James: The Rock Icon Who Built Bangladesh’s Music Scene from Scratch

Before Bangladesh had a rock scene to speak of, it had Faruq Mahfuz Anam — known to everyone simply as James. Born on 2 October 1964 in Rajshahi and raised in Chattogram, James left home in 1976 after his family resisted his interest in music, and began performing live at Aziz Boarding in Pahartali.

In 1977 he formed the band Feelings as lead vocalist and guitarist; it would later be renamed Nagar Baul, the name under which James is best known today. The band’s first album, Station Road, arrived in 1987, but it was through the 1990s that James rose to mainstream fame as the frontman of what became known as one of the “Big Three of Rock” in Bangladesh, alongside LRB and Ark — the three acts credited with building the country’s rock scene more or less from nothing.

As a solo artist, James released eight studio albums between 1989 and 2009, including Palabe Kothay (1995) and Janata Express (2005), while pioneering a strain of psychedelic rock blended with blues that had no real precedent in Bangladeshi music at the time. His catalogue crosses into playback singing as well — he won the Bangladesh National Film Award for Best Male Playback Singer twice, for Desha: The Leader (2014) and Swatta (2017).

James’s reach extended beyond Bangladesh’s borders earlier than almost any of his peers. He debuted in Bollywood with Anurag Basu’s Gangster (2006), and went on to contribute music to Woh Lamhe (2006), Life… in a Metro (2007), and Warning (2013) — a crossover run that, decades on, remains rare for an artist who built his career almost entirely on Bangla-language rock.