A.R. Rahman Plays Mumbai Tonight And Says The Stage Was Once 'Like A Nightmare'
Hours before The Wonderment Tour reaches Jio World Garden, the composer has talked about learning to perform, his jingle years and what Ramayana asked of him.
A.R. Rahman takes The Wonderment Tour to Jio World Garden in Bandra Kurla Complex this evening, and in an interview published on the morning of the show he said the part of the job he took longest to learn was standing in front of people.
"If I haven't rehearsed properly, I am a nervous performer," Rahman said in a Zoom interview from his studio in Kodambakkam, Chennai, published in The Indian Express on Sunday.
He was, by his own account, "completely a non-performer" for much of his early career. His first stage appearance came at a benefit concert in Malaysia in 1996, a year after Bombay and Rangeela. For years after that the trouble was technical. "At the time, it was very difficult to interpret so much of studio work into live," he said.
The Barot years
The change came around 2015, when percussionist Ranjit Barot, a long-time associate, took over as music director of his live shows.
"Things loosened up. What was before like a nightmare to be on stage became like, 'oh okay, I'm going to my living room on a piano to play'," Rahman said. He now jokes and sings on stage, and puts that down to a question he asked himself as a listener: would he rather watch someone hiding behind a keyboard or someone who entertains.
He also traced how composer-led concerts became a draw in India. Composers once had to tour with film stars to sell tickets, he said, until a run of shows around 2000 with Sukhwinder Singh, Hariharan, Shankar Mahadevan and Sonu Nigam convinced audiences that a music night could stand on its own. "That changed the whole game," he said.
Thirty seconds at a time
Before Roja in 1992, Rahman wrote advertising jingles, including the Titan watches theme adapted from Mozart's Symphony No. 25. He says the habit of writing for 30 seconds shaped how he built full songs.
"If I do a 32-second jingle which becomes popular, how can I do a five-minute song? So I literally took the same effort to put many 30-second pieces together to make a five-minute song," he said.
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Work with Imtiaz Ali has run long. "Highway was supposed to be one song, and we ended up with 14 different tracks," he said. On this year's Main Vaapas Aaunga, he told Ali that even 20 per cent of a strong theme would be "a goldmine", and the tune that came out of it, "Kya Kamaal Hai", became the base of the score.
Hindi films, he said, have drifted towards picking songs from different places and slotting them in. "They started picking things like Hollywood, which was convenient."
Ramayana in five languages
Ramayana: Part 1, which he scored with Hans Zimmer, opens on 5 November. Rahman described the job as "probably like 10 movies worth of work", across five languages and separate Indian and international versions, and said Zimmer's name would bring "a whole set of new audience curiosity" to the film. Our report on the five-language album has the credits, and the latest single, "Judi Jodi", is out in all five.
His next films, he said, include Shekhar Kapur's Masoom: The Next Generation, Mani Ratnam's Inji Vellam and Ramayana: Part 2.
Tonight
The District listing now gives a 6.30 pm start, with gates at 5 pm, a live orchestra, and tickets from Rs 3,999 still on general sale on Sunday morning. Jonita Gandhi, A.R. Ameen, Raghav, Nakul Abhyankar, Heer and Rakshita are named as guests, as we reported in our Wonderment Tour preview. The tour moves to Backyard Sports Club, Gurugram, on 21 November. More soundtrack news is on Film Music.
(Source: The Indian Express interview with A.R. Rahman by Suanshu Khurana, 1 November 2026; District event listing, A R Rahman Wonderment Tour Mumbai, accessed 1 November 2026)
