Walter Pereira is a fixture at Christian celebrations in Bandra, with his repertoire of old hit songs.
Night after night, Walter Pereira enquires: “Are you lonesome tonight?” In his Elvis-esque baritone he aims to fill your heart with pain, and then tease “your memory to stray to a brighter sunny day” which will presumably compel you to confess that the “chairs in your parlour” do in fact seem “empty and bare”. For Christians — East Indians and Goan Catholics — who live in Bandra, Pereira, 62, is not just a singer of Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Don Williams, ABBA and Engelbert Humperdinck hits, he is also the sine qua non of a celebration. It is almost a ritual to be religiously followed that he is invited to sing at local christenings, communions, confirmations, weddings and engagement ceremonies.
Pereira is a durable performer. He sang at Earl Fernandes’s wedding 27 years ago, then at his silver jubilee anniversary, and again last week at Fernandes’s son’s wedding. Riehaella Newnes booked the musician months in advance of her church wedding earlier this year. Since her wedding list had a large number of elderly couples, Riehaella knew that Pereira would provide the right entertainment. Families have been known to change event dates to be sure to get Pereira. Legend has it that Pereira can reignite passion in couples who are advanced in age.
A group of Pereira loyalists recently took a straw poll, to discover that the musician has probably performed at fully half of all the Christian homes in Bandra. In the last month Pereira has sung at a woman’s 70th birthday party as well as her grandson’s communion. Riehaella Newnes’s brother Aaron says, “There is no one quite like Walter to make people dance. The middle-aged people kill it [i.e., go wild] because he does their kind of songs.” Aaron Newnes is a member of Bandra Gymkhana, and Pereira performs there regularly on Saturdays or Wednesdays.
Although Pereira does do Bryan Adams’s “The Summer of ’69” every now and then, his music chiefly caters to the Flower Power generation and the disco generation that followed. “I don’t blame the youngsters for not dancing to my tunes. I sing songs which are meant for slow jive and cha-chas and waltz,” the singer says. “Also, nowadays youngsters don’t know the traditional dance forms like their parents. But as happened with many of us, these youngsters will also start mellowing with age. And one day, maybe after 10 years,
I will see them hit the dance floor. Looking at this I smile to myself.”
Surprisingly, through his 40-odd years, as he says, of performing, Pereira has remained a semi-professional musician with a full-time job as a draughtsman at Mazagon Dock. He landed the job at the same time as he began singing with a band called The Strangers in 1969. “I quit college in the second year, since I got this job at 19. At the same time, someone heard me singing at a talent contest and asked me to join The Strangers. At the dock I used to get 100 bucks and The Strangers paid me Rs 45 per wedding. I started doing four to five shows per month, so I didn’t even have time to attend night college. I needed the cash, since my parents were leading a hand-to-mouth life. I would sing from nine in the evening to two in the morning, return home, and then go to the dock at seven,” says Pereira.
From The Strangers, he changed to The Volcanoes in 1971 to sing at Hotel Heritage, where nude cabaret dancers performed the Mustafa in between rock and roll. Then he moved to a band called The New Tradition, which played at Caesar’s Palace (which was rumoured to be mafia-owned). He was there for more than a year, ducking the soda bottles flung during fights and struggling to cope, until the Oberoi Sheraton called. It was there in 1975 that Soft Rock Revolution, another band, came into being at the Supper Club on the Sheraton rooftop. From here, it is word of mouth that carried him to the suburb of Bandra and into so many individual lives.