Feature with Headbanger's Kitchen
The Naked Demonstealer
Metal and Food, oh, glorious food! Iron Men and Maidens, welcome to the Headbanger's Kitchen!
(Episode 8 featuring Karnivool)
Headbanger’s Kitchen was a concept born from me wanting to convert my facebook cooking blog into video format. About 3-4 years ago I started uploading photos and recipes of food I was cooking on my facebook profile and I got a lot of positive responses to that which made me give a second thought to making youtube video recipes since the whole video thing was taking off and I called and had a chat with Srinivas Sunderrajan who made the Demonic Resurrection video and asked if he’d help me out and that is kind of how I decided to give it a name and then came up with the idea of getting a metal band on the show and interviewing them. If I’m not mistaken it was Mephisto the keyboardist of Demonic Resurrection who threw up the name Headbanger’s Kitchen and then we put out a small contest to design a logo and then Danish from Bangalore sent us the ass kicking logo that we have today. We even got a 16 year old whiz kid Pratheek from Hyderabad to design and maintain our website so we’re a pan India team of people working on it now.
In regards to cooking; is this a self-taught experience or have you an entitled qualification?
I have no qualifications in cooking department. I sort of learned at a young age from my grandfather and my mom and during my 7th and 8th grade I took cooking as a hobby and actually very seriously considered becoming a chef, that was till I decided to become a computer engineer. However as you can see I’m not a computer engineer so that went out the window pretty quick too.
How often do you upload new content, and how much time do you usually use on an episode? If possible, can you elaborate on the process of an episode?
We are as off now a monthly show and we plan to keep it that way. However we’ve been known to skip a month here and there. The process of shooting the episode itself takes about 2 days time and the editing takes another couple of days. The other stuff like learning the dish and figuring out what I’m going to make takes more time depending on who our guest is. So for example when we heard that Karnivool was coming to India we immediately wrote to them and got an ok for the show, then it took me 7 days to master the dish because I wanted to make something Indian for them and since that really isn’t my forte it took me some time to master it. We normally shoot the making off and the interview part the same day if the band is a local one but if the band is from out of town we do them separately since most artists are on a fairly tight schedule.
How has Headbanger’s Kitchen been publically received by general media and audience?
We’ve got some tremendous feedback from people and most people have LOVED the show, I remember in the initial day’s metal heads telling me that their mothers are watching the show and that was really cool. I also suddenly started seeing a lot of metal kids cooking and uploading photos of their food so it has been really awesome, I’m also proud to say that some of the recipes are being made in France and Norway. So the reaction has been awesome, of course there is criticism as well, there is the inane thought that it’s not metal to cook or I’ve sold out (!!!!) and then there were some who thought that I was doing this instead of touring and writing music which wasn’t really the case since that is my priority in life. The media reaction was great as well, we got a lot of positive feedback, I think the mainstream media in India was expecting to see a lot of blood and guts since they think metal is all about that, but it’s been a really fun process so far.
On each episode of Headbanger’s Kitchen there is always a band/musician appearance – how do you select your guests?
It really depends, the show itself started when Nervecell came to India. We had discussed the show and it was kind of sitting on the backburner till Nervecell announced their tour of India in October 2010 and I was involvanak Maut and Scribe were the obvious choice, later on it was just decided according to which artist is touring India and available to come on the show and if it was a local artist who is really creating a lot of buzz at the moment. So that is kind of how we pick our guests.
For more information and super yummy episodes of Headbanger's Kitchen follow these Links! Headbangers Kitchen or on Facebook. Devilishly Tasty Looking!ed in it so they had like a week free in Mumbai and so I called Srinivas and said ‘Look Nervecell is in town let’s shoot the first episode with them’ and it was done, the episode however was released only in March 2011. For me it was pretty obvious I had to get the biggest Indian bands on the show and Bhay
What are your future plans in regards to Headbanger’s Kitchen?
We definitely want to keep doing this and we can hopefully monetize this since the show doesn’t pay for itself just yet and we’re also hoping to release some merchandise in 2012 but no real extravagant plans, but I’d really like to interview some of my heroes.
Posted on Air Guitar Blog
