Ritu

HEINZ REICH

Ritu, imagine you are sitting in a plane, you can’t sleep for some reason, the in-flight movie is boring like always, and close to you is one of our students. So now imagine you have to tell him or her your life – where would you start and how would you do it?

RITU

OK, well, I’d start by being born. I was born in London in the 1960s, spent pretty much all my life there, apart from a little brief trip out to America as a child and a brief period where we lived in Wales. But I mainly grew up in East London in the ‘60s, ‘70s, which was quite a racist area at that time. In fact, it still is to some degree.

And jumping forth to my musical career [laughs] – after being born, I became a DJ. When I was at school, I was very interested in music. I was part of the school choir, the school orchestra, the school marching band, I learned to play trumpet. I was also asked then to play tuba because I was told I had big lips [laughter]. And I taught myself to play guitar and piano. I didn’t get my first record player until I was about 11. I had to really beg my dad for a record player. Finally I got this record player and the first track I bought was a track called “Darling” by David Cassidy [laughs in embarrassment]. And so began my musical origins.

Growing up, I really wanted to be an artist, a painter, and I went to art school. I went to Chelsea School of Art when I was 18. And it was while I was a student that I started to go clubbing and somehow felt that I could do better than some of the DJs I was seeing in various clubs that I was in. And that’s how my DJ career began.

One of the clubs I was going to, they got rid of all the DJs suddenly and I said, “Hey, can I have a go?” And they said, “Alright.” And I ended up being resident at that club for the next six years. And somehow, I think my painting, the creativity that went with my painting, my art side, somehow got transferred over into DJing. So it started off as a hobby, but 17 years on, it’s a profession. There’s a potted history.

HEINZ REICH

Fine, the flight might go on for another 11 hours, but we can still switch topics. There is a bus-load of serious things that, of course, I want to talk to you about, but I think before we come to the what and the why, it’s always kind of interesting for the people to know who is sitting here. So there is an interesting detail, that you said your best feature is the dimple on your bottom. Can you explain this?

RITU

Erm, no [laughs]. I always wanted dimples on my face, and unfortunately, my younger brother, who’s nine years younger than me, got them and I didn’t. But I think it was some years later that someone pointed out that I actually had a dimple on one of my buttocks. So it just kind of ended up in the wrong place, but it has no relevance or no bearing, no connection with the music side of what I do [laughter].

HEINZ REICH

But it can be found when you are Googling on the internet under the name of DJ Ritu.

RITU

There is all kind of weird things under Google under the name of DJ Ritu. None of it has been put up by me, so…

HEINZ REICH

You also said that your biggest inspirations are your mom and dad. Now, that’s really interesting because, I mean, if my father had been my biggest inspiration, I would have become a fisherman or filming documentaries about springboks in the jungle, but no music. Did your parents inspire you musically or do you mean that spiritually?

RITU

I think my parents have inspired me more spiritually, and also I guess the work ethic is very, very strong with my parents. And what I am very conscious of is, I am second generation Asian, but they are obviously first generation. They came from India to the UK in the late 1950s, early ‘60s. And it was very, very, very, very difficult for them, you know? Being from a country that was formerly a colony, many people in India and some of the other colonies regarded the UK as being the place to get the best education. Everything that was English was the best thing. And, of course, all these people went over there to work and then found, you know, signs upon boarding houses saying, “No coloreds, no dogs, no Irish, no this, no that.”

One year my father went to Trafalgar Square for the New Year’s Eve celebrations as a young man, he must’ve been around 20, 25, something like that, and he was punched in the face just for being Indian. So I suppose in that sense my parents have been very inspirational, because what I have seen them do is I’ve seen them struggle. I have seen them work very hard and not complain. I suppose a lot of my strength, actually, comes from them. To this day they are remarkably liberal, they are very encouraging about what I do. They weren’t at first, I hasten to add. I was kind of regarded as the black sheep of the Indian community that I grew up in in the UK, because I didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. But once I started presenting for the BBC, that’s when my parents then felt that this was something they could identify with. It had status. And that’s why since then, they have been much more, sort of, “OK, we understand what you do now and it’s alright.”

HEINZ REICH

So I suppose that this possibility of doing the radio show for BBC was one of the big milestones in your career. Your first show has this very interesting title called “Bhangra in Beds.” How did you come to this title? Is it played in the morning, when everybody is still sleeping?

