“It was fifty years ago today”

It was fifty years ago, well almost today. But while Sgt. Pepper did not teach the band to play, it was the harmonies of The Beatles that George and Lionel Taylor first began practicing together in 1965, at the St. Joseph’s Boarding School in Bangalore. Those initial beginnings led to the eventual formation of The Combustibles in 1967 and their emergence as a major presence on the live rock scene in India – based in Bombay. Now, five decades later, the band’s history has been revived, thanks to the “newest Combustible” – Michael Fishberg, Founder & CEO of Harkit Records in London. As a result, the stories and the band’s music live on again.

The details of this hard-to-believe voyage can be found all through this web-site – and this link provides a lot of the history.

Outside Trincas in Calcutta:

At the end of the day – and at the heart of the journey – remain the ten musicians who made it all happen at different stages of the band’s evolution, and the friendships that still endure through the many band members scattered across the globe in India, England, Canada and the U.S.

The collected images here provide only a small part of the story. Perhaps, there is more still ahead. Rock ‘n’ Roll has always been about dreams – never fully envisaged in the detail but often realized in the abstract. The Combustibles continue to dream…

The First Available On-Stage Images: