Remo Fernandes

Luís Remo de Maria Bernardo Fernandes (born 8 May 1953), known professionally as Remo Fernandes, is a Portuguese singer and musician.

Known as a pioneer of Indian pop music, he performs pop/rock/Indian fusion and is also a film playback singer.

His musical work is a fusion of many different cultures and styles that he has been exposed to as a child in Goa and in his later travels around the world.

Such influences include Goan and Portuguese music, Sega music (from Mauritius and Seychelles), African music, Latin music (from Spain and South America), the music of erstwhile European communist states, those of the dance halls from Jamaica and Soca (from Trinidad and Tobago).

Remo Fernandes was born to the well-known Panjim family of Bernado and Luiza Fernandes on 8 May 1953.

He has a sister named Belinda, who sings Brazilian songs.

Although brought up in a Catholic family, Remo says he "realized that god is beyond religion".

Remo's first introduction to rock music was at the age of seven, when a cousin returned from London with "Rock Around The Clock", a record by Bill Haley & His Comets.

He spent the next decade listening to music of that era's most popular icons:

In school, Remo developed his guitar playing skills along with a group of friends (Alexandre Rosario, Tony Godinho, and Caetano Abreu) and formed a school band with them, named 'The Beat 4'.

He wrote his first songs around age 14.

He won prizes best composer, best vocalist, and best lead guitarist in all-Goa competitions.

After graduating from school, Remo went on to earn a bachelor's degree in Architecture from Sir J.J College of Architecture in the city of Mumbai, greatly influenced by Lucio Miranda (Mario Miranda's cousin, who is an architect and musician).

His love for music continued, and he often bunked classes to work on his technique.

He continued writing his own songs, playing solo or playing with different bands, including one of Bombay's top bands, The Savages, with whom he released an album, Ode to the Messiah, on Polydor Records in 1975.

Mumbai being one of the few cities in India at the time with a niche audience for rock music, Remo played in concerts and venues such as Shanmukhnanda Hall, Rang Bhavan, and in all the major college campuses of the city.

Remo brought an Indian element to his music with his sitar/guitar, and taught himself to play the Indian flute.

After graduating, Remo traveled in Europe and North Africa between 1977 and 1980, performing with fusion rock bands and even releasing an album, Rock Synergie, in Paris in 1979.

He then returned to Goa and immersed himself in its hippie culture.

He met a group of travelling European artists who named themselves the Amsterdam Balloon Company, and began playing at their concerts at Baga.

He even invited them to perform at Miramar Beach.

Writing and singing songs in English made his success more rare and distinctive in the context of the Bollywood-dominated, Hindi language-based, occasionally even disco music scene that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s.

His compositions in English, reflecting life and socio-political happenings in India with which every Indian could identify.

His Hindi pop/rock and film songs became instant hits with the Indian masses, earning him Gold, Platinum and Double Platinum Discs.

A popular stage performer in India, he has also taken part in many music festivals around the world.

He has performed with members of international groups such as Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin and Queen.

He now writes and sings his songs in five different languages: English, Hindi, French, Portuguese and Konkani.

Later, Remo performed in Amsterdam with Lucas Amor, the violinist in this group, and release a record called Venus and the Moon in 1981.

He also formed his own band of fusion music called Indiana with bass guitarist Abel, tabla player Lala and the percussionist Bondo.

Remo recorded his maiden album Goan Crazy (in 1984) and a subsequent album Old Goan Gold (in 1985) on a four-track cassette TEAC Portastudio recorder in his home under the banner of 'Goana Records'.

In these albums he played all the instruments, sang all voices, and was the only composer of its music and lyrics.

He engineered the recording and mixing and designed the album covers.

He had cassettes produced in Mumbai and personally went about distributing the cassettes from shop to shop in Goa with an illustrated book of poems he wrote (called Leads), and postcards and T-shirts he designed.

After releasing his first hit album Pack That Smack in 1986 and Bombay City the next year, he became the highest-selling English rock musician in India and the only one in the country to be awarded Gold Discs for this category.

Pack That Smack was his first album to be released by a national record company, CBS.

This was an anti-drugs themed album, especially against addiction to heroin, which contained songs such as "Just a Hippie" and "Down with Brown", as well as asocio-political satire titled "Mr Minister", a nursery rhyme-styled song on politician who went to sleep once elected to power; and "So Wie Du", a recording of an award-winning live performance of his from the Dresden Song Competition.

Bombay City contained hits such as "Against you/Against me", "Ocean Queen" and a hilarious take on the condition of telephone services in India, "Ode to Graham Bell".

Later in 1986, he was invited to play at an official government function in Goa for the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was visiting.

There he sang a song titled "Hello Rajiv Gandhi", which spoke about the hurried completion of Kala Academy just before Prime Minister Gandhi's arrival, and requested Gandhi to visit Goa repeatedly to increase the speed of other construction work.

The song caused an uproar in the local press and subsequently in the national press.