If Bombay Disco failed to satisfy your fascination with disco-era filmi themes fear not! Get your leisure suit/ Halston dress on once more as the Cultures Of Soul label – under the guidance of chief disco-digger Brother Cleve – goes all ‘Bombay the hard way’ on the crates of mouldy second hand vinyl to be found throughout the teeming sub-continent. And that’s a lot of music to trawl through because having arrived in India just as it was going out of fashion in the west at the start of the eighties, disco enjoyed a new lease of life providing the generic musical basis with which to soundtrack all manner of Bollywood output for the best part of another decade.
The obvious stuff has been avoided again and Cleve has dug deep for such curios Sardana Sargam’s Saat Samundar Paar with its almost New Romantic melodies, the jazz-disco wig-out of RD Burman’s Disco Music and the Kate Bush-meets-country-meets-late 70s electro boogie of Behroze Chatterjee’s Sweety Seventeen. Particularly enjoyable though are Hridaynath Mangeshkar’s off-the-beat disco skank Dance Music, film score giant Bappi Lahiri’s storming Abba-esque closer of the same name (Disco Music doesn’t seem to have been an under-used title in Indian film scores) and the exotic, spacey minimalisms of Asha Bhosle’s Pass Aao Na. Do the hindu Hustle!
(Out now or 9 December depending on your source on Cultures Of Soul)
