Cyanide started out as the school band of Modern School, Barakhamba Road in 2000 by members Aman Nath, Varun Uppal, Prashant Kalra, Arjun Verman and Rohan Solomon. Over the years Cyanide has seen multiple line up changes. But I have always been the one common factor in the band. As I was the junior most in the band, in order to continue the school band after my mates passed out, I had to find new members.
I took on batch mate and old friend Dhaval Mudgal (Half Step Down) in the group and juniors Rahul Sainani (Joint Family), Bharat Bindal (Starlab), Shardul Mehta (Joint Family) and John Sangtam (Vorpal Scythe)... Together we were performing in the school assembly every week and slowly getting rid of our stage fright. By the age of 16, stage fright was a distant memory. The motivation of playing regularly in a band allowed me to write the band’s first original song called Cool Breeze on Camel’s Back followed by our second composition Untold Misery in which the other members also played an active role in the song writing process. After the departure of Dhaval and the addition of Yuvika Bader on Keyboards, we recorded our first demos of those two songs.
Starting by distributing the CD’s to our friends, those two songs went viral in Modern School. Hence we gained a lot of popularity and decided to finally step out of our comfort zone and take part in a few inter-school music competitions. After a series of performances over the months we won Pepsi Storm in October 2002. This got us a lot of recognition and our demo Untold Misery was picked up by a radio jockey and was added to regular spins on radio.
After passing out from school, we remained united and were competing in college competitions. In 2003 we officially entered the Rock circuit.
After two year hiatus, Rahul and Shardul got busy with Joint Family and decided not to re-group with the rest of Cyanide. That is when I decided to take on the responsibility of rhythm while singing and they all decided to keep Cyanide a four-piece band.
In 2006, we met Srijan Mahajan (Parikrama & Half Step Down) and he joined the band. Through the Internet and social media, our band made it a point to stay in touch with our fans. After a series of lineup changes with John leaving the band, Arpan Guhathakurta (ex Bandish) joined for a while but eventually we took on 16-year-old Rohan Kale as the lead guitarist. This line up stayed together for four years and took over the Indian rock circuit by being a finalist of Channel [V] launchpad. In 2010, Bharat and Kale left the band and we took on Nikhil Malik (Blank Noize) as the lead guitarist. We could not find the right bassist to suit our sound for about a year. So we continued to play shows with session bass players and decided that we will release our album. Kale volunteered to play the bass for the record as he was still in town for a few months. After about six months of production, we finally launched our debut album Sugarcoated in March 201. We released two singles from this album Money and Find You on multiple radio stations all across the country.
Midway through 2011, we decided to take Sid Mathur as the bassist. Recently we released a Christmas EP in December 2012. It’s been a long but fun journey and doesn’t look like its going to end in the near future.