Guthrie Govan: ‘I Like It When You Can Go Beyond 100 Percent'

Ahead of his India tour this month, the English guitar virtuoso on changing the rules, keeping up with Hans Zimmer, and “suffering in art”.

- Nabeela Shaikh

“IT’S THE ONLY COUNTRY WHERE I’ve ever looked out of the window, and in the lane next to me is a taxi, and the passenger in the taxi is a goat,” says Guthrie Govan plainly, as he recalls his recent visit to India with experimental/jazz rock trio The Aristocrats. As is the case for most visitors, the English guitarist was fairly bewildered by the cacophonous “dawn chorus of everybody honking at everybody else”—possibly even enough to inspire a tune on the next Aristocrats record: “We definitely want a song on the next album called ‘Horn OK Please’,” he half-jokes over the phone from Chelmsford, England.

But Govan took back much more beyond the regular Indian traffic trope from both his September 2016 tour with The Aristocrats and a two-city India experience in 2010. The latter includes memories of conducting a clinic in the Russian embassy and another at a temple with a “full-on Hindu wedding going on downstairs” during the workshop—a hint of the country’s entrepreneurial ways even as organizers rearranged and added last-minute shows on The Aristocrats’ tour. “It didn’t take me very long to realize that yours is a country which takes its music very seriously…” says Govan, who returns this month for a 10-date tour comprising both gigs and guitar clinics. He will be accompanied by drummer Gino Banks and bass prodigy Mohini Dey.