Chandy Nath of Cambridge band Sunday Driver: ‘The music came to me on a polar research trip’

As Chandy Nath lay in her tent on a desolate Antarctic ice sheet 1,000 kilometres from the nearest base station, the wind seemed to be playing a strange melody.

With no wildlife, no sea and no people except three other polar researchers, the only sounds for weeks on end came from the wind whistling through her tent’s poles and rattling the fabric.

But it was all the inspiration she needed. She picked up her Walkman tape recorder, hoping the batteries would hold out, and began to sing.

Chandy, who is now the lead singer with Cambridge band Sunday Driver, who are playing at The Portland Arms soon, said: "That was when I really got into song-writing because the Antarctic ice is completely silent. There are no sounds of life. There are no birds, no penguins. It's hundreds of miles inland, so there's nothing to see or hear. We were just on this ice sheet, camping out for 100 days. That's a long time to be cut off from everyone else. We were radioing back to base every day and living on these ex-Army rations.

“Whenever the weather was bad, the wind would blow really hard through the poles of my tent, and it made music. It was basically like flute music, and then you'd hear the rapping of the winds. When wind raps fabric, it doesn't just sound like a rustle. It actually sounds like a drum beat. And that's what inspired me to write.”

Now she and her band are about to release their new album, Silk and Filth, the next chapter in their Spaghetti Eastern series. Following 2021's critically acclaimed Sun God, this album continues their exploration of rich storytelling, cultural fusion, and genre-defying sounds. Known for their unique blend of Eastern and Western influences, sharp wit, and a touch of cynicism, Sunday Driver have spent over two decades crafting music that mixes English folk and classical Indian influences.

“I'm still composing songs which build off riffs that I wrote in the Antarctic,” says Chandy, who reckons her early music sounds like “a Dickensian Kate Bush”.

“It had taken several days just to get to the field camp, to travel out there on this tiny plane with skis on it,” she says.

“There were three guys and me, so I didn't hear another woman's voice for almost three months. There was no running water, no fresh food and obviously no telly. And we didn't have mobile phones in those days, so no Facebook, no films, no electronic devices. So we listened to music on our Walkmans until the batteries stopped, and read. There was so much silence, and in a way, I found the silence quite difficult. It was almost melancholic, the complete silence just filled by the sounds of machinery or the blowing wind. And so that was where I said to myself, I love this, but I want to come home and I want to fill my life with music, because I found it very hard. I had started to write music before that, but it wasn't very good.

“I've still got tapes and tapes of little melody ideas that I recorded there. You can hear the wind blowing in the background. I did take out this tiny little travel guitar. It was so small - about as big as my arm, but most of it I just wrote it in my head. And that's how I write music now. Usually, the whole song appears in my head, every part, and then the job is to get it out of my head and communicate it to the band. But I don't really play any instruments very well. I play a little bit of guitar, a little bit of piano, and I'm starting to play the bamboo flute, but I can't write music, really, so it's all just very much memory. And I think that's where the Indian influences come in, because Indian musicians never write anything down.”

Now working for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, she has run her music career in parallel with her scientific roles. Her other musical inspiration comes from south India. She was brought up in the north-east of England, but her parents were huge fans of Indian classical music and would arrange concerts in the UK for Indian music stars, often putting them up in their home.

“They were very much first generation parents, and they ended up creating a very hybrid Indian-British childhood for me,” she says.

“My dad's still alive. My mum passed away during the pandemic. They loved Indian classical culture so much that they created a charity to bring artists over from India. Because in the 70s, especially in the north-east of England, where I grew up, there just wasn't much Indian culture at all. So they basically created it for themselves by bringing these artists over, and we'd have really famous musicians sleeping in our house. I frequently had to vacate my room because a really famous Indian singer was coming to stay.”

The music stars included popular classical singers Vani Jairam and Anupta Jalota.

Chandy says: “It wasn’t until many years later that I realised how famous all these people had been because I found all my parents' old vinyl. I actually have a regular slot on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire talking about the stuff I found in my parents loft at the moment. And one of the things I found was a stack of vinyl, and I recognised all these artists from it. I think, I remember him sitting in our back garden playing the sitar. And I remember that woman practicing her vocals in my bedroom. So, I was surrounded by music from Indian cultures from a really early age.”

