The Pearl Diver

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Sharon Prabhakar

Sharon Prabhakar is an Indian pop diva and theatre actress who shot to fame in the early eighties with her collaboration with Bappi Lahiri, ‘Mere Jaisi Haseena Ka Dil’, for the movie ‘Armaan’ (1981). Around the same time she released her LP, ‘Chal Disco Chal’ with Musarrat Nazir, Peter Moss and Deepak Khazanchi and got the title of the Disco Queen of India. 

Sharon has claimed international recognition with her performances at multiple pop festivals, including one at the White House and sharing the stage with icons like Celine Dion and Michael Jackson but her most memorable work has been her collection of covers called ‘London Calling- The Best from the West - Hindi Disco Hits.’ 

Singing International hits in Hindi like ‘Vo Mera Hi Hai’ (Boney M cover) and ‘Halchal Aaj Ki Raat’ (Donna Summers cover) turned out to be very successful for her as she was working with tunes that had already proven to be catchy as well as being one of the first pop stars of India who made music apart from for films gave her a very distinctive image. Ranging from sensual to fun and groovy, her collection of music is still unforgettable with fans all over the world desperately searching for her albums on the internet, ‘Disco Mastana’ being the most fondly remembered. 

Her popularity started fading when the trends started shifting from Indi-pop to the remix era of music. She continues to act in theatres and sing and is one of India’s most respected corporate trainers. Some of her songs from the eighties like ‘Follow Me’ were recently used in the 2020 film, ‘Bahut Hua Samman.’

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Musarrat Nazir

Musarrat Nazir is a Pakistani actress from the sixties, who’s famous for her wedding and folk songs. Being one of the most admired actresses of her time and one of the first pop icons of the region, she is also known for quitting her career at its peak to start a family. 

While her folk songs are still deeply rooted in Pakistani culture, her music from the era of disco seems to be forgotten. After quitting her acting career, she reemerged in the eighties with her eclectic Hindi covers of western hits, like ‘Rahen Tere Bina’ (Eye in the Sky - The Alan Parsons Project) and ‘Gale Se Laga Lo’ (Happy Together - Turtles). 

The tunes of Boney M were fused into the subcontinent in 1981 when Musarrat recorded the LP ‘M3 Disco Fantasy in Hindi’ with the celebrated Indian playback singer, Mahendra Kapoor. The interesting thing about this LP was that the lyrics weren’t loosely translated into Hindi from the original songs in English. The already vibrant melodies of the greatest hits of Boney M were layered with catchy and fresh Hindi lyrics that were enjoyed across countries as whole new songs. 

Musarrat followed the same trend in her next collaboration with an Indian singer, Sharon Prabhakar, ‘Chal Disco Chal’, which was released in India in 1981. 

Unfortunately the massive gap between the popularity of Bollywood music and solo pop albums back in the day made these songs fade away from pop culture. These tracks are now found here and there on YouTube and other streaming platforms where her fans from India and Pakistan fondly remember the ‘good old days’ in the comments while some new listeners compare them to the originals. 

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Emergency Kiss - Juice

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EMERGENCY KISS: FROM THE GUTTER TO THE STARS

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

― Oscar Wilde. By the time they made Love Is Slow Poison, they had survived years of misfortune, including a fire that destroyed their first synthesisers- The only ones they had.The album was recorded at a friend’s garage and was released through a label whose infrastructure and reputation was as non-existent as the band themselves. A few friends got the CD’s which at that time were still novel (and expensive) in India.

In the first half of the 2000, a new generation of musicians took inspiration from the shimmering tracks on Love Is Slow Poison and soon EKISS became minor cult celebrities in Bangalore.

The band recorded two more albums after Love Is Slow Poison, but they fell apart long before the second album was released. Three women who couldn’t play music had run out of steam.

However, like all good things, their music refused to come to an end. 

One track on the album, “JUICE”, best listened to in its entirety, as it is a lyrical tour de force, with lines like:

“AUR JAB GARMI LAGHTI HAI TO TUM PHIGALNE LAG TE HO.” When it’s hot, you begin to melt.

Is this some kind of prescient love anthem for the climate change era? I don’t know.

Emergency Kiss’s music is edgy and unapologetically noisy, with elements of jazz and post-rock. The jazz comes in not because they were trying but because the music often drifts into “Sun Ra” type of a tonality.

The band members didn’t care for the terms ‘funk’, ‘rock’, or ‘synth-pop’; they simply wanted to make music. Songs like “Juice”, which is also the band’s greatest hit, reflects the band’s awareness of the constraints of being in a band, with the words “Maine manga juice, tune Zeher pilya” or “I asked for juice, you gave me poison instead”

While Emergency Kiss’s music is incredibly poppy and catchy, they wrote in Hindi. They sing in Hindi. They actually wrote in Hindi. They didn’t think twice about this, and seem to have embraced their limitations for the sake of creativity. Although we often see many bands of South Indian descent in the UK rarely do we see South Indian bands writing in Hindi. This is partly because Hindi is a classical language of the north and partly because South Indians aren’t typically taught to write in Hindi until much later.

Emergency Kiss, despite being teenagers, displayed an incredible amount of self-awareness both lyrically and musically.Interestingly, despite the intense (but playful) musical style of the band, none of Emergency Kiss’s instruments sound ‘awful’. If anything, their strong, catchy melodies often fall into very catchy pop melodies.There is still plenty of energy and youthful exuberance in this band, as evident in this video that was released two years ago. 

Rumors abound that the band’s album - “Love is slow poison” will soon be released by an Indian Label.