The Right Sort of Girl

by Anita Rani

  This is where my musical education picked up speed at a rapid pace. Two years earlier, in 1994, Goldie had released ‘Inner City Life’, UK Apache had released ‘Original Nuttah’ and our ears had been opened to something so incredible it could have been from an alien planet. We’d stepped through a musical portal into a world of sound we had no idea could exist. In this student bedroom, we watched movies and listened to all the latest drum n bass and jungle records, hip hop, jazz, funk, soul, neo soul, techno, house, rave. Synapses were being formed and were firing at a rapid pace. This is what I wanted in my life. This is what had been missing. I’d been searching for more art and culture and inspiration but now I had other people to open my eyes and show me what else was out there to discover. Music was filling an infinite well inside me and it just made sense to me. Music was still how I connected with emotions I kept shuttered, how I released emotions I couldn’t understand. I liked the people who also loved music, they were my kind of people, people I had something in common with for starters, who I could sit in a room with and not have to speak to if we didn’t feel the need. It was an exciting education learning about new music and artists which, only a couple of months before, I had no idea existed. Not only was I a fast learner, I was top of the class. I’d found my thing, I’d found my escape! Quite simply, it made me forget about everything else and be happy.

  It’s such a magnificent, overwhelming, spiritual feeling when you discover an incredible new tune or album, when you hear it for the first time and then share it with people who you know will appreciate it. You want to watch their eyes widen and heads nod up and down, see a warm smile creep across their face. Connecting to music is transcendent. I couldn’t get enough: Andy Weatherall, Ashley Beedle, Björk, Ry Cooder, Fela Kuti, Miles Davis, Talking Heads, Fleetwood Mac, Buena Vista Social Club, Portishead, PFunk, G-Funk, 4hero, Herbie Hancock, Nina Simone, Gilles Peterson, DJ Shadow, Tom Waits – to name a fraction and give you a sense of the vibe. No genre was left undiscovered! I was introduced to independent record labels like Blue Note, Rawkus, Ubiquity, Nuphonic, V Recordings, Metalheadz, Trojan, Warp and discovered the world of record shops. I became the little Asian lass with the green JanSport rucksack spending hours in Crash Records, Mr Jumbos and HMV.

  We were nerds, who loved nothing more than nerding out about music. The best part was bringing home an album and listening to it in its entirety, all in one go. An album was put on, inlay sleeves were studied for information. Who did the production? What label was it on? What were the samples? Then we’d go and buy the original song to hear where the sample was taken from. This was a world in which I was content. I was at home here. I felt safe. My ears could hear it all, the layers of production, the twiddly bits and the heavy bass and the strings and even the silences, and it all moved me. Music wasn’t just something to have on in the background at dinner parties, it was the guest of honour. It was the main event. It was pure pleasure to find other people who could happily sit and just listen and hear every inch of the tune, and let the music take us wherever it wanted. To just absorb ourselves in it. Music is in my bones and if you feel it too, you know what I’m talking about.

  I spent a lot of time inside, listening to music, but I wasn’t a complete hermit! I also went out. Oh my God, yes, I went out out. It is 1996, remember, and we’re heading into the age of technology and dance music. I still didn’t have a mobile phone or a laptop at this point but I had a Saturday job at Miss Selfridge, was still doing my radio shows in Bradford and had my flash new uni mates – I was going through an awakening. My mind was nourished by the music, my soul by the food and my body by the world of underground clubbing. The holy trinity complete.

  The club world became my temple. Dance music, house, techno, drum n bass all are meant to be played out loud, in dark underground clubs. Hip hop is meant to be heard played live on decks by some wizard in baggy jeans and a cap. And all this music is made to dance to. I was drawn to a world on the fringe, but it felt like the centre of the universe.

  In underground clubs, I felt safe. In these clubs, no one cared where you were from or what you looked like. There were people of all shades and flavours and, to the untrained eye, most people dressed to sweat, in simple jeans and a T-shirt. But subcultures are all about insider knowledge. In these clubs, the jeans and the T-shirts were always branded, and were usually hard to get hold of – Japanese brands like Evisu and Maharishi. The clothes were expensive but also street. In these clubs, people gathered for one reason only: the music. B-boys and B-girls met skater kids, met house lovers and techno heads. In the drum n bass club, everyone was part of the ‘junglist massive’.