RITU

OK, out of the radio shows that I have done and still do, none of them have been titled by me. The show I do currently is for the national BBC Asian Network, it’s called [grimacing] “The Mix,” which is not a title I would have chosen. I have also presented two series on Asian music for the BBC World Service and they were titled “Bhangra Beat” and “Bhangra In Beds,” which was the first radio show I started doing, for BBC Three Counties Radio. At that time it was called BBC Radio Bedfordshire, covering the county of Bedfordshire in the UK. And the short version of Bedfordshire was Beds. So there was a program called “Breakfast in Beds” and blah-di-blah, so my program came to be called “Bhangra in Beds.”

HEINZ REICH

OK, no sexual connotation or whatever?

RITU

None whatsoever.

HEINZ REICH

OK, no mattress mambo. That was ‘92, what was the next big step in your career?

RITU

I turned 28 and literally a week later, my six-year residency, which I mentioned before, suddenly went. I looked in the magazine and found that some other people were DJing in my residency the following week [laughs in disbelief]. And within the next year, all my DJ residencies went.

So I kind of thought, “Well, maybe I am not supposed to DJ anymore.” I actually really thought that, and I struggled to get work for quite a few months. You know, I had the odd gig here and the odd gig there, but nothing regular. And it was because of that I moved into radio. I just sent a demo tape off to the BBC. It was a terrible demo tape, absolutely terrible. But they liked my voice and they said, “Yeah, great, come in and we will have you,” sort of thing. And it was actually through doing the radio program that I started to meet a lot of people. The radio program led me to meet up with a guy called Mitts, he was part of the first ever Sikh rap outfit. It was three Sikh guys, you know with turbans and everything, and they caused quite a stir in the UK in the early '90s because they were just so unusual to look at. Mitts, who was one of them, was setting up a club in conjunction with two of his other student friends. And this club turned out to be the first ever weekly Asian club in the UK – possibly even the world, actually, not even only the UK.

It was called Bombay Jungle. It opened up in The Wag, which was a very well-known, mainstream sort of club. This was every Tuesday night, and suddenly Shaftesbury Avenue in central London, the whole face of it completely changed because suddenly there were all these Asians. And we used to pack 700 kids into this club, there’d be piles of young people outside who couldn’t get in because it was just too full. The media really got hold of it. I mean, we had film crews in from Japan, or Canada, or India, just everywhere. So it caused a major, major buzz, this club, and I was fortunate enough to be one of the resident DJs at it. So that was quite a turning point for me, and that led me to the formation of Outcaste Records.

Bombay Jungle opened in 1993, Outcaste we founded in 1994. I was being sent records, free records as you do, from various PR companies. One of the PR companies was a PR company called Heavyweight Media, and they were sending me records by people like Apache Indian, the Ragga Twins and so on. And the guy that was sending me the records, we ended up talking a lot on the phone. And we talked about how we felt that the music industry was basically blocked for Asian talent to come forward. We felt that there were no openings for Asian people in the music industry at all.

If you are Asian, you could go and join one of the bhangra labels and do bhangra, but what if you don’t want to do that? The only other alternative was Nation Records, which had been set up around 1989, 1990, and that was much more about a kind of global chaos fusion thing. So we really felt that there was something missing. It was a big gap in the market, a big gap for Asian artists to go to.

We also talked about how we felt that for people of African or Caribbean descent, that certain moves had been made forward in terms of how cool it was to be black on the street. At this time, I was also working as a youth worker, I was managing a youth center in North London. And what I was seeing there was black kids, white kids, Greek kids, Asian kids, and all the kids wanted to be black. Like, they were wearing hip-hop kind of clothing, talking in a kind of urban street, black street language. They were listening to black street music and so on. And I said to Shabs at Heavyweight Media, “Wouldn’t it be great if it was cool to be down with the brown?” Meaning that, mainly through music, maybe we could change something about how Asians would be perceived in the UK in terms of the coolness factor. Because at that point, we were definitely not cool. We were the people that were running the corner shops. We were the people that made curry, we were the doctors. We weren’t regarded as musical, we weren’t regarded as sporty. Nobody wanted to be like us. And so that is how we started with Outcaste. It was with a specific view to making a lot of social and political changes and not just music that was equally British and Eastern.

