Kula shaker are Crispian Mills, Alonza Bevan, Jay Darlington, and Paul Winterhart
Look back to 1988, when Crispian and Alonza first met, they hit it off immediately and so they decided to join the Object Of Desire which led by Macus Maclaine. By 1991, Paul joined the band, but other members left and the name had changed so many times like the Lovely Lads, the New Originals....etc. Until when 2 more members had joined the band. One of them 's Jay and another 's Suan Dismont who's Crispian cousin. ( Suan was a lead singer by then, Crispian was just a guitarist) Somehow Suan was the one who turned them into the spiritual direction, he told them about the magical letter "K", and so they changed to the Kays.
Suan decided to leave the band not long afterward to run the nightclub, Alonza, Jay and Paul think that Crispian should become a frontman and so he did.
In 1993, Crispian decided to go to India. He got a work at the temple in exchange for foods and place to live. He'd met the holy men and received spiritual insights. He also go tht vision to fuse ethic Indian music with rock sounds. One day he heard the chanting in Sanskrite which know as "the language of the gods" so he decided to incorporate that into the songs he was writing.
He returned to England with a goal on his mind. He got back with his band mates and start playing again. In 1994, the Kays hooked up with Gut Records but it was a huge disappointment for them. Sometime around the end of 1994, they played at the Leisure Lounge in London. Crispian recalled "The support act was some guy who hung irons and swords from his dick. He played real loud techno while his naked girlfriend smoked crack on stage. We finally went on at about four in the morning to this half-emply room of people. We've got these Indian backing tracks, singing about sunrise, and there's this bunch of naked guys in the audience shouting, 'When are you going to start buggering each other?' That was a low point...."
By the sping of 1995, the band left Gut Records, they felt that they'd been treated badly. One day, Mathura had visited the band with an American friend, an original follower of Krishna and someone who'd lived with John Lennon. His name was Kula Sekhara, and he told exciting tales and how the original Kula Sekhara was a ninth century mystic and emperor who's into God, poetry and music. He told the band that if they take the name, he would watch over them " And we thought, "Well, we'll have a bit of that then." Crispian said. And so they did, and the band's name changed to Kula Shaker.
Once when they were playing some gig and suddenly when about 200 hippies dancing to them. "We weren't actually going down that well until we started improvising 'Govinda' on the spot. Now, i've played gigs with seven or eight other bands in my time, but i've never, EVER seen so many people lock their eyes onto someone like they did with Crispian at that point. Twenty, they 50, then 200 people in this tent with all their eyes locked on Crispian...and I just thought, Fuck..." Said Paul
Three weeks after they changed their name, RCA was the first to offer them a deal and seemed like every other record company wanted to offer them the deals too. Somehow they signed up with Columbia-a subsidiary of the giant Sony coporation. Crispian explained why they decided to sign up with Columbia, "The most lucky combination of numbers for us is two 10s together and right outside the Sony building it just said 10 10, and we just said, " That's a sign," and went for it." The band told Sony that they have to be sign up at the exact 10.10 pm on St George's Day, with the moon it its fourth quarter. "The people at Sony were running around, going, "Quick, quick, wr've only got five minutes and Jupiter isn't in conjunction with Mercury anymore." said Crispian. So why do they have to sign at exact this time?..."Because it's a very significant day to Rosicrucian alchemists. It wasn't deliberate. It was destiny" Crispian explained.
Source: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Bungalow/4421/Kband.html