  The two ways of connecting in a drum n bass club are through the music and through dancing. On these dancefloors, I always managed to find my space. It didn’t matter who I was next to, I didn’t even have to dance near my friends. I just needed to lose myself in the tunes. In the um ka umka um ka umka of the beat or the waaaaaa waaaaaa waaaaa of the bass. You’d always find the usual suspects, the girls in sexy, skimpy outfits, looking hot and a little self-conscious, the cool guys who danced at half time, stepping from foot to foot, usually with one eye on the girl in the skimpy outfit, the kids who came with wicked moves, ready to bust them out, ready to be seen. There was always a group of head nodders around the DJ booth, who refused to take their very expensive mountaineering coats off, and the one kid who had done a few too many Ecstasy, dancing four times as fast as everyone else, arms flailing.

  In a club, people can take off their Monday-to-Friday masks and be who they want to be. In a society so geared towards achievement and economic success, they need a place of release. And dancing the night away is so much better than downing 10 pints and getting into a fight. Music allowed me to take my mask off too, to not pretend to be anyone other than a person who liked rhythm, sounds, melodies and dirty basslines!

  I went to clubs to watch the DJs too. I’d get excited about hearing their set. I’d leave the club desperate to get my hands on the records that were played, as soon as they were released. I was immersed in this scene. I found my home. I belonged. No judgement, no expectation, no one to impress . . . in this space you come as you are. And I did. In my baggy trousers, my DC skater trainers or adidas shell toes, a hoodie, a Helly Hansen fleece and my rucksack. The rucksack came with me everywhere. Even on the dancefloor. What was in the rucksack was always a mystery, even to me, but it was always heavy and always a requirement. I didn’t go anywhere without it. Plus, it gave me a bit of extra space on the dancefloor so no one could get too close for comfort.

  I loved the connectivity between strangers in a club, congregating to worship at the altar of the DJ, letting the music move them to express themselves, to let their bodies move as they wish and as freely as they want, to smile and feel euphoria. It was a ritual. Nobody cared where you came from or what you had. Up until then, my entire life felt like I was constantly under someone’s gaze, being told how to behave and what was expected of me. At this point in my life, I didn’t feel like I fitted in anywhere. I was too white to be brown, too brown to be white. Too rebellious, too loud, too demanding, too angry, too opinionated. There was no place I’d found where I fitted, where I could be myself, where I felt comfortable just being me. I didn’t know who I was, I was still trying to figure it out, but at every turn it felt like I was being told that who I wanted to be wasn’t possible. Like I was always on the outside looking in. At home, at school, at the temple, it felt like every environment I walked into was trying to shape, mould and bend me to fit. But I just didn’t. It’s a crazy idea that we should always fit in! So small-minded. So reductive. Sometimes you just don’t.

  I just wanted something different and, finally, on the dancefloor in a club, I could express myself. Freely. Coming from a small community in Bradford where everybody seemed to care about your business, and a school where I always knew I didn’t fit the mould, it was a huge relief to be in a space where none of that mattered. Only your love of the music. I felt a s
ense of belonging like I had never felt anywhere else. Club culture defined a generation but also made me realise I had the freedom to define who I was. It was hands-in-the-air liberation.

  In drum n bass clubs, black kids mixed with white kids mixed with Asian kids. Somehow, the music unified across culture and class. The Criminal Justice Bill had been passed in 1994 to clamp down on the illegal raves that had been happening since the second Summer of Love in 1989. But it didn’t stop them happening. Kids will always find ways to party. My first ever general election was in 1997 and the tide had turned. After 18 years in government the Conservatives were out and Tony Blair sauntered in, singing ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, flying his ‘Cool Britannia’ Union Jack.

