Kuljit’s cultural mix

He’s credited with launching bhangra in Britain. For most musicians, pioneering a musical phenomenon would be enough. Ian Macrae discovers there’s much more to Kuljit Bhamra than bhangra beats

Check out the range and variety of Kuljit Bhamra’s collaborators: Jazz sax ace Andy Shepherd; concert pianist Joanna McGregor; far-out low-fi new wave band The Auteurs; queen of the Northumbrian pipes Katherine Tickell. And that’s not mentioning the galaxy of stars from the Asian and British Asian music scene with whom he’s worked.

The list of his stage and screen credits is equally impressive: Baji on the Beach, Bombay Dreams, the Far Pavilions and Bend It Like Beckham.

His background, though very different from his chosen path, has also contributed to shaping what he’s become. His grandfather was sent from the Punjab to Kenya by the British Raj to supervise the building of imperial railways. Kenya is where Kuljit was born and where, presumably, he took in the rhythms of the East African brand of high energy pop known as “high life” with his mother’s milk. When his father came to Britain to formalise his own civil engineering training, Kuljit and his mother went to India where, at the age of one, Kuljit contracted polio.

By the mid 60s, he and his mother had joined his father in England and were living in Southall, west of London. But Kuljit’s disability was already joining cultural considerations in shaping what he was to become.

“The immediate worry was ‘Who’s going to marry him?’ And the immediate answer was, ‘No-one’s going to marry him because no-one’s going to give their daughter to someone who’s deficient’. I eventually did get married at the age of 28 but I spent all that time believing that no-one was going to marry me. I laugh at it now – I’ve been married twice and had numerous girlfriends – but at the time it was true.

Southall is now one of Britain’s most vibrant Asian communities, but back then it was much more British. And one of the most British institutions in the community was Southall Grammar School, where Kuljit ended up and where he was regarded as different, not just as an Asian, but as a disabled kid in a mainstream school, a rarity then. He was taken along to games sessions in which he could play no part.

“I felt angry that no-one could really deal with me in that way. And I remember thinking, ‘I’ll show you’. And I still say my success in the music industry has been fuelled by, ‘Watch me, I’ll show you!’ My friends say, ‘Oh shut up Kuljit, it’s because you’re talented and nothing to do with your leg’,” he laughs.

A multi-instrumentalist, Kuljit’s true virtuosity lies with percussion, and in particular the distinctive sounding tabla. Once again, culture and disability came together to shape a unique way of doing things.

“There’s a very rigorous and traditional way of learning and playing tabla. One of the things I couldn’t do was sit on the floor cross-legged for hours on end.

Now if you see me play I sit on a chair. I used to laugh when I recorded at the BBC when they’d still put out the Persian rug and the joss sticks.

Kuljit started by accompanying his mother, who was a singer much in demand in Sikh temples. But they were increasingly asked to provide the entertainment at weddings once the religious element was over. Kuljit laughs as he remembers how they took control.

“At Punjabi weddings, they’d do the religious ceremony and then the men would go to a pub or working men’s club or school hall they’d hired, and drink loads of beer and whisky and eat loads of meat. And the women would be sitting in the kitchen with the bride. I remember my mother saying she wasn’t going to sing any more unless the women could come in the room where the men were partying. Now when you go to Punjabi weddings there’s always a dance floor.”

Once everyone was in the same room, Kuljit could begin to pursue his goal, getting them to dance.

“I’d take my energy from the room, I’d look at who was tapping their feet and concentrate on their energy. We’d mike the tabla up really loud and my Mum would sing and play the harmonium and we could get people to dance for more than an hour.”

And that was the birth of British bhangra, the phenomenon that was to drive the British Asian music scene for the next 20 years. Next came its refinement. By now Kuljit was listening to and absorbing a whole set of musical influences: the Bee Gees, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, as well as Punjabi folk songs and Bollywood soundtracks. And it all started to coalesce.

“I realised that if you turned an Indian record up really loud it sounded terrible. If you listened to a Bee Gees record, you had to dance, the groove was so incredible. So I thought the obvious thing to do was to bring those elements of production into Indian music. I didn’t create bhangra, bhangra’s been around for yonks, but I think what I did was to popularise it.”

There’s an undoubted snobbery which has kept bhangra from becoming part of what’s become known as the world music scene. Almost, says Kuljit, as though something this accessible can’t be very good. So he’s sought a wider audience via different routes and through his collaborations with western musicians. But he feels he always stays true and anchored to his Indian roots.

“The stuff that I’ve done that’s kind of western, I don’t think I’ve insulted my Indian ethics in it. I’m still keeping those elements alive but somehow trying to infiltrate the western world by saying ‘Shut up and listen to this, isn’t it amazing’”. And he firmly believes that his disability contributes to his being able to follow this uniquely individual path.

“If you’ve got a disability, are you not already quirky? I can get away with saying things that other people would find it inappropriate to say.”

And as he takes up a new role as artistic director of the Society for the Promotion of New Music, all the signs are that he’ll continue doing just that.

• Visit www.kuljitbhamra.com for more information