Travelling in India by Dominic Miller

Striking a chord…

Working for a teen magazine years ago meant that backstage was a frequent haunt. It’s where you got to know bands without their bluster and subterfuge. Backstage varied with the wealth of sponsors and scale of show. Some smelt of sweat and Farenheit, some of weed and wine. A few bands were tight-assed and taut, others raucous and wild, like monkeys let loose in a city. Some artistes adopted a trance, responding with a serious nod only to every alternate question, others would tell you risqué personal stories until you were queasy. Backstage construction varied, too - one ranked it by the size of rooms, strength of partitions, stink level of loos, number of plastic chairs, no carpet or yes carpet, and the contents of the cardboard food boxes.

This backstage, a few days ago, was special. This was Sting. The backstage was large, plush, like a designer shamiana, holding hard and fast in the rain showering and shimmering outside. A dining area featured round tables, a chic buffet with six desserts and a coffee machine that eagerly did several types of the brew. The ‘lobby’ flanked by rooms for crew, band, manager and so on, was divided in the middle by tall gas heaters standing like the columns of a pop-Parthenon. With me was Mark, who plays lead guitar for his college band, but looks all of fifteen. Sinking into the cushy leather sofas, Mark and I watched a tall lanky longhaired man. He wasn’t Sting.

Tall Man began to play. Bach on guitar. Very low, but very strong. The notes wafted over to us, rose and waltzed around us, in widening circles, then pirouetted out the doorless entrance. We inched closer and closer, yet just outside privacy’s invisible limits. The man jammed his lit cigarette between two strings on the guitar neck and there it stayed until he finished playing. Then he pulled out the stub, ground it on the sole of his shoe and asked Mark if he played guitar. Yes.

His name was Dominic and he stood up and handed the guitar to Mark. Mark recoiled as if the guitar were on fire. Unbelievable! Never known a musician to give over his guitar to a strange boy. Dominic went away, shocked Mark started to play. And play and play. After a while, Dominic reappeared and sitting on his haunches, spoke to Mark about music. About what Mark liked to play. About practising with classical music. About playing guitar slowly, really very slowly, in the mornings - like yoga, he said - to make every note matter. About getting a teacher. About playing certain pieces that would improve his technique, others that would enhance emotion. He talked to Mark for nearly an hour. The concert was about to begin; we shook hands and he was gone.

Dominic started learning the guitar when he was fifteen. Later, he studied at London's Guildhall School of Music. He has played with Phil Collins and has been 15 years with Sting. It appears Sting calls him ‘my right hand and my left hand’. He has recorded with the Pretenders, Paul Young, Level 42, Steve Winwood, Sheryl Crow, Peter Gabriel, Rod Stewart, and Luciano Pavarotti. After three solo albums, he released Shapes - his interpretations of classics by Bach, Beethoven, Elgar, and more. Interestingly, in 1997 he recorded with A R Rahman on the almost devotional track ‘Revival’ on that peerless album Vande Mataram. For a man with that kind of resume, he spent a lot of time with a boy who likes playing guitar.

Dominic’s last name is Miller.

It’s rarely that you get to know what a person is before you get to know who he is, like music that stays long and unforgettably in your head, without your knowing its name. Dominic Miller was like that music. 

© The Hindustan Times | March 2005

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