To appreciate the singularity of Remo Fernandes, pioneering pop star and Indian cultural phenomenon, you must venture to the heart of his Goan village of Siolim on a waterlogged 24th of June. That date marks the Feast of San Joao, a kind of carnival of the rains, which unfolds with slow benedictions and accelerates to Bacchanalian mayhem. Every Siolkar wears a fanciful, gloriously creative headdress, woven together from tropical flowers and palm fronds. Groups of boys with dazzling smiles pace through ancient vaddos, lining up to plummet into all the deepest wells with hair-raising, daredevil abandon. Everyone is drenched to the skin the whole time, everyone hoarse and still yelling, ‘Viva!’

By late afternoon, mass delirium reigns along the sodden riverside opposite the neo-Gothic façade of St. Anthony’s Church. High-spirited caravans of revellers trail to the water, swelling the crowd into drenched, delighted thousands. Warm June rain courses in sheets. And almost every year, there comes the highlight everyone is waiting for. The huge, raucous crowd gasps, falls silent – Siolim’s star comes on stage to take the mike. Remo, deeply loved son of this overflowing landscape will now serenade his people and they wait for it with that rare kind of anticipation that presumes every ounce of yearning is about to be satisfied.

There’s no one else quite like him in the Indian cultural strand. On stage in Siolim is a troubadour in the composer/performer tradition of the Iberian Middle Ages, who has been filtered through rock and roll, bossa nova and must be viewed through the contemporary Goan prism. With this audience, Remo will be alternately metaphysical, polemical, poetic, satirical and ribald. He roars ‘Amcho ganv, amcho San Joao’ and the massed crowd explodes with a wall of primal emotion that lingers in the air like firecracker smoke. He strums his guitar, and you dance helplessly alongside everyone else in a mosh pit of red mud. Think Sachin Tendulkar on song at Wankhede, think Pele’s 1000 goals in Rio de Janeiro. These are valid comparisons to Remo, alone on the lip of his hometown stage, with a guitar slung around his neck, and your heart in the palm of his hand.

“My brother gets a lot of strength from being alone,” says Remo’s younger sister, Belinda. “He’s a very strong person, who is not afraid to be different.” Belinda grew up hero-worshipping her brother for always remaining completely honest, and true to himself. Remo went his own way (for example, opting out of Sunday mass as a teenager) without covering up his actions. As she sees it, Remo has twin facets to his personality. One is the family-oriented bedrock, which can be gauged in intense relationships with his sons, Noah (21) and Jonah (18). And then there’s the maverick streak, that fierce independent drive that has fuelled one of the most unlikely career trajectories in Indian cultural history – from a Goan village to national pop icon to Bollywood hit-maker and now to the Padmashri and unexpected musical maturity.

Listen to the sweeping, laid-back soundscapes of India Beyond, the 2001 album that’s described on www.remofernandes.com as ‘his best till today’ and you marvel at the musical progression marked out over almost three decades. The best track, A Piano for Shakti is a mellow seven and a half minutes of shimmering ivories, with the vocals in the far background. It’s a million conceptual miles from Pack that Smack (1986), the hard-hitting rock album that made Remo’s national reputation. Ironically, this new direction in music has rewound a familiar scenario – no music company in India wants anything like it from Remo, they all want the same kind of filmi pop that has topped the charts for them in the past. Even as a New York label has licensed A Piano for Shakti for a popular global compilation, our artist finds himself alone at the crossroads again.

“I know the way I want to move ahead,” says Remo, seated in the back garden of his ancestral house in Siolim, in the shade of a tree laden with sour bimbli pods. “I know the road I want to travel on in the future, but the record companies don’t want to follow me.” He has been shut out by the music establishment before, back when labels demanded Hindi Disco from him and the idea of homegrown hits in English seemed a remote fantasy. “But then I knew the country was waiting and I knew my music would hit,” says Remo. “Now I feel like I have to battle another big obstacle on my own.” Then, ruefully, “I just don’t feel like struggling anymore. How long can you fight? The walls seem to be growing higher and thicker. It might be time to move on.”

If India lost Remo, it would not be the first time a highly original Goan artist has been driven to withdraw. It has happened in successive generations, like grim clockwork. Angelo Fonseca, exemplary artist and favourite student of Abanindranath Tagore at Shantiniketan, was hounded by reactionaries offended by his Konkani Madonnas and lived the rest of his life in near-total obscurity. Francis Newton Souza was furious with India in 1949, when he arrived penniless in London, completely desperate to escape ‘a country that despises her artists and is ignorant of her heritage.’

Remo sounds uncannily like a 21st century version of Souza. “This country which is so culturally rich, today acts as if it has nothing beyond Bollywood. Every television channel somehow comes back to it, we are engulfed by Bollywood.” There seems to be no escaping the pervasive footprint. Remo recounts the story of Symphonic Chants (2002), his ambitious release that comprises highly individualistic versions of The Gayatri Mantra and Jai Jagdish Hare. Despite the content of the albums, a daily headlined its story about the album, Remo’s New Jalwa!
On Remo’s website there’s a revealing line. ‘Rejections tend to mark a man and his music even more deeply.’ The record companies that laughed in his face in the beginning drove him to set up his own studio, produce and record his albums and oversee the finished product himself. He wrote all the songs, played every instrument, mastered every track, produced every line of artwork, and then he hopped on his little yellow scooter to speed all over Goa to find distributors and outlets. In those days, he also found other outlets for his creativity – wonderfully witty t-shirt designs and postcards. These ironic images even today still possess tremendous charm and testify to a highly original, multifaceted creativity.

As we all know, this first baptism by fire had a happy resolution. The world caught up to Remo, even as he forged ahead on his independent path. All of a sudden, it became a matter of national pride for emerging India to have its own pop stars. Then came multiple awards in East Germany in 1986, as the first Indian officially entered in an international pop competition. The victories were seen as emblematic of a new era for a new Indian culture. Two years later, Remo was sent by the government on a concert tour of the Soviet Union and the year after that to Tokyo. Fast-forward to 1995 and all the hurly-burly and hype of the new India Rising, and Remo finds himself playing onstage at the Channel V awards in Mumbai. He looks around. Next to him: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, and Roger Taylor of Queen.

“Growing up in India, especially in Goa, you feel such isolation. You think that the real stuff is overseas, it leads to a real sense of insecurity which 451 years of colonialism certainly did not help.” Remo confides, “Of course I had the secret thought, ‘I’m as good’, but I kept it to myself. If I said it out loud, everyone would have justifiably said that I’m a delirious, self-opinionated boor.” But then the awards in East Germany. Then all the international performances as cultural ambassador for India. And the concerts with all-time greats, including Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson in 2005. “I felt those moments deeply,” admits Remo, with a chuckle. “I’m not saying that I’m on par with those guys, or even comparing myself directly. But those moments alongside them, helped me realise my worth...and the worth of my music.”