HEINZ REICH

And haven’t you been surprised yourself by the immediate success of Outcaste Recordings?

RITU

It’s a surprise now. I think we didn’t really feel the fruits of our labors until ‘96, maybe ‘97, when the Asian underground scene started to be a scene and started to be an industry and started to be something that the mainstream press was writing about and talking about. And we started to see a lot of excitement, particularly in Europe. In fact, Europe was far more receptive and far more open and far more keen and eager to be hearing this music and hearing the artists, far more than the UK was. In the UK, we have to remember, the UK has a special relationship [miming quote marks] with the Indian subcontinent, which again goes back to being the former colonies. And so we were constantly battling with this thing of “It’s not cool to be Asian, and the music ain’t cool either,” right?

So when I look at what is happening now, I can see, really, the fruits of our labors and of many other people around us that also worked towards the same goals at that time. If somebody had told me that this year I would be going around the world and playing Bollywood in places like Belgrade, in Stockholm, in Cairo, in Istanbul, I would have laughed. Two years ago, I would have laughed. I mean, if somebody said to me, “Yeah, you will be going around the world, playing the Asian underground,” I wouldn’t have laughed, because that has been normal for me for the last eight, nine years.

And in fact another reason why we set up Outcaste, one of our other things that was in our mission statement, was that we hoped that by making music that was very palatable for western people, you know, drum and bass that might have a tabla loop stuck in it or a sitar somewhere, that this would be the stepping stone, the first step on the ladder for non-Asians to access Asian music. We hoped that what would then happen is that non-Asians would then access more traditional forms of music after that. And that didn’t happen in the ‘90s, but it seems to be happening now.

HEINZ REICH

You have found a very interesting way of broadening the spectrum of the work of a DJ with your project Sister India by adding visual elements, dancers, rappers. Could you briefly introduce to us how that happened?

RITU

The band that I had before Sister India was called The Asian Equation and that was created by accident. Basically, I was DJing in Brussels and a promoter that was there came over to me and said, “Listen, I love what you do and every year I hold an annual live music, six-week thing in Berlin” – it’s actually Heimatklänge – “and I would really like you to come there and perform there, but DJs are very boring to look at.” I said, “Thank you.” And so he basically gave me a budget and said, “Go and do something with this money.”

So what I decided to do is I called upon various musician friends of mine and I thought, “Well, OK, they don’t look boring. Even if I look boring, they don’t.” So I tried to devise a way of working with these guys – it was all guys, actually, I was pretty much the only woman there – and we went off to Berlin and did these five shows. So Asian Equation just suddenly took on a life of its own. It just kind of snowballed. I think maybe about two years later, 1998, around then, I started to get serious about it and I realized that I really was enjoying what I was doing with it, because now I wasn’t the only person, this solitary person DJing, I was collaborating with other people. There was a creative exchange going on. And I found that it actually brought out my performance aspect. Normally when I’ve been DJing, I’m in a little booth and I’ve got my headphones on [stands up], and I’m like this, the foot is tapping away like this [taps her foot and puts her head to the side as if listening to headphones]. With Asian Equation I found out that I can suddenly come out of myself a little bit more. So it brought out the performer in me to some degree as well.

Along the way I kept meeting quite interesting Asian women who were musicians. There was a woman called Sudha, who you will see on the DVD in a minute, who was actually a Latin percussionist and she works with Faithless. And she was also resident at clubs like The Haçienda in Manchester, Cream in Liverpool, Ministry of Sound in London. And there was another woman called Jotie. She was an Indian woman, she was playing violin for people like Joan Armatrading, Ryuichi Sakamoto – excuse my pronunciation – Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra. She was working with a lot of top people.

Anyway, so these women were kind of dotted around, they were in the background, they were like session musicians, or just background people in various bands and clubs. And I kept thinking, “What would it be like to take an all-female, all-Asian team? What would it be like if Asian Equation was not all guys, but was all women? How would that be, what kind of energy would that create?” And anyway, we applied for a grant and we got it. And that’s how we created Sister India, as an all-Asian female equivalent of The Asian Equation.

(music: Sister India – “Out Of Place”)

HEINZ REICH

This is apparently a really well-done blend of fusion of Indian elements and very up-to-date rhythms and parts of, let’s say, western club culture. This attitude is quite opposed to that of those elderly gentlemen yesterday who were very, very conservative, clinging to the old production values of the ‘60s and the ‘70s as the only valid formula. How come you and your partners are so open minded?

