'Music is a very emotional way to communicate quickly with people': 'Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous' music supervisor Alick Sethi

Khaleej Times

25-02-2025

The raw electronic sound that originated in clubs across the UK in the 90s had a way of sending energy pulsing through your body. You felt it in your muscles, you felt it in your bones — that need to thrum along, to tap your feet and move to the beat. Now, picture the same feeling but in response to the rhythmic clapping and free flowing notes of a qawwali, a form of Sufi Islamic devotional song that originated in India.
Both bring you closer to something fundamental within you — a river of torrential emotion that ebbs and flows and will not be denied expression.
The dichotomy of the two very different types of music eliciting a similar feeling was not lost on Alick Sethi, whose childhood soundtrack had heaps of both.
In fact, somewhere along the way, while listening to qawwalis performed at his home in London as a child and devouring the 90s club scene in his teens and 20s, he trained his ear to match sound to emotion, to tell a story through a beat.
The 51-year-old London-born British music supervisor exercised that same passion (and analytical genius) when he decided to work on Netflix documentary Y o Yo Honey Singh: Famous and gangster-drama Guns & Gulaabs. (Both series can be streamed on the platform.)
'When I was very young (three or four), I was at home in London, and every now and then, we had these musical evenings where people from the Indian community would come around with the harmonium and tabla, and they would start playing and singing qawwali music. I was fascinated by it. Of course, I was listening to music on the TV or the radio, whatever my parents had on, but this music hypnotised me because it was so long and kind of free form compared to what I heard on the radio, and everyone seemed to know what they were doing and singing, and when to sing and when not to sing and when to play and when not to play — I found it captivating. It's one of my early memories of music,' recalled Sethi.
As he grew up, his tastes in music began to evolve; with exploration came the love for diverse genres, languages, and styles.
'I was looking for my identity, and I think I found it when I started going to university. I went to university in central London. I moved there, and I started to discover what came after the rave scene in the UK was this explosion of electronic music, and it seemed like new genres were springing up every year. It was a very amazing time because it was all new territory and uncharted,' he said.
Living in London gave him an edge too, because as the UK's capital it drew talent like cheese draws mice. 'You could find the best DJs or the best electronic musicians playing in London every weekend or every week,' said Sethi.
The experience would invariably be followed by a hunt for music on vinyl in little cellar record stores. But as a student, Sethi was constrained by budget (or rather, lack of). So he found a loophole; his university, Imperial College, had a radio station where he signed up and did a show, marking his beginning as a DJ that lasted till he was nearly 30. During the day, he would fiddle with test tubes and learn formulae, and in the evening, he would take to the decks; he still plays in clubs under the name Warped DJ.
During his early DJing days, he found himself wondering about the music that was shown on TV. 'I realised one day that everything I saw on TV or in the movies had music. And I was wondering, how did that music get there, and who chose it, and how and why?' added Sethi.
And the answer, he explained was Miami Vice. 'There was a legend that a TV executive was scribbling down ideas on a notepad, and he wrote MTV cops, and then left it at that, and wrote other ideas. And then someone saw that, and they developed this cop show where the cops that are undercover drive Ferraris because they have to pretend to be drug dealers and rich, and they have cool clothes, and it's all very styled, and then the music starts to play a part in that. Instead of just having chases and scenes with an orchestra or a composer making fast-paced music, they started to use songs from the era, songs that would become huge hits because of the show that we remember now. The songs made those scenes like mini pop videos — they became part of the story.'
And so began his dance with the next phase of his life, one that would take him to places as far as Russia and India.
Leap of fate
Years later, he found his curiosity and subsequent learning paying off in the form of the Yo Yo Honey Singh project. He credits the director of the documentary, Mozez Singh, and the Academy Award-winning producer Guneet Monga with the creative vision behind the plan. Atypical to the Indian film industry, they took a leap of faith by hiring a music supervisor before even considering a composer. This gave Alick and Mozez the time and space to plan the musical universe for the story.
'Now I've worked on this Yo Yo Honey Singh documentary, and that was really interesting because it's unscripted, but it needed a music supervisor to license the songs and then also to help with the score, to put in ideas for the score, because we had a film director who was really collaborative and very sure of himself, secure in his vision in all aspects of production including music supervision. So, this was a real joy to work on.'
In total, Sethi worked on negotiating and licensing 30 songs and 23 music videos, making it a gargantuan task in a country that he had not worked in too much and one that did not use music supervisors often.
'I worked for a long time in Russia,' he explained, 'And I think Russia grew into this whole licensing music and working with music supervisors thing more quickly. I think India has a very set way of working, and it's taking longer, but it's going in that direction, for sure,' mulled Sethi.
In the Middle East, Sethi said, 'I know that all the big labels are opening offices in Dubai and Saudi ... and I think it's definitely needed. It's a hub, there's a lot of work, there's a lot of business, and there's a lot of communication that's needed. And of course, music is a very emotional way to communicate very quickly with people.'
He explained that he's always on the lookout for places where he can engage with people. 'I think that's something that I feel is very prevalent in Dubai. That's something I would love to experience, coming from London and having had some of the happiest periods of my career in Moscow,' he said.
For now though, he's just listening to music — the kind that plays on your mind long after you've seen the visuals on the screen. The kind that gets into your bones and causes your soles to itch to move to the beat. He is studying how to unlock the soundtrack of memories.