In February 1971, Asha Puthli was sitting with Andy Warhol and friends at Max’s Kansas City, a New York club nightclub and restaurant, when the DJ played her new single. It was a cover of Marvin Gaye’s Motown classic Ain’t That Peculiar with Peter Ivers Group. Excited by what he heard, Warhol asked the singer who was going to do the cover art for the group’s forthcoming album. She had a risque concept: “A man’s zipper, which opens, and the album should come out with a pink inner sleeve. You know, like a prophylactic.”
That album never came to fruition, but months later, a strangely similar image hit the shelves: a person’s denim-clad crotch, zipper protruding, on the cover of the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers. It was a collaboration between Warhol and Craig Braun, which Vanity Fair called the “most notorious album art of 1971”. “[I thought] ‘What the fuck is Sticky Fingers?’” Puthli tells me. “I never thought of the Stones doing music that you can masturbate to. There is no song alluding to a sexual connotation [on that album]. Or did I miss something?”
Puthli, now 79, doesn’t seem to mind about Warhol apparently pinching her idea. She knows the world is finally catching up with her. The Indian-born singer almost became a huge star in the 70s, her sensuous, spacey jazz-disco fusions predating the US’s glitterball era. She performed at Studio 54, was a neighbour of Bianca Jagger, knew Grace Jones, was tattooed by the queen of bohemia Vali Myers, and was courted by the era’s A-list fashion designers and photographers. Her former flatmate was trans Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, whom she wrote a song about – although Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, about Woodlawn, is vastly better known. Puthli says she enjoyed the provocation of the Factory scene: she starred in a short with Woodlawn and, briefly continuing her film starlet phase, appeared semi-nude in the satirical romp Savages, which got banned in her homeland.
Despite grooving with the glitterati, Puthli never reached the household-name heights of her peers. And yet she has left an enduring mark. In the 90s, a central character in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet was eerily reminiscent of Puthli (“there are 91 similarities between the book and my real life”) and her records were pilfered for breaks by hip-hop heavyweights such as The Notorious BIG. A gold dress with cone-cupped bosom that she wore on Italian TV, meanwhile, pre-empted Madonna’s Jean Paul Gaultier corset. “I’ve realised getting older, nothing is original any more,” she says. “It’s all part of the collective consciousness.”
When we met this month in London, Puthli was midway through her first major tour in 40 years. It’s the second time we’ve spoken – the first being virtually, from her retirement complex in Palm Beach, Florida – in the midst of her long-overdue renaissance. She speaks softly, with the occasional burst of bawdy humour. Once collector’s items, a number of albums from her heyday have recently been reissued, spanning breathy galactic disco, heavy-lidded jazz, soul and glam pop. They come complete with incredible covers of Puthli in her floaty finery, as striking as any Bowie imagery.
Her music, there’s no two ways about it, drips with orgasmic sensuality and cosmic whimsy, not least her covers of JJ Cale’s Right Down Here, John Lennon’s Love and George Harrison’s I Dig Love from her 1973 self-titled debut. “I sexed it up,” she says of the latter song, which starts with the sound of Puthli “gargling with champagne”. But she had a serious musical mission, too. “I felt the Beatles, for example, had come to India, taken sitar and popularised it in mainstream [western] music, but I didn’t think it was [one-]way traffic,” she says. “I felt: I’m Indian and I’m influenced by the west. Why can I not be accepted on an equal platform?”
Blending east and west was Puthli’s passion. Born in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1945, she studied opera as well as Indian classical dance and singing – specifically the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana closed-throat style, which is what gives her music (and plenty of other disco songs after it) a distinctive, feather-like quality. She found jazz via Voice of America radio broadcasts. “The improvisations,” she says, “represented freedom in every sense.”
To get an Indian passport – hard to come by in those days – she became a flight attendant. It was “pretty radical, because I come from a very traditional family”, who expected her to have an arranged marriage. She then won a dance scholarship to the Martha Graham school in New York, arriving in 1969 as Woodstock was about to start. A high time was had at the festival; her then-boyfriend was Billy Hitchcock, who had helped to finance the LSD tab Orange Sunshine. Puthli is tight-lipped about any other love affairs outside her marriages – “save it for when you want blood on the pages,” she purrs – though she does remember the time that Salvador Dalí chased after her down the street, spellbound by the sight of her in a homemade pillowcase skirt.
In 1970, Puthli’s fortunes changed. With her student visa about to expire, she married her first husband and met CBS talent scout John Hammond, who had discovered Bob Dylan and Billie Holiday. Hammond introduced her to saxophonist Ornette Coleman – who’d never recorded with a vocalist before – and she went on to win a prestigious Downbeat award for best female jazz vocalist for her work on his 1972 album Science Fiction. It was a big year for Puthli, but she was told that she’d find it hard to be accepted in the US. “[Coleman said:] ‘They want sitars and temple bells, so it’s easy for them to accept you, otherwise it’s going to be difficult,’” she remembers. “And he was right.”
Puthli refused to change her name or sound and ended up signing with CBS in the UK. She would often appear on major TV shows such as Russell Harty Plus, but it’s wild now to think that, with her connections and collaborators, she wasn’t more widely known. Her best-loved track became Space Talk from 1976’s The Devil Is Loose, which was arranged by Dave Virgin King, who played bass on Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby. While Space Talk is nowhere near as ubiquitous as the Summer classic, and wasn’t officially released in the US, it became a cult hit at NYC parties such as David Mancuso’s now-legendary Loft. “My music has always been underground,” she says.
Despite this, Puthli’s music laid the groundwork for where the mainstream went. Her label suspended her when she fell pregnant, blaming an incorrect work permit. After her son was born in February 1975, the slinky space-disco sound she’d instigated was soon everywhere. By the time Love to Love You Baby was released worldwide in November 1975, Puthli says that she received calls from people who’d heard the song and saw clear links with Puthli’s style. She claims she found out that Summer’s producers would “play my stuff and tell her to sound a little bit like that”, specifically her 1973 debut album, produced by Elton John collaborator Del Newman.
Puthli flips over the Mick Rock-shot cover of that debut LP to show a series of shots of her in a diaphanous Bill Gibb dress and cape. It looks incredibly similar to what Summer wore in a performance of ‘Love to Love You Baby’ on Dutch TV in 1975 (and also, with Puthli’s coiled hair, to Princess Leia, who arrived on screens in 1977). While the two were both performing on TV show Hits a Gogo in Hamburg, Summer with the group Family Tree, Puthli says the singer was “watching every move I made. She came backstage and asked me, ‘Where did you get this lovely dress?’ and I told her Bill Gibb