VoiceZ - The New Age Boy Band

Kamran and Faizan, or better known as the Khurshid Brothers among the fans, have been rocking the city with their melodious voice, ever since they came into the scene. From their duo performances to the after performance selfie with the audience, everything has kept the crowd cheering for them. And now they've created something, which we might just call, "The First new age boy band in the city". The code is broken with their first introductory act at the Yuva Music Festival held on 3rd August, 2015 at Science City Auditorium. With their two originally composed songs- With Love and Jaane Kyu, these handsome guys have made their mark into our hearts. They aim to go international and set a mark on the globe! Let’s hear from them about their new-age boy band- VoiceZ!

Credits - Sandip Das

Q1- ‘VOICEZ’ is a very unique name with the addition of a ‘z’ at the end. How did you come with this name?

Kamran-  It took us a long time, maybe a month to come up with a name. But we wanted a name that lingers on forever. We did not want a name that sounds cool only in 2015. What about maybe like say, when we are forty years old and this band is 25 years old and we are old men and we are still making music so the name has to resonate in the mind forever. And also since we are in India and we want to go international and the name has to, umm, you know connect with people. It should not be that people take the name and say, Oh it’s a rock band, oh it’s a funk band, and oh it’s a jazz band. It has to be universal. It’s all vocal crew in this band. This is not a rock band or DJ band. This band is about harmonies and other vocal music. It’s all about our voices so we kept looking for other names. We had some other names like Blend it; Funk it, Uptown & Epic. We had a lot of options but every time, Voicez kept coming back. And then we thought that this makes sense. So that’s how we kept the Voicez.

Q2- We have seen Kamran and Faizan rocking the stage off and on. How this band did come to form?

Shantam- Technically speaking, we hadn’t really thought of it a long time back but then I was a huge fan of Faizan when I used to go to college fests and competitions I used to see him sing and get inspired. Then all of a sudden he came to my college for a fest. He liked my voice and we started talking. We also got two of our songs released. He liked my song and I liked his song. Then we started chatting on Facebook. Finally, I met Kamran and the other boys through Faizan and we just came up with this idea. India has never seen this kind of boy band before. So we thought why not, do something which India has never seen before. So this is how everything started.

Kamran- See basically, Faizan and I have always performed together and people have jokingly called us the Backstreet Boys of Kolkata. And we are actually huge fans of Backstreet Boys. And growing up in 90s we were huge boy band fans and whenever we both went up on the stage something would have been incomplete. Just me and Faizan…we wanted to do so many things like harmonies and stuff. And with two voices you can’t do much. So we wanted that charm of a boy band. We always wanted it but finding people of the same mentality was difficult. It was not just about talented people. There are many talented people around but finding people with the same kind of mentality was difficult. When you want to a kind of music, you need to find people who have the same mentality like yours to entertain the audience. So four of us here have the same taste of music and we know what we are to perform. When someone in our band says, I like this song then all of us know that this song is what we are going to sing. There is not much of a debate when everyone has the same mentality. So it took us three weeks to come up with this band and we also launched our first act within three months and you have seen how successful it has been.

Q3- What’s your favourite genre of music?

Shantam- Pop!

Joydeep- Pop!

Faizan- It has to be pop!

Kamran- Pop!

Faizan- Whenever you think about a boy band it has to be pop. No boy band makes any other kind of music but yes, we try to keep a blend of all kinds of music. We just don’t do pop music when we are performing we try to blend in as many genres of music as we can. Like when we performed at Science City we did all kinds of songs from Billy Jones to One Direction to Cold Play. Cold play is a rock band. So we do everything in our own style. 

Kamran- We customize every music that we perform. If you hear our version of ‘What makes you beautiful’, it’s not how One Direction has sung it. We do not want to come up as a rip up of another artist so when we pick a song, we make it VoiceZ way.

Faizan- We make up our custom tracks, our custom vocal. Like we plan it accordingly and try to make it our own way.

Q4- So how difficult is it to dance and sing together?

Faizan- Yes. If you see the video, you will see that we had a story in our act. We hand singing, dancing and acting. There is also graphics work in our video. It was like a Broadway. I had to pick up a few softwares to make the graphic.

Kamran- The acting, singing, dancing, script writing is all among the four of us. We do it together. It is difficult but we try to make it as good as possible.

Q5- How has been the reaction of the public after your first concert? 

Faizan- Oh, the notification on Facebook never stops!

Kamran- Yeah. I wake up in the morning and find 100 notifications from the VoiceZ page. I have almost lost my identity on Facebook. Every notification is from the page, and I am like where is Kamran Khurshid!

Joydeep- And messages!

Kamran- Yes! Joydeep has the most number of fans! Girls are drooling over him.

Joydeep- There was this girl who kept my picture as her dp on WhatsApp and wrote JB VoiceZ I love you. That’s actually very sweet.

Kamran- And about our performance in the Science City, when Yuva Music Festival were talking to me, they were scared if they could fill the auditorium because it was raining cats and dogs. I told them; ask Science City if they can let people stand. I was confident that the auditorium will be over crowded. And actually it happened!

Faizan- We were amazed!

Kamran- We were the final act and people knew that Kamran and Faizan would be performing. We did not tell anyone about us. So people were cheering for us. And when finally we were on stage and we sang the first part, the whole crowd cheered louder for us! I think we all had goosebumps! That was a priceless moment. With our first note, the whole arena exploded with cheers!

Joydeep- And Shantam went missing.

Shantam- Yes, my friends lifted me up and took me somewhere to take pictures!

Kamran- And even the selfie stick wasn’t sufficient for the groupfie!

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Facebook Page : VOICEZ

YouTube Page :  VOICEZ

ABOUT THE AUTHOR : 

Jaismita Alexander loves to write, eat, travel & sleep besides being an admirer of Art and Literature. She is also an editor and the co-founder of ExPRESS Magazine.