The new album draws on experiences from the whole band about loss and the pandemic, as well as the influence of Britain in India and India on Britain. “I suppose you could call our music fusion, but we don't like the word fusion, because I don't think anyone really knows what it means,” says Chandy.

“Sometimes it's hard to pinpoint where the fusion comes from. But it could be a little riff, or it could be a melody, or it could be an instrument that's not used in the way that it's normally used.”

She jokes that one of the reasons she travelled to Antarctica was to avoid an arranged marriage.

“My parents were trying to arrange a marriage at the time, late 90s. So basically, if you want to dodge an arranged marriage, there's only a few things you can do, and going to Antarctica is a really good one.

“Every time I went home, there'd be some new bloke on the doorstep and it would be ‘come and meet Robbie’. And we'd talk about stamp collecting or whatever. And then they'd say, what you do? And I'd say, high energy particle physics, non linear quantum mechanics. And, you know, then they do a double take, and some of them went running, but not enough of them. But once I'd been to the Antarctic, that was it. I was on the shelf, so it kind of got me out of it, and I just didn't want to have an arranged marriage.

“No one was going to marry a woman who had spent three months in a tent with another guy. I mean, it would have to be a really enlightened Indian parent, because ultimately it's the parents that decide. I was pushing it, having a PhD in physics and going to live in Hamburg, but then going to Antarctica was the limit. To this day, I have never met an Indian woman that had gone there before me. I was the only person in my Indian community that had ever been to Antarctica.

“No one ever said you shouldn't do that. But I think once I had been, it was pretty clear to everyone that I just wasn't the kind of arranged marriage material, that they weren't just going to get me married off to an accountant in Basingstoke and buy me a mock Tudor mansion. I think people understood me better after that.”

On her return from Antarctica in 2000, Chandy set about finding a band, putting up adverts in local music shops. And that’s how she met fellow band member Joel Clayton, who later became her husband.

“I put up a little note in Mark's Music. I went back next week, and only one phone number had been torn off. And I thought, ‘Oh no, nothing's going to happen there’. And then I got a call from Joel, the guitarist, who said he was interested in forming a band, but what we hadn't communicated was the kind of band we wanted to form. So I wanted to form a folk band, and he wanted to form a thrash metal band. I’d sent him this demo that basically sounded like Charlotte Church.”

In spite of their musical differences, they quickly formed Sunday Driver with his flatmates, who became the second guitarist and bassist. Chandy and Joel married and have a daughter together. And in spite of many terrible times in recent years, including Chandy discovering she had cancer soon after losing her mother, the band has stuck together.

“It just made me realise how short life is, and you've only got so long to make sense of it all and to share it with people,” she says.

“I'm just so proud that this it's 25 years since Sunday Driver formed - wow. And when I see the album we've put out, I just feel so proud and that we've got through a pandemic, we've got through cancer, we've got through bereavement to and, and we're still making music together. I think it's just a really special band that gets each other and gives each other space.

“We’re driven by what we’re trying to do. We’re driven by the desire to make beautiful music. We make music that we like, and we make music that says something, and we don’t feel any pressure to have a genre. We don’t feel like we need to be the jazz band or the reggae band or the fusion band. We brought out an EP in 2013 that was completely Indian folk music. And I think a lot of people got really into us thinking, ‘Oh yeah, it’s an Indian folk band’. And then the next album was just rock. And I think a lot of that is Cambridge as well. It's a special place to make music.”

The new album was inspired by a trip to shop in the back streets of Bangalore.

“I went to this filthy out of town region with my area, with my auntie”, says Chandy. “She took me into the sari shop. And I just thought, it's fascinating how wealth and luxury is juxtaposed with poverty and and so that's one of the themes of the album, this juxtaposition of wealth and poverty and beauty and ugliness and wonderful things in life, like an album and horrific things like nearly dying of cancer. So Silk and Filth kind of encapsulates all of that. So I'm going to wear silk. So I'm looking forward to that. I don't know who's going to do the filth.”

Sunday Driver will play The Portland Arms in Cambridge, from 7pm on Friday, 7 March. For tickets, priced £9.90 including booking fee, visit https://wegottickets.com/greenmind/event/648911/#tickets.