Dinoo Kelleghan

For the in-crowd of the Sixties, if you weren’t dancing to the Jetliners farewell concert at the Musaeus College Hall, on March 3, you weren’t alive, says

Apache! The guitars yowled and spat, the drums thundered out the famous beat. The Jetliners - Sri Lanka’s first and best superstar band started on a string of numbers by the Shadows - hits they first played more than half a century ago.

Most of us have only heard these numbers played on record, and the effect of a live performance was stunning. Hard, hot sound, each guitar distinct and virile - there isn’t anything to beat that in today’s padded electronic music.

The Jets entertained Colombo from the legendary nightclub, the Coconut Grove, at the Galle Face Hotel. For the in-crowd of the Sixties, if you weren’t dancing to the Jetliners at the Coconut Grove on Saturday, you weren’t alive.

The Jets were my elder sisters’ band, really. For me, it was Amazing Grace in the Seventies, doing Play That Funky Music and Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale. But the Jets rule, and when a friend made a date for their farewell concert, on March 3, we went.

What an evening! The four original band members, possibly in their seventies, and the singers, kept it up for three solid hours. What a darned shame they are part of Sri Lanka’s pervasive pattern of migration and can’t play together more often. We would lock them up in a cage together and force them to play if we could.

Lead guitarist Indra Raj lives in Switzerland, bass guitarist Felix Fernando in Australia; Anton Gunawijeya, who plays rhythm guitar, lives in the UK and drummer Harris Jurampathy in Denmark. Lead singer Mignonne Fernando, who joined the Jets after winning a talent contest at the age of 16, lives much of the time in the US, and singer Conrad De Silva in Australia. Mignonne is now 69, but when she came on in a glittering black catsuit and swayed to the music the audience gasped and whispered. Some women just do it: Tina Turner, Eartha Kitt - warm, dynamic, infinitely talented, infinitely admired.

Mignonne sang Hopelessly Devoted To You in memory of her late husband Tony, who brought her into the band when she was a teenager. Last Sunday’s standouts were vocalist Conrad De Silva and Indra Raj, who memorably apologised for “a few bum notes here and here” after playing Cavatina from The Deerhunter, and later stopped and re-started a Shadows hit, saying the audience had paid a lot of money and deserved better than his first attempt.

Conrad, lithe and supple in pink jeans, belted out the best version of Mustang Sally, better even than The Commitments soundtrack version, and boy, could this guy move! Was he 70? Who knows? Was he sexy? Yes!

Conrad’s handsome son, Andrew, whose career in a rising Melbourne R&B band crashed when he became ill with cancer, later struggled to remake his life by singing at weddings and last year had a fairytale result by winning Australia’s Most Talented contest. His semi-final win, when he sang, from the heart, Sam Cooke’s spine-tingling A Change is Gonna Come, produced the kind of judges’ reaction seen on the iconic ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ when Susan Boyle won.

Enough of that. We knew what we came for last Sunday and the Jetliners gave it to us in spades, helped by a cheerful Rod Stewart-like blond from Sheffield, David Roberts, who contributed the obligatory Cliff Richard quota.

The “original Jetliners” was the offering, and authentically and beautifully so, unlike a recent international Motown tour heard in Sydney where the so-called original line-ups of the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Supremes etc. were hardly that, where Martha Reeves puffed breathlessly through her numbers, and the saving grace was the gifted Joan Osbourne. A review brutally stated: “Stop, in the name of love”.

Not so here in Colombo. And call me old-fashioned but it was great seeing a