Effective period / Period of releases: 1971

Members: Everett Perry

The five members of The Combustibles who recorded Watch Her and Some Peace of Mind were its regulars during the band’s final act from 1969-72. But each entered the band from vastly different directions. Brothers George (on bass) and Lionel Taylor (on lead), the founder members, were children of British parents who decided to stay on in India after the country’s independence in 1947.

George and Lionel recall playing their first guitars and singing together at St. Joseph’s boarding school in Bangalore as young teenagers, inspired by the early harmonies of The Beatles. Returning to Bombay in 1965, they started playing publicly in informal settings till the first edition of The Combustibles formed in 1967. The Taylor parents and their sister Ellen, were the band’s initial mentors and remained their biggest supporters and fans.

Everett Perry first discovered his lyrical skills at the young age of thirteen, while in high school at St. Michael’s in the Bandra suburb of Bombay when a number of his friends approached him to pen love poems for their girlfriends – a skill they apparently did not possess! One of his earliest successes, on the local radio called The Cadbury Show resulted in a prize of a dozen Cadbury bars. The poet in Everett ended up becoming The Combustibles song-writer and composer. The oldest in the band by about five years, he was the only one who had theoretical training in music and studied the piano till the intermediate stage. Everett took over the lead vocal slot and became one of the most recognized front-men in the Bombay rock scene – ably supported by George who managed most of the harmony vocals.

Bobby Furtado, the baby of the band and brother-in-law of manager Godfrey Uttanwalla, was an important link in The Combustibles chain. For a drummer, Bobby was quiet to a fault and self-effacing till he got on stage! Drumming since the age of sixteen, he had only played with a few local amateur bands till the opportunity to join the band occurred following the illness of regular drummer Croyden Maben late in 1969. Bobby seized the opportunity with both hands (and a strong leg on the bass drum) and provided the basic beat to the music of The Combustibles till the band disbanded in the summer of 1972.

While George and Lionel were beginning to practice the harmonies of The Beatles in Bangalore, Everett was honing his song-writing skills and Bobby had still to start playing the drums, Nissim was 8500 miles away in Washington D.C., with his family where his father had just begun employment with the IMF. The family arrived just a month before the horror of President Kennedy’s assassination but three months later, with all of America, watched The Beatles launch a rock revolution as they opened their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on 9th February 1964, four days after Nissim’s fourteenth birthday, with All My Loving. Like every teenage boy at the time it seemed, Nissim was hooked and soon had his first cheap acoustic guitar. But nothing went very far until fate intervened and a classmate in high school named Pat Loper invited Nissim to his home where every member of the family (including the Mom) would sit around after dinner playing the guitar and strumming classic country songs. Buck Owens and the Buckaroos was what they played most! There was no rock played in the Loper household – though Act Naturally was soon to be an important bridge between Buck Owens and Ringo and The Beatles!

Five years later as the family got ready to return to India, a friendly salesman at Veneman Music in the Arlington suburb of Washington D.C. suggested to Nissim’s father that his son would do well to take along a Fender Stratocaster and this new fuzz-wah pedal of a type that a guitarist named Jimi Hendrix had already made very famous. Nissim’s passport to The Combustibles had just been delivered!