Bally Sagoo – Famous Punjabi

Bally Sagoo grew up in the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham. By the 1970s, his father – Saminder Sagoo – was running his own retail music outlet, after playing in The Musafirs in the late 1960s. By the time he had reached his teens, Sagoo developed a burgeoning taste for reggae, soul and disco and he was spending most of his college years producing mix-tapes for friends and dj-ng at local events. These home-made creations demonstrated his fusing Western dance and hip hop with existing Indian music. Bally Sagoo got his break in 1989 when Oriental Star Agencies, a local Indian record label gave him the opportunity to remix an old Punjabi track called “Hey Jamalo”. The single became a hit and Sagoo subsequently joined OSA as their full-time in-house producer. Through this relationship, he released his first album – 1990’s Wham Bam – which went on to become a success and spawn a sequel, Wham Bam 2. Other material came during this period, including Star Crazy and Bally Sagoo’s 1991 collaboration with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, to produce Magic Touch. In 1994, Sagoo signed with Sony Records to produce Bollywood Flashback. He became the first Indian artist to be play listed on national mainstream radio when the album track “Chura Liya” (a re-working of Asha Bhosle’s song) was played on the BBC Radio 1. This was followed in 1996 by his first, all-original non-remix work Rising from the East, which included “Dil Cheez” and “Tum Bin Jiya”. These became chart hits in the UK and saw Sagoo appear on Top of the Pops. He later toured India with Michael Jackson on the “HIStory Tour”, produced the Aby Baby album with Amitabh Bachchan and was invited to New Delhi to meet the then Indian President, Shankar Dayal Sharma.In 1999, Bally Sagoo launched his own UK music label, Ishq Records. Their first output was his album, Dub of Asia. Ishq followed this with the release of a number of Sagoo titles including Anything But Silent, Hanj and the technical Sag Loops series. The label also managed and showcased several other new talents and delivered tracks such as “Noorie” on Sagoo’s 2000 release, Bollywood Flashback 2. In 2003 at the UK Asian Awards, the Spice Girls presented him with the inaugural trophy for ‘Outstanding Achievement’. The decade also saw Sagoo’s music supporting Gurinder Chadha’s hit Bend It Like Beckham,Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001), the Aishwarya Rai and Dylan McDermott drama Mistress of Spices and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife. Sagoo also starred in and composed the music for the 2006 Punjabi film, Sajna ve Sajna, and he appeared in television programs throughout the decade, including the show, the Asian reality show Bollywood Star and celebrity magazine formats such as Tinseltown TV. In 2012, Sagoo completed the installation of a new studio in Mumbai, and now splits his time between the UK and India. The same year saw the merger of the business assets of Ishq Records into Fresh Dope Records, the music division of Fresh Dope Industries. With a head office in Brussels, Belgium and an operational satellite in Mumbai, the new business represents the culmination of Bally Sagoo’s striving to create quality material and it is already engaged in a number of projects including feature film production, TV shows, new artist promotion and management, corporate participation, online and traditional publishing, live performances, lifestyle products, fashion trends and technology developments. Sagoo’s latest album, Future Shock was released in February 2013 on Fresh Dope Records.