Tune into Tantra: Welcome to the Pleasuredome
“Tantra is not a path of indulgence,
but a path of freedom in the world,
not from the world.”
~ Pandit Rajmani Tigunait
The eighties were the greaties.
The mid 1980’s in Great Britain were great heady days. It was a time of massive political and economic turmoil, and at the same time a period of eclectic experimentation and a creative explosion of such sublime richness that it has never really been repeated.
Much has been documented about this colourful time in World history, so I won’t really get into too much of it. Instead I’ve decided to tell you a story of a poetic introduction preceding a remix of a song that captured my imagination when I first heard it as I was entering my teenage years in my hometown of Durban, South Africa.
Durban’s beaches of segregation during Apartheid
Lake many people of Durban, my family is of Indian heritage. I am the eldest of four brothers. Being the introvert of the family I often found social interaction soul-draining. While I was growing up, and entering my pubescent teens in the mid-80s, I didn’t really feel like I had many role models or peers that I truly resonated with. Except for one. My beloved mom had very close family friends, the Lakhani family of Effingham (an Indian suburb created during the segregation of South Africa during Apartheid). The matriarch in the Lakhani family was like another mom to my mother, and her beautifully exuberant children, a daughter and three sons, my mom treated as her siblings. I called her Nani (granny in Hindi and Gujarati). The youngest of the siblings, the late Manoj Leeladar Lakhani, who was in his twenties at the time, also affectionately known as Bubloo, was my mentor and role model. I called him Bubloo-mama. I adored his older brothers Ketan and Muna too, and they also impacted my youth and consciousness in other wonderful ways.
Manoj saw that this shy, awkward teen in me had a thirst for the esoteric, the erotic, and for sci-fi, comics, film, music and bunny chows. And he provided me with an intellectual and spiritual canvas to explore this thirst in a highly conservative society at the time. Manoj was the older brother that I didn’t have.
Manoj introduced me to so much music that has stayed with me till this day. Pop, soul, house, R&B and jazz oozed out of his turntable whenever I would visit him. I would get lost for hours in the music. It was the perfect way to escape the reality of that unjust world around me. And Manoj gave me an alternative to that reality.
Manoj Lakhani in the groove with his beloved daughter Sonali in the early 2000s.
Manoj was also a really crafty deejay. One day he gave me a mix-tape of a deejay session he had recorded on a cassette tape, and I stuck it in my Sony Walkman. For those born before the new millennium, you know what I’m talking about. For those born in the last 2 decades, please Google it ;-)
Anyway, I digress. So I pressed play on my Walkman and the exquisite voice of Gary Taylor boomed through my headphones. It went:
In song and in dance I express myself as a member of a higher community
I have forgotten how to walk and speak I am on the way toward flying into the air, dancing
My very gestures express enchantment
I feel myself a God
Supernatural sounds emanate from me
I walk about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the Gods I saw walking in my dreams
I am no longer an artist I have become a work of art
Welcome to the Pleasuredome
And then the song began. It was an extended mix of Welcome to the Pleasuredome by the British pop band Frankie Goes to Hollywood. You can listen to the intro and the rest of the song here.
I had heard the song before (which I still regard as a pop-classic), but not this version with the poetic intro. I was mesmerised. I rewound the tape and played that intro again and again. Manoj was enamoured by my love for it. And today, almost 40 years later, I am still mesmerised by it. These words have come to take on even greater meaning, especially as I found myself dancing enchantedly on the Tantric path over the last decade and a half.
Manoj sadly passed away in November 2004. He died young, but lived many lifetimes in his short season on the eternity of Mother Earth.
The poetic influence behind the infamous song.
Welcome to the Pleasuredome is the title track to the 1984 debut album by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, produced by the legendary Trevor Horn. The lyrics of the song, written by band members Holly Johnson, Brian Philip Nash, Mark William O'toole and Peter Gill were inspired by the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an 18th century English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of a group known as the Lake Poets. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including "suspension of disbelief". He had a major influence on the spiritually awakened Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American transcendentalism movement. Emerson is one of several poetic figures who took a more Eastern approach to life by rejecting the common view of God as separate from the world.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood in the 1980s. Image from the Lever Gallery.
In March 1985, the album track was abridged and remixed for release as the group's fourth UK single. At the time of release, many in the press, media and church criticised Frankie Goes to Hollywood for writing a song that glorifies debauchery, especially with regards to the lyrics (and video). Ironically the message of the song was misinterpreted, just as Coleridge's poem was. It was actually an ode about the potential dangers of this kind of decadent lifestyle. The song, along with Relax, made Frankie Goes to Hollywood even more controversial than they already were. But it was also great marketing at play as it propelled the band to the top of the charts, and helped young Brits at the time break free from the shackles of puritanism.
The spoken-word introductions to both 12-inch mixes released in 1985 of Welcome to the Pleasuredome are adapted from Walter Kaufmann's 1967 translation of Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. The recitation on the first 12-inch version (Real Altered) is by Gary Taylor, whilst that on the second 12-inch version (Fruitness) is by actor Geoffrey Palmer.
It’s the Gary Taylor recitation at the introduction of the Real Altered mix that this post is all about. Real Altered, according to the band, stands for "Alternative To Reality".
What does this all have to do with Tantra?
Well, on the face of it, not a lot. After all Friedrich Nietzsche, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Frankie Goes To Hollywood are not exactly top of mind when you think of anything remotely resembling spirituality or Tantra. And this is probably a total assumption, but the band were most certainly not thinking of Tantra when they got Gary Taylor to voice the intro to the Real Altered mix:
In song and in dance I express myself as a member of a higher community
I have forgotten how to walk and speak I am on the way toward flying into the air, dancing
My very gestures express enchantment
I feel myself a God
Supernatural sounds emanate from me
I walk about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the Gods I saw walking in my dreams
I am no longer an artist I have become a work of art
But personally, these words are like a hymn of creation to me. They express the Tantric attitude to life with such clarity and poetry. The joyous combinations of music, mantra, mudra and dance take me to the creative source of divine consciousness, just like a Shaman in a trance or Shiva in the dance of the cosmos, depicted as Nataraja in the “dance of bliss” (ananda tandava). Even if we are not aware of it, every cell in our bodies is constantly dancing in vibration to the tune of the universe. And if we can bring our minds to be in tune with this vibration, then we too become this that we have always been - Shiva.
Shiva Nataraja - the dance of the universe
Dedication to a maestro.
Bubloo-mama, this post is dedicated to you. Thank you for your inspiration, faith, love, laughter and for being my original Real Altered. I miss you eternally. Keep on dancing, everywhere you are in the universe. And, as you have always preached, “stay in the light.” ॐ नमः शिवाय
With love, Rohan
ॐ
May our bodies and minds be healthy.
May our thoughts be filled with love.
May our practice be free of obstacles.
May we carry its benefits into the world.
ॐ
