When Muhammad Ayyub moved to Birmingham from Pakistan in 1961, he immediately felt homesick. Back in Gujrat, he had enjoyed a “pleasant and social life”, collecting records, watching films and going to festivals alongside his teaching job. But here, in the early years of south Asian migration to the West Midlands, there was little he could engage with – he and his small community only had each other’s homes to gather in and reminisce. “Now we have TV channels, concerts and musicians visiting from India and Pakistan, but at that time it was different,” he says. “We missed our music, we missed our culture.”
Fed up with low-paid, unstable work, Ayyub opened a shop selling transistor radios on Balsall Heath Road in 1966. Around the same time, the cinema next door had introduced Sunday matinee screenings for south Asian films and people would gather in his shop afterwards, discussing the scores and expressing longing for the sounds they had grown up with. Prompted by their requests, Ayyub began importing records from India and Pakistan. The initial order, which took more than six weeks to arrive by ship, went like hotcakes, he recalls, smiling.
What started as a humble, community-minded endeavour went on to become Oriental Star Agencies (OSA), one of the biggest south Asian record labels in the country and the cornerstone of UK bhangra. “OSA introduced Asian music to the world and passed it on to the next generation,” Ayyub tells me, now aged 84. “If it was not for this label, people would have lost their culture, their language, their music.”
As more families arrived, demand increased. By then, OSA was putting in wholesale orders for south Asian folk, qawwalis, pop music and funk, as well as music from Bollywood and its Pakistani equivalent, Lollywood. With only one other south Asian music distributor in the UK, the Balsall Heath shop became inundated with advance orders and visitors from across the country. “People used to wait for weeks and weeks for their favourite records,” Ayyub says. “They felt very deprived.”
In 1969, the business launched a label offshoot after Ayyub was approached by local Punjabi folk outfit the Bhujhangy Group to release a record. Their fusion of western and Asian instruments and rhythms became hugely popular and laid the foundations for commercial bhangra in the UK. Nurturing talent in the West Midlands and beyond, OSA would go on to launch the UK careers of leading south Asian and British Asian stars, including Malkit Singh, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Bally Sagoo. “We put Birmingham on the world music scene,” Ayyub says.
By 2000, Singh would be named the biggest selling bhangra artist ever with almost 5m album sales at that point, most of them on OSA; Khan would be signed by Peter Gabriel’s Real World label and collaborate with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, a big crossover success built on the foundation of approximately 125 OSA-released albums.
Meanwhile, after years of making music in his bedroom, Sagoo began working as an in-house producer at OSA in 1989, then released his own solo records on the label. Drawing on the wealth of cultures in Birmingham, his music welded dub and reggae basslines with Indian percussion and vocals. “They launched my career,” Sagoo says of OSA, recalling how he swapped his pirate radio slots, bootlegs and homemade CDs sold outside of colleges for international acclaim and pop success: his 1996 bhangra/trip-hop crossover track Dil Cheez reached No 12 in the UK charts.
“The dream was to go into a studio but who was going to give you the chance?” he says, citing the hostility and scepticism of white industry figures in the early 1990s. Within four years of working with OSA, Sagoo signed with Sony to release Bollywood Flashback in 1994. “It was the first Indian record played on Radio 1 – that’s how hard it was. You needed that break.”
Sagoo’s layering of electronic music with traditional forms bridged the gap between different generations, allowing British Asians born towards the end of the century to connect with their parents’ heritage and languages – and ushered in the Asian Underground, continued by the likes of Asian Dub Foundation and Mercury prize-winning Talvin Singh.
But despite the success of the label and the genres it cultivated, the story behind OSA and British Asian music remains little told. “When we launched Bally Sagoo’s second album Wham Bam 2 in 1992, we sold 50,000 vinyls and CDs [in] the first week,” Ayyub says. “But as they were not registered in the mainstream charts, English people didn’t know that such artists existed.”
OSA continued as a distributor and label into the new millennium; its output reached a new audience with multiple tracks from the label being included on the Bend It Like Beckham soundtrack in 2002. But in 2017, after five decades of business, the decline of physical sales and increasing overheads forced the label and the Balsall Heath shop to close.
As the site was being emptied, artist and archivist Faisal Hussain, whose father and grandfather used to dig around for records there, hurried over to salvage what he could in his family’s frozen food company van. “I got a call from Mr Ayyub saying: ‘If you want anything, you better come now,’” he says. “It was like the call you get when someone is ill in hospital.”
In the five years since, Hussain has been building an online and physical archive of the 3,000 records that were saved, now on show in the South Asia gallery of Manchester Museum as part of his True Form project. He believes it is a one of a kind collection that is representative of OSA’s expansive output, spanning Partition-era phonographs to 00s remixes, by way of classical music, electro ragga and Hindi Abba covers. “It’s one of the only institutions that bookmarks the entire history of south Asian music,” Hussain says.
But the archive is more than just a catalogue of exciting and rare music: it is also a social history, tracing the changing lifestyles and listening habits of the 20th-century diaspora in the Midlands. Alongside the records are photographs of customers and friends flicking through crates of music, as well as letters from listeners of Ayyub’s former BBC radio show East in West. Written in Urdu and English, the handwritten notes detail requests for songs to be played for family members and loved ones.
“These are humble yet strong letters of being here,” Hussain says. “Because that’s what our parents had to be: humble and strong. The archive tells the story of south Asian people in Britain existing.” He hopes that it can find a permanent, freely accessible home.
“It’s peculiar that this history hasn’t really been told, but we are going to start telling it,” he adds. “If museums and institutions don’t listen to what we have to say, then we have to build our own.” And despite the “heartbreaking” fate of OSA, Ayyub is thrilled to see its history preserved for future generations: “We have left a legacy that will last for centuries.”
• The exhibition Request Line is at Manchester Museum until 17 August.
