When Nabeel Pervaiz ordered a re-released '80s album by a British-Pakistani duo, he never anticipated how it would pave the way for him to reconnect with his father's culture.
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Disco Se Aagay … Nermin Niazi and Feisal Mosleh in a 1989 magazine shoot in Karachi.
Disco Se Aagay … Nermin Niazi and Feisal Mosleh in a 1989 magazine shoot in Karachi.
Nermin Niazi and Feisal Mosleh were teenage immigrants blending their Pakistani musical heritage with Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode – and their punchy disco LP has been rescued from obscurity
Tue 9 Feb 2021 04.00 EST
Last modified on Fri 26 Feb 2021 06.52 EST
Opening its doors in 1970, Birmingham’s Zella Studios played home to a who’s who of the city’s musical greats: Black Sabbath, Band of Joy, the Spencer Davis Group. But the Bristol Street institution was also home to one of the most remarkable and unfairly overlooked albums of the 1980s: Disco Se Aagay, by teenage British-Pakistani sibling duo Feisal Mosleh and Nermin Niazi.
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Los Angeles artist Arshia Fatima Haq was thumbing through racks of dusty vinyl at New Yorkâs A-1 Records a few years ago when a title caught her eye:
Disco Se Aagay, or âBeyond Discoâ in Haqâs native Urdu. Peering out from the sleeve was a teenage girl with bouffant â80s hair, a white dinner jacket, and a Mona Lisa smile. The album was billed as âa step further in the field of disco musicâ; the musicians were identified in the credits as a brother and sister, Nermin Niazi and Feisal Mosleh, from Birmingham, England. Nermin, the singer and lyricist, was âstill a school-girl,â according to the sleeve notes. Feisal, a college student, had composed and produced the music, writing some of the songs at just 17. The copyright was dated 1984; there were synthesizers. Naturally, Haq took the record home.