by Disco might have reached the mainstream through the dancefloors of swanky New York nightclubs, but it didn’t take long for its revolutionary rhythm to infect the entire globe, inspiring the creation of both commercial powerhouses and woefully underappreciated masterpieces, such as the cult classic, Punjabi Disco.
Thousands of miles away from the mirrorballs of Studio 54, in a perpetually grey and drizzly 1970s Britain, disco music emerged as a means of escapism more than anything else. After all, Britain was a pretty miserable place to be for much of that era, punctuated by industrial action, rising unemployment, and seemingly constant far-right demonstrations from hate groups like the National Front. Punk emerged as an abrasive, rebellious answer to that discontent, but disco offered an equally essential sense of escapism for some audiences.
Mohinder Kaur Bhamra was one such person who recognised the importance of that escapism. Having moved to the UK from India back in 1961, Bhamra was among the growing South Asian population in Britain at that time, and she came face to face with the extent of the nation’s widespread racist attitudes as a result. Nevertheless, she always maintained her cultural roots through music and encouraged countless others to follow suit.
Performing at weddings, parties, and Sikh Gurdwaras all across London for much of the 1960s, when the nation’s capital was at its most swinging, Bhamra became one of the very first female kirtan singers to make a name for themselves in the UK, and she always used that position of notoriety to encourage other British-Indian women to do the same, preserving the cultural heritage of their homeland through music and dancing.
Hang on, you might be saying, ‘What does this have to do with disco?’ Well, through her performances, often accompanied by her son Kuljit, Bhamra essentially laid the foundations for all future British-Asian dance music, and her 1982 record Punjabi Disco was a particular revelation, without which Bhangra daytimers might never have existed.
Punjabi Disco- The lost masterpiece which birthed British-Asian dance music
(Credits: Naya Beat Records)
That album saw Bhamra blend the traditional kirtan sounds that she had been performing for decades at that point with the emergence of disco and electronic dance music, and it remains one of the most essential yet overlooked disco records of all time as a result.
It is easy to see why the record was overlooked when it first hit the airwaves back in 1982. For starters, the landscape of British-Asian dance music was still incredibly niche at that point, and outside of London’s Sikh community, Bhamra’s reputation wasn’t widely known. What’s more, only 500 copies of the album were ever pressed, released exclusively by HMV in India, limiting its market even further, and causing an endless amount of headaches for a litany of future vinyl collectors and crate diggers.
Despite its endlessly obscure nature, though, Punjabi Disco amassed something of a cult following in the years following its release, rightly hailed as being the origins of Asian dance music, as well as being a key cultural landmark in the story of the British-Asian community as a whole. Perhaps more so than any other record, Punjabi Disco told the liberating story of Asian people in the UK, enmeshing those traditional wedding-song sounds with a distinctly westernised form of dance music.
All of its efforts were not in vain, either. In the years that followed its release, Kuljit Bhamra – whose Roland SH-1000 synthesiser forged the disco sound of that 1982 masterpiece – became an essential figure in developing Bhangra music scenes, and even earned an MBE for his troubles. Still, Punjabi Disco has remained an elusive yet alluring record for those in the know.
Now, at long last, the prayers of those crate diggers have been answered by the higher power, which is Los Angeles’ Naya Beat Records, who have announced a full reissue of the album for the very first time. What’s more, the long-awaited reissue comes complete with a previously unreleased track and a collection of dance-heavy remixes, which help to capture the impact which this album had on Asian dance music upon its release.
