Ready to yell cheese?

CHENNAI: There’s something crazy about ‘The Family Cheese’. For starters, this trio enjoys playing progressive rock just as much as it loves carnatic rhythms. “We don’t really have a genre,” laughs Apurv Isaac, who plays lead guitar, shares vocal duties and is also the band’s booking agent. “Right now, we’re actually working on some multi-genre stuff – a little bit of bossa nova, disco, space rock,” he says. So far the band has close to 10 of their own compositions ready, which for a barely six-month-old act is quite impressive.The Family Cheese has already won competitions such as India Today Mind Rock’s band hunt and the Chennai Live Band Hunt conducted last year. Says Yohan Marshall who handles drums and vocals, “In the first four months, we did about 60 shows and now I think we’re up to 80!” Bandmate Homi Rustumji adds, “We really pushed ourselves to play every gig and competition that we could to get noticed outside Chennai as well.” Think massive crowds at venues like IIT Karagpur, IIM Bangalore, BITS Pilani at Hyderabad and Symbiosis, Pune. So did they come out tops at every cultural fest? “No,” smiles Homi, “but we did win best instrumentalist (each one of them) almost every single time.”And if you were under the assumption that members of The Family Cheese are related to each other, (going by the ‘family’ in the band name) you couldn’t be more mistaken. Nineteen-year-old Apurv recalls, “We all study at the Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music, that’s how we met.” And the best part? The trio comprises musicians from three different cities  — Chennai, Bangalore and Ahmedabad. So have they ever had to jam on Skype considering the distances? “Nah, not yet. But we have had shows where we’ve hit the stage right after we left the airport, which  were killer shows anyway,” he responds with enthusiasm.It was, in fact, before their very first show that the band came up with their name. Yohan tells the story, “We had all eaten a really big breakfast, and the lone survivor on the table was a piece of cheese.” And the rest, as a popular ‘cheesy’ saying goes, is history.