Zoe’s set included a mix of jazz, blues, Bollywood and a few nostalgic Pakistani covers. For jazz/blues, she sang an original song Raat Gaye and followed that up with the dreamy Feeling You. For the Bollywood section, she belted out covers of Mere Sapno ki Rani, Tum Hi Ho and perhaps the best of the lot, Kaisi Paheli Zindagani. She also performed impeccable covers of Boom Boom (where she urged Tapu to sing the title part each time), Dum Mast Qalandar and a rock-fuelled version of Bolo Bolo. She also took advantage of the cruise and performed My Heart Will Go On. In a nutshell, Zoe and her band brought the house down with their livewire performance.

Post-performance she delivered a few sound bites to queries posed by IoS:

“The trend of corporate sponsorship is definitely a positive one for the music industry. It’s enabled many of us to get our projects off the ground and facilitated plans that would otherwise be difficult to do since they cost so much. I think it’s up to the artist to negotiate terms so that their creativity is not inhibited by terms that make their art suffer. For myself, I don’t see any compromise, in the sense that the art comes first, and if that is being inhibited in anyway by corporate support then it’s best to move on and find a marriage that works for both parties.”

Zoe adds that it’s always a bit of a challenge doing performances for selected audiences. “I end up singing more cover songs and playing my original songs in between. It’s a small compromise, but people love nostalgia and hearing those old numbers alongside my own stuff. It takes a while to warm everyone up, but by the end we have the audience singing too, which lets me go home happy!” — S.S.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 5th, 2015

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