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Vietnam), attracting a huge following and even playing with Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones when he visited. Mostly though, pop ruled, with jaunty acts such as The Jetliners and Antoinette & The Gaylords being popular.
What was regarded as true rock ’n’ roll was mostly bound up with the rise and fall of Rock Company, an initiative to bring the small but fragmented community together by pioneer Agit Perera in the early ’70s. Its members and fans exhibited a passion for rock music, inspired by the West but most definitely Sri Lankan, borne out of a hard-fought battle to play a genre they could identify with despite scant resources and an unreceptive music industry.
In the ’70s, you couldn’t walk into a store and buy a rock record as you could in the UK. Access was restricted to Radio Ceylon, courtesy of “The Rebel DJ” Steve Alagaratnam who was the first to play the likes of The Who, The Kinks, The Animals and The Yardbirds on Sri Lankan airwaves, or via a relative abroad.
bit intellectual, they were into peace and love and all that. We weren’t – we were into rock ’n’ roll. There were big cultural clashes.”
So, despite not being able to play a note until his friends taught him, Abeysekera stole a guitar and set about creating what is widely proclaimed to be the first original Sri Lankan rock music.
Their first gig, with a cover charge of five rupees, packed the then grungy Lionel Wendt Theatre with 500 people. Whereas the rock crowd had previously been all English speaking, Abeysekera gave his friends from the slums, who only spoke Sinhala, complimentary tickets. Bringing their dope with them, which was previously untouched by the middle classes, their shows became known as “The Smoking Rock Circus”.
Cancer, who Abeysekera said still has fans who have never actually heard the band’s music, put on shows the like of which Sri Lanka had never seen before, with homemade firework displays, “cheap grass and cheap hookers”. On
one occasion they went a step further: “I knew a guy who worked in the cemetery, so I said, ‘Look, machang (term of endearment literally translated as ‘brother in law’ but roughly meaning ‘mate’), I need some skulls.” So he got hold of a bag of 10 and kicked them into the crowd at a gig. “We invented punk rock – we didn’t care.”
Cancer’s rebellious drug-taking antics were almost unheard of in Sri Lanka then, except for in the hippy beachside enclave of Hikkaduwa where those in the know hung out with LSD-tripping Westerners. Abeysekera had other means of learning about drugs though, “I learnt everything about LSD from Reader’s Digest. And there was this US magazine by Youth For Christ circulated by missionaries called High On Campus – it became the drug taker’s handbook in Sri Lanka because it had all the lists on every drug.”
For Cancer, the Flower Power-inspired rock festivals of the era were a joke, with most of the bands playing covers of Western bands. At the Rock Cyclone
“ROCK BANDS WERE ALL MIDDLE CLASS AND A BIT INTELLECTUAL, THEY WERE INTO PEACE AND LOVE AND ALL THAT. WE WEREN’T – WE WERE INTO ROCK ’N’ ROLL. THERE WERE BIG CULTURAL CLASHES”
“If some dude was wearing blue jeans, it was guaranteed he was a rock fan. So if you wanted blue jeans then you asked your uncle to send them with a Led Zeppelin record,” explained front man of punk rock band Cancer, Prasanna Abeysekera, taking a drag on a 3 Roses cigarette. Now 56, with long hair, an open shirt and fingers bedecked with silver skull rings, Abeysekera remains every inch the rocker. He first heard rock music when an excited school friend received a record from his older brother in England and told him to come and listen. It was Pink Floyd II. Although they later decided that “Pink Floyd were crap,” at the time the boys sat around all day listening to it.
As the only Sri Lankans abroad then were middle class professionals, rock was only really popular among what some have referred to as the “bunch of rich kids” who made up The Wall Gang, the foundation for Rock Company, who used to hang around on a wall off Galle Road in Colombo playing Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd covers.
That was until Abeysekera and his pot- smoking slum friends came along. “Rock bands were all middle class and a
21
“Eternal ’70s child” Anup Vega (right) and Brian Jones during his ’67 visit (below)
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