try to roughen up their sound with Eastern inflections, yet the result never quite escapes its own stiffness. These tracks are not disasters, but they carry that faint smell of musicians chasing a trend rather than following an instinct, like they chucked a joss stick into the washing machine and hoped for the best.
There are also those who only just scrape through. Blossom Toes manage to integrate Indian‑leaning phrases into their ornate pop with a certain swagger, yet you can still feel the strain at the edges. Humble Pie flirt with the idea, adding touches that give their song a slight tilt without truly transforming it. These are the borderline cases, the ones that work well enough to pass, but not well enough to linger.
What emerges from all of this is not a tidy narrative of enlightenment, but a messy field of attempts, some sincere, some opportunistic, some clumsy, some quietly impressive. Indian influence enters these tracks as a way to change the air, to suggest that something more serious or more strange is happening than the song alone can support. Sometimes that suggestion is backed up by thought and craft. Sometimes it is pure theatre. The set catches all of it: the musicians who meant it, the musicians who faked it, the ones who stumbled into something new, the ones who left behind a single awkward experiment that now feels like a note in the margin of pop history.
Today, the landscape is different again. Global pop loops back on itself. K‑pop borrows from Western pop while Western pop borrows from K‑pop. Latin trap borrows from Atlanta while Atlanta borrows from Latin trap. The ouroboros keeps gorging. It is harder to spot the moment when one culture throws something across the fence because the fences have dissolved. Everything is mashed together. Everything is influencing everything else. This collection feels like a relic from a time when cultural borrowing still had edges, still had borders, still had moments of awkwardness and novelty and misinterpretation. A time when a sitar could feel like a passport. A time when a borrowed scale could feel like a shortcut to depth. A time when musicians were reaching for something they didn’t fully understand and leaving behind the evidence of that reach in the grooves.
Daz Lawrence
About the Author
