Bollywood Movie Queen Songs
Baudilio Eliason
Moss was 32 in 1981, when he got a call from Pran Gohil, a former scout for PolyGram Records who had set up the UK's first Asian label, Multitone. Gohil was at the forefront of modern bhangra, mixing western synth-pop with Punjabi folk music to great effect. He was keen to pounce on trends, to exploit and twist them for the Indian market. "They'd done a poll in India, finding out the most popular western acts in India, and the most popular at that time was Boney M," says Moss, referencing the ridiculous (yet often amazing) German-produced, Jamaican-fronted disco band. "So Pran decided he wanted to do Boney M in Hindi. And that's how it all started, we did an album. It's called Boney M In Hindi." Naturally.
Gohil hired Amit Khanna, a poet and filmmaker from Delhi, to write original Hindi lyrics for the Boney M album, discarding the existing English ones. "It made sense," says Moss. "One song, 'Belfast,' was about the political situation in Northern Ireland at the time. But the average Indian sitting in the average Indian village in the middle of nowhere wouldn't have had a clue where Northern Ireland was, let alone Belfast. So the lyric Amit wrote for the song was nothing to do with Belfast at all."
By 1981, the family had settled in Shenley, and their house, says Salma, speaking from Mumbai, was the Queen's hunting lodge before their father bought it. "It had 37 bedrooms, two lakes, riding grounds, and two swimming pools, indoor and outdoor. It was a lovely place. My father just wanted everything for the kids. He kept a cow there, because he thought children should have fresh milk." The teen Agha sisters did not have to find work flipping burgers.
Salma and Sabina had been trained in classical music, so had some experience when Amit Khanna asked them to sing on the ABBA album. They were excited. "I loved their songs!" says Salma. Khanna's new lyrics, meanwhile, were written with them in mind. "The Hindi lyrics are more meaningful than the original ABBA lyrics," he says. "There's more poetry in the Hindi versions." Again, there's no resemblance to the original English lyrics. Khanna's "Dancing Queen" for example, is nothing to do with dancing queens. "No," he says. "It's about falling in love. It says 'Love is sweet and it's intoxicating.'"
There is, though, an absence of sitar and tabla on the Hindi ABBA album. Vocals aside, it sounds like a cheap western knock-off. Moss had good ideas for it, he says, but finances were less forthcoming this time so the Indian extravagances were gone; the vocals were deemed enough. And then, when it was done, the whole thing fizzled out. "This is partly where the whole project fell down," says Moss. "In India at that time, they copied everything. So Pran, and he was Indian, he had this fear about it, and he was so cagey about letting anybody hear anything in case they ripped it off, and that worked against the situation."
The Agha family left Britain for Mumbai. Sabina did not pursue a career in showbusiness: "She got married and her husband was not very happy with her being a singer, so he never encouraged her," says Salma. Salma, however, became a Bollywood star, that year headlining the controversial romantic hit drama Nikaah, which explored Sharia divorce. She went on to win a Best Female Playback Award at the Filmfare awards (the Indian equivalent of the Oscars) for the song "Dil Ke Armaan," and throughout the 80s continued to act in films.
In 1999, she married Pakistani squash coach Rehmat Khan, who in his previous marriage had fathered Bat For Lashes' Natasha Khan. Salma has since remarried, and lives with her kids in Mumbai, where she's been known to pick up stray dogs on the streets at 2 AM: "If I see a little puppy or cat wandering around under a car wheel or something on a scary rainy night, I bring them home and give them shelter, I have a big house. I give them out for adoption, but if nobody takes them then I'll have them. I can't stop myself." How many dogs does she have? "I think 10 right now." No cow though.
The ABBA album did enjoy a brief moment of glory when, in the early 90s, Britain's Radio 1 DJ John Peel discovered it, playing some of the songs on his late-night show, opining: "Wasn't it the poet Keats who once said, 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever?' I think he may have had Salma and Sabina in mind." But then it disappeared again. Salma hasn't seen Peter Moss since 1981, but asked me for his phone number, in view of making more music together. Meanwhile, there will always be Hindi ABBA. John Peel had a point: listen to their "Chiquitita." If you don't find it pretty as hell, well, I don't know what to do with you.
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