RITU

[Teasing] I think it’s probably the dimple on the bottom, that probably has a lot to do with it. I mean if you have a dimple on your bottom, you have to be really open-minded afterward.

I see myself as someone who is here to entertain. And I am a firm believer that people come to my gigs or come to my clubs, that they are paying money and that my job is to entertain them. And that, I think, fits straight away hand in hand with having an open approach, because you have to be saying, “Well, let me come to you, what can I do for you?” You are saying that, aren’t you? You are aiming to please, you are aiming to provide something or provide something that’s being asked for.

HEINZ REICH

If you come back to the political implications of music and your role as an ambassador between two cultures, I suppose that if you want this effect that people say, “Hey, it’s cool to be down with the Asians,” you can’t be hardcore, playing traditional Asian music because then the western guys will never get it. And on the other hand, if you would be just a regular drum & bass DJ, you would do nothing for the Asian community. So, this was probably the best formula.

RITU

Well, this is one of the formulas. I mean, the Sister India formula is fusion-y. It is what some kind of people would term as Asian underground, though we, in fact, like to describe ourselves as a club music-based band. We are basically a club on stage with a whole visual show and whatever.

But with the clubs that I run…? OK, let’s take Kuch Kuch, for example, which was the first Bollywood club in London – we opened three years ago in 2000. And there I am playing pretty hardcore traditional Asian music from the Indian film industry, Bollywood, and also bhangra, which is pretty traditional. It is definitely not what you just heard on the DVD at all. Quite different. But there, what I’ll do there is I will mix it up with R&B, I will mix it up with house.

But I think what we’re seeing now is a coming-of-age of British Asians. We’re seeing a movement that can’t be stopped any longer and it is filtering out and out and out and becoming more and more mainstream. I mean, I will pretty much bet that most of you or a lot of you are from different countries, but I would imagine that almost all of you have heard of Panjabi MC.

HEINZ REICH

Who has heard of Panjabi MC?

RITU

[Looks around] OK, so most people. Because the track “Mundian To Bach Ke” by him, which went to number #5 in the British charts in January this year, had already charted in Germany, went to number #2 in Germany before Christmas. It was playing in Turkey when I was there in September last year. So it’s kind of going into the Top 5 or Top 10 in almost every country in the world. And that is just an amazing, absolutely amazing thing.

HEINZ REICH

Do you also have a typical example of bhangra here?

RITU

I've got three typical examples of bhangra here, and there is probably a fourth type that I didn’t bring with me, which is a shame. I am going to give you three types. If we start with the first, that would be a very traditional form of bhangra, much more how it would be done in India itself, as opposed to in its fusion world or in its diasporic world in the UK or the States or Canada or wherever. OK, so here we go.

(music: Gurdas Maan – “Apna Punjab Hove”)

That one is actual a very nationalistic piece as well. It’s one of those ones, if you DJ in an Asian club you will get a lot of Punjabis coming over and saying, “Play that track! Can you play that track for me, ‘Apna Punjab’?” The part of India that is Punjab, northern India, it is in Pakistan as well. Punjab was actually divided by the partition of Pakistan and India. So the region of Punjab falls in both. And bhangra music is Punjabi. It’s not Gujarati, it’s not Sri Lankan, it’s Punjabi, and the lyrics are sung in the Punjabi language. They are sung in Punjabi. And nine times out of ten, in fact, 99 times of 100, it will be sung by a guy. There’s not women. There are very few women in that music, in that scene.

HEINZ REICH

Is Panjabi MC also a second generation Punjabi?

RITU

Yeah, he is and his real name is Raj [laughs]. Yeah, and he is from Birmingham. Yes, he is Punjabi.

HEINZ REICH

What are the typical bhangra dance moves then?

RITU

Bhangra music originates, as we say, from the Punjab, it is a folk music. And really it was largely created around the spring, for the harvest of vegetables and corn and what have you. And the main drum that is used in bhangra music is the big double-sided drum that is put around the neck and beaten with sticks. And it is called the dhol, OK? So you will hear that over and over again in bhangra music. And the dhol is very much about [imitating] ‘tchaka-tchaka-tchaka-tchak’. Come and dance! Come and dance! It is really loud, it is brash, a very brash sort of drum.

(music: B21 – Unknown)

You can hear it is British produced because there is a b-line for starters. Because on the first one we heard, which was Indian produced, a bassline is not that important, you know? Quite often it will almost be missing and quite often you have to turn up the bass on your graphic equalizer just to get something there at the bottom end, apart from the bass of the drums. Whereas the British-produced stuff, it will always have a bassline. You can hear, obviously, the beats are metronomed or drum-machined or whatever. It feels British, you know what I mean? It is not Indian-produced. You can hear it.

And here is something that is very, very British. What is going on in the moment is a very big move towards urban bhangra at the moment in the UK. And that takes two forms: it tends to be either garage or it will tend to be R&B. On the garage side, you tend to get again a very strong bassline. You tend to have a rap, which will be done in English or Patois or something of that kind. And then the singing vocal will be in Punjabi.

(music: Unknown)

So how can you pigeonhole bhangra? You have heard three very different things there. And if you add Panjabi MC into that as well, that is four different things. So there is a lot going on with the music, and I think the only thing that really unifies it is the fact that, as I say, there will be some lyrical content which is sung in Punjabi. And that’s about the only common ingredient now going on. The interesting thing with a track like this, for example, is, I run DJ workshops in various places, and some of the schools we are working in East London recently, it has been quite phenomenal. You know what I said earlier about being a youth worker and seeing all the kids wanting to be black? And the schools in East London at the moment, the Asian kids bring music like this in and all the other kids are listening to this and they’re bringing stuff in like this too. So suddenly people are wanting to be brown. Does it make sense? And that’s a really big difference that I’m seeing at the moment. For me, to be seeing white kids listening to this in school with their Asian friends is like… But you can hear why, because apart from the fact that they wouldn’t be able to understand the Punjabi lyric, everything else is familiar to them. You know, the tempo, the beat, the rhythm, everything is familiar.

HEINZ REICH

You already mentioned Dr. Dre and Missy Elliott. We have witnessed that big hip-hop artists have been sampling elements of Asian underground stuff or bhangra. So would you be happy about this? Would you say this is another achievement, even black [people] now would say, "Hey, it’s cool to be down with the Asians”? Or is it just that they are in need of a little bit of exotic topping on their production?

RITU

The Asian music industry is very split on this question at the moment. I think we are all very excited to suddenly see some progress at last with Asian music becoming more mainstream. But everyone is terrified that it is going to be fad, a trend, it’s going to come and go as quickly as it arrived. My personal belief is that it I don’t think that it will come and go as quickly as it arrived. I think it will be around to stay for quite a while. The reason being is that, if you came to Bombay Jungle back in 1993, you would have heard us playing bhangra, but you would have heard us playing ragga, you would have heard us playing jungle, you would have heard us playing swing. We would have heard all the music styles playing in there.

But if you went to a black music kind of club, you wouldn’t have heard any Asian music being played whatsoever. So, what’s been going on in the Asian music scene for years in the UK, is we have been having this one-way conversation with black music and we’re having a one-way conversation with black culture. And it has never been the other way. It has never been a dialogue, it has never been a two-way conversation. And now, there is a two-way conversation going on, so we had Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On”, Dr. Dre’s “Truth Hurts/Addictive”, which actually was a bit naughty because he sampled, I think it was Lata Mangeshkar, but he didn’t get permission from the Indian record company. I think it was the EMI/India. And he just thought he could get away with taking this Asian lady’s voice and not telling anybody. And EMI/India knew that he was about to release this track, and they sent him letters and phoned him or phoned his production company and said, “Look. All we’re saying is, you need to clear this sample, you need to pay us for it and then you can release your track.”

And they just ignored these letters and just went ahead, released the track anyway. So when it’s done like that, with no respect whatsoever for the artist and for the record company, then that I’m not happy about at all, and I think a lot of people weren’t very happy about that. And ultimately, if Dr. Dre or Missy Elliott or any of these other people are putting Asian music out there, it sends it out to a wider audience than any Asian artist could take it to. If an Asian artist had produced “Get Ur Freak On,” it would not have gotten into charts. That wouldn’t have happened. So Missy Elliott could take it one step further and to new audiences as well. So now there is a dialogue. The one-way conversation has stopped, there is a dialogue going on and that’s got to mean a longer life for Asian music outside of the underground.