  While Britpop was fully endorsing the establishment, another movement was happening elsewhere that I was far more interested and invested in, because it affirmed my existence like nothing else. It was happening for a small select group of us who were in the know and those of us that were part of it were blessed to have been there: the Asian Underground. There was an Asian Underground music scene, unashamedly confident and uncompromising, not pandering to what anyone expected from brown musicians, a uniquely British sound. Producers were putting the music I had grown up listening to, classical Indian music, the tabla and the sitar, maybe some Indian vocals, and mixing it with electronic dance music. Also in 1996, the BBC had commissioned a brand new comedy series, Goodness Gracious Me, which started life as a radio series before transferring to TV. It became an instant cult classic. Yes, an actual Asian comedy on mainstream TV, showing the world how brown can be funny, clever and relatable. We could not believe it.

  For the first time in my life, I had a sound that was all for me, that I understood fully. I had producers and musical heroes who looked like me. This music wasn’t just being listened to in Asian pockets around the country. Major labels began signing British Asian artists, Asian Dub Foundation and Cornershop, Nitin Sawhney, Talvin Singh, rebellious and political and raw and cool. They were doing things on their own terms. This had nothing to do with pleasing the white music industry or our parents, this was a sub-culture, a coming of age for second generation British Asians. Had we finally arrived? Were we at last putting our cultural mark on Britain? Were we carving out a space?

  I got myself on student radio to do a weekly dub and Asian underground radio show. I teamed up with a man who owned a record shop in the Corn Exchange, where I was buying these sounds coming up from London.

  London. I had to get myself to where the rest of the world seemed to be. I couldn’t wait for things to head up north to me anymore. I was impatient. This meant booking a ticket on a National Express and heading down the M1 to that there London. I had some dreams to chase.

  * * *

  My passion for music started at home. I loved so many different styles of music but just like the rest of my life, it was compartmentalised based on who I was with. The music I listened to with my Indian family was the Bollywood classics of course, but I also found myself staying up late with the adults at dinner parties, adoring ghazals, poetry set to classical music. Jagjit Singh is one of my favourite voices of all time, I can spend hours alone in his company. I loved qawwalis, devotional Sufi songs, and there’s nothing like a bit of bhangra to get me onto a dancefloor at a family party. (I am Punjabi, after all.) Then there’s also the sweet religious sounds of beautiful shabads, bhajans and kirtan I would hear on a Sunday morning. The complex raags and rhythms of South Asian music that I took for granted, soaked into me before I heard my first blast of Western sounds.

  My love for music just grew and grew throughout my life, and is still growing. I absorb myself in global melodies still. Wherever in the world I travel, I have to sample their music, to pick up some of their local vibes, head to a club or a record shop, listen to local radio. If a song or piece of music comes on that my ear tunes into, I’ll stop a conversation mid flow to direct everyone’s attention to it. If you hear a tune that blows your mind and you’re desperate to share it with someone, I’m your girl. To this day, one of my favourite pastimes is hanging out in my room listening to music, planning a DJ set, or even creating a mix which I imagine I’m playing out in a dark, sweaty club, or in a field somewhere, sending the crowds berserk with my selection. I’m an epic bedroom DJ.

  If You Don’t Do It, Someone Else Will

  Music. Radio. TV. The Universe. These were my goals. I’d found my place and now I had a mission. I wanted to head to the epicentre and surround myself with music. At that time, there really was only one place: the BBC.

  My degree offered the Holy Grail: a six-month placement in TV. An opening into a world that seemed a million miles away. This was gold dust. An opportunity to get your foot in the door of a notoriously difficult industry to get into. (Unless, of course, Daddy is the boss.)

  I was already working my ass off at three different jobs to afford uni: data imputer at GE Capital (if you’ve ever applied for a store card on a Saturday and had to have your credit checked, I was the person telling you whether you can get that dress on the never-never or not), part-time radio presenter (not that this paid) and my new absolute favourite, bartender at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. There were placements around the country and a few based at the BBC. Some of the kids on my course were already discounting London because they knew they couldn’t afford it. There was only one placement I wanted and that was at the music department at the BBC. I wasn’t very good at giving myself room for manoeuvre, so this had to be mine.

  My tutor had other ideas. ‘I think you should apply for the placement at the BBC Asian Programmes Unit, in Birmingham.’ Hmmm. I wonder why he thought of that one for me? I wasn’t offended or surprised that he’d suggested it, I simply set him straight. There were two reasons I wouldn’t be doing that.

  1. Because I love music and THE ONLY placement I want is in the music department at the BBC.

  2. I’m related to far too many people in Birmingham, so there’s no way I’m going there.

  That’s right, Howard, you just got told! Imma head for London, you’re not going to pigeonhole me! (A few years later, the Asian Programmes unit would be instrumental in helping my career, but I wasn’t to know that back then.)

  I trained like a warrior for the interview, like an assassin, like Bruce Lee preparing for a fight. I’d been prepping my whole life for this! I walked into Western House (renamed Wogan House now and home to Radio 2 and 6 Music) and felt a rush of excitement looking at everyone working away at their desks. This is actually the place where they make TV!

  TV, radio and music were my specialist subjects. During the interview, I discussed my thoughts about the underground East Coast hip hop scene in the US and I clocked the BBC producer had not the foggiest what I was on about. He was obviously smart enough to recognise that I was just the person who should be working on his programme. I was plugged in, knew my stuff and was confident in my taste, maybe even a little cocky. And guess what? Yours truly only went and blagged the blooming placement! I was off to work at the BBC, in music, on a BBC2 music show called The Ozone. A whole six months getting paid absolutely nothing and I could not wait.

  This was my introduction to life at the bottom rung of the ladder in TV. You get paid nothing and you’re bloody grateful for the opportunity because, if you don’t do it, someone else is prepared to do it for less. After a couple of months in London, down to my last pennies, I managed to get them to at least pay my travel costs. And you ARE truly grateful for the experience. I was prepared to do it. What else was a student loan for?

  The Sunday before I was due to start work, I moved into a tiny attic room in a house I was sharing with six other housemates from university. We were living all the way out in Hendon, a north London residential suburb, seven miles from the centre. It’s a great location if you want to jump on the M1 to head north or have easy access to the M25. I was there because we knew nothing about London geography and it was dirt cheap (for London). It was so far out, I might a
s well have commuted from Leeds. We were giddy with excitement though, the first night in London on our own, and I was about to start a job in telly. We needed to celebrate, so we did what British students do better than anyone else: we got shit-faced.

  BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP. My alarm went off at 7am and I woke up with a shock, still fully dressed, lying on top of my bed sheets. I could feel my tiny brain bouncing around in my skull. Somehow I managed to get through my first day by nodding at everything people were telling me and sitting in the toilet when I needed a time out or to micro-nap. I spent the entire day swallowing my own saliva and counting down the minutes before I could next lie down. Note to self: do not go into work hungover EVER again, especially not on day one.

  I was in London, with no connections, no money, at the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the pile, and it felt great. At no point did I think, look at me, this Asian lass from Bradford, working at the BBC. I just thought this is where I need to be. Even though I was the only person like me in the entire department, back then I was confident that I belonged there. It was only music, what’s my race got to do with that?!

  My job was mainly to call in music videos from record companies and do the tea round at least 75 times a day. Within a week, I was already running my own parallel side hustle. I was ordering vinyl from all the record labels I loved and calling up the clubs I wanted to go to at the weekend and blagging guest list by saying I was coming down to do a reccy for possible filming locations. No one wants to queue for a club. This was London in 1998, the heyday of celeb haunts like the Met and Atlantic bars in central London, where Oasis, All Saints and every artist at the time were papped stumbling out of most nights of the week. But I wanted a spot on the guest list for some of the dirtiest dance joints: 333, Mother Bar, The End, Bar Rumba, Blue Note in Hoxton. Really, the last place I wanted to be was at the celeb hangout. I did go to the Met Bar once and I met Björk in the toilets. Washing my hands and side glancing Björk washing hers is a moment I’ll treasure forever. The two of us, tandem hand washing.