It was a snowy December afternoon in 2022. I remember taking the train from London Bridge to meet the Hansens in South London for the first time. Vivian was there, as was his wife, June Hansen (née Marsh), their daughter, and her family. Outside, South London was white and freezing. Inside, Hansen’s warm recollections transported me back to mid-century Calcutta — neon-lit Park Street venues, packed dance floors, and voices that ran late into the night.
This was the first of many meetings with a man who once dazzled the bandstands along Park Street — Trincas, Mocambo, and Magnolia — and helped me map a largely forgotten stretch of Calcutta’s music history. As we chatted, the old-time city returned in a familiar sequence: the stages, the audience, the pay, the musicians who emigrated, and those who had passed away.
Jazz and dance bands thrived within the city’s hotels long before Hansen arrived. In 1926, India’s first jazz record was cut by a band resident at the Grand (later Oberoi Grand), Calcutta’s landmark hotel on Chowringhee. During the Second World War, as Allied troops poured into the city, all elite venues hired African American jazz musicians to run nightly shows. Pianist Teddy Weatherford was the Grand’s bandleader and cut multiple records in the city before his untimely death in 1945. After 1947, foreign ensembles still flew in seasonally, with local Anglo-Indian and Goan musicians taking over most of the empty slots. By the mid-1950s, the live entertainment had gradually shifted to the nearby Park Street stretch. New restaurants emerged. Mocambo opened in 1956, and Trincas began hosting live music in 1959. Live jazz and cabaret drew in more patrons. Most Park Street venues began housing a resident band and a crooner. And in the midst of this musical melee was Vivian Hansen, later dubbed “Mr Showbiz,” the Calcutta crooner who now lives in East Croydon.
Hansen was born in Delhi in 1940, as one of six children in an Anglo-Indian family, and grew up moving frequently as his father worked for the East Indian Railway. The family eventually settled in Calcutta. By 1959, the teenager was singing for K.C. Sen’s Band Wagon, the city’s main Anglophone talent management agency with regular Sunday auditions, hotel dates, and a pipeline from amateur singer to paid resident. It only took a quick Sunday audition at the New Empire Theatre for Sen to spot his talent, and Hansen quickly became the lead vocalist for two Band Wagon groups: The Offbeats, a vocal trio with Rodney Callistin and Raymond Ward; and the Treble Clefs, an all-Anglo-Indian line-up featuring Carlton Oxley on saxophone, Derek (Dougie) Clark and Raymond Ward on guitars, Peter Plant on drums, and Hansen on vocals.
The Treble Clefs played at the Grand Oberoi’s Shehrazade bar for about a year. That same year, The Offbeats went out to the Gramophone Company’s Dum Dum Studios and cut a 78-rpm record with Marie Sampson, then a familiar voice at Magnolia’s lunch and evening sets. They covered Perry Como’s “Catch a Falling Star” and Elvis Presley’s “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.”
Hansen’s clean pop tenor could carry an entire Sunday floor on its own, run pop hooks for four hours, and still take on requests. Journalist Jug Suraiya, in remembering him as Mr Showbiz, wrote that he “sounded more like Cliff Richard than Cliffie-boy himself did” and that he was “the star of the afternoon jam sessions at Trincas.” “I did jazz, pop, reggae, and country,” Hansen recalled. “I catered for people. When I saw a Japanese [table], I played a Japanese song. If a Greek came, I played a Greek song. They used to reward us with money or drinks.”
Despite his rising popularity, the money felt thin. “Sen was great in his art but paid us very little,” Hansen recalled. “He would get paid three hundred rupees for a string of ten shows at the Grand and three shows at the Great Eastern and only hand us ten.”
Seeking better pay and artistic freedom, Hansen left Band Wagon after a year in 1960. He then formed the Soul Sensations, bringing in Peter Plant on drums and Rudy Rodericks on the piano. That same year, they played a gig at the Ludlow Jute Mills in Barrackpore, north of the city, far from the Park Street glitz. By September 1961, “Mr Showbiz” was back on Park Street, organizing the charity revue Make Mine Music at St. Xavier’s College, in aid of parish schools run by St. Teresa’s Church.
Around this time, on Mocambo’s dance floor, Hansen noticed a young woman dancing with unusual energy. During a break between sets, he asked if she had ever thought of taking the stage seriously. She laughed. Hansen suggested getting her a professional contract.
Years later, in her autobiography, the now-famous cabaret queen of Calcutta, Miss Shefali recalled working then as a domestic maid in a Calcuttan Anglo-Indian household when Hansen introduced her to George David, the manager of Firpo’s, a legendary Chowringhee restaurant that closed down in 1977. Hansen himself remembers only the dance floor meeting. Although their accounts differ on the details, both agree that Hansen first opened the door for her to enter Calcutta’s professional cabaret circuit.
In 1962, Hansen moved down the street to Trincas. Venues at the time still flew in foreign dance bands on short-term visas, with local acts getting the supporting slots. That year, Trincas hired the British Ashley Kozak Quartet and employed Hansen as resident singer. After the ensemble returned home, he stayed on with Jimmy Ravestee’s group until 1967.
“From three to seven, it was four hours of non-stop rock and roll,” Hansen says, fondly remembering bygone Sunday afternoon performances. “We played the Beatles, Cliff Richard, Herman’s Hermits, the Rolling Stones, all sorts of poppy stuff! By the time we finished, my voice was completely gone!”
At Trincas, he also ran the Vivian Hansen Show and the Sunday My Fair Lady contest, giving emerging local talent a platform before regular patrons. From 1967, he spent a year at Magnolia, then settled into Mocambo, where he performed into the 1980s. His wife, June, sang at Capri nearby, and often joined in at weekend revues. He also performed occasionally with Sonny Lobo’s orchestra at Shehrazade.
When Duke Ellington’s orchestra visited in 1963, members of the ensemble slipped out of the Oberoi Grand after midnight and jammed with Hansen and Ravestee at Trincas. Biddu Appaiah came up from Bangalore and jammed with Hansen years before “Kung Fu Fighting” brought him global acclaim.
Years before Zanjeer (1973) turned him into a Bollywood icon, Amitabh Bachchan — then a young Calcuttan executive working at Bird & Co., the shipping firm — was among the office men who habitually frequented Park Street on weekends. In fact, he was a regular at Mocambo’s corner tables and, as Hansen recalls, was a fan of his singing. “I did a special show for him at Prince’s at the Grand,” recalled Hansen.
Hansen also crossed into mainstream Bengali cinema, appearing in a gold-lamé jacket beside actress Moushumi Chatterjee in the legendary Uttam Kumar’s final film, Ogo Bodhu Shundori (1981).
By the early 1970s, he had evolved into an independent impresario. “I was running all the shows from Tollygunge Club to Bengal Club, Calcutta Swimming Club, and the Saturday Club,” he says. Partnering with Martin Sarkis of Humayun Properties —which ran the Lighthouse, New Empire, and Tiger cinemas — he regularly organized revues such as Starlit Night and Starorama alongside corporate “Beat Stock” shows (Woodstock-inspired ‘battle of the beat groups’ contests featuring campus rock groups, mod-fashion pageants, and Hansen himself as the MC). By dealing directly with sponsors like ITC, Golden Tobacco, and Shaw Wallace, he claims that amateur groups were paid around a thousand rupees per date, without middlemen. He also organized beat contests at major Calcutta venues like the Kalamandir Auditorium, St. Xavier’s College, and the Calcutta Ice Skating Rink.
In the late 1970s, the scene was gradually shrinking. Naxalite unrest, street gang wars, and the Left government’s aggressive entertainment tax combined to “cripple the city’s entertainment business.” Anglo-Indian musicians were leaving en masse for Australia, Canada, and the UK. “The writing was on the wall,” Hansen remembered. “You could look at the bandstand on a Saturday night and realise half your rhythm section was packing trunks for Melbourne or London.”
The Hansen family eventually left Calcutta for Britain in 1988. In South London, he ran the Croydon Bargain Centre until his retirement in 2013. He occasionally performed at the White Horse Pub and once appeared as a contestant on the television game show, Deal or No Deal.
Going back to that December afternoon, as the heavy winter snow fell outside the window, and June served us a sumptuous Anglo-Indian chicken curry and peas pulao dinner, Vivian laughed and said he was “one of the last of the Mohicans.” “There was Engelbert Humperdinck, there was Cliff Richard, and there was Tony Brent. And now there’s only me left,” he joked.
Author Bio: Arka Chakraborty is a music historian based in Kolkata and a PhD candidate at SOAS University of London, researching Kolkata’s Anglophone music scene.
