His Knight Rider-sampling dancefloor banger put dhol drums into hip-hop and Asian beats on the BBC. Now 49, the star takes us back to ‘his own little lab’ in Coventry In February 2003, the UK bhangra producer and rapper Panjabi MC played a DJ set in Germany, then flew by private jet to Switzerland to play twice more that same evening. His song Mundian To Bach Ke had recently been rereleased. Having spent five years on a closed circuit of British Asian weddings, family functions, radio shows and club nights, it would soon reach the UK Top 5 and No 1 in Italy, Hungary, Belgium and Greece. Touching down at Birmingham airport after the tour, his manager Rekha Sagoo received a call from the promoter. “I’ll always remember it,” she says. “Jay-Z had been in Switzerland and heard Bach Ke blasting through the walls and wanted to add his own verse.” The remix that soon followed (called Beware of the Boys) took the song back into the charts again in 2003, and Jay-Z performed it at Glastonbury in 2008. Continue reading...
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