City pubs in a trance with new music

Hyderabad’s pubs are now experimenting with different genres of music. If you step into a pub nowadays, you are very likely to hear trance music and ‘house’ music rather than just Bollywood or hi-hop. Earlier, if youngsters wanted to listen to such offbeat music, they had to travel to metros such as Mumbai, Delhi or Bengaluru. That is no longer the case. Well-known pubs are roping in big names from the music industry to cater to the increasingly global taste of the city audience. People travel a lot nowadays and are exposed to the pubbing scene abroad. Because of this, they get turned off by staid music that is played in the city pubs.

Bringing in a star DJ costs a lot, and so pubs usually rope in sponsors who pay for them. "When we got DJ Tiesto, people from all across the country and even other parts of the world came to Hyderabad to see him perform," says Mr Harish Rao, chairman of Mantra hotels, which runs the pub Souls. "We put Hyderabad in the global music map. We are trying to promote trance by playing it on Fridays and Tuesdays." But there is a dampener. Pubs close by midnight in Hyderabad and the fun is over even before things get hot. But pub owners say the city folks make best use of the situation. And the DJs too are finding it a refreshing change, as DJ Paul Jackson and DJ Paul Deighton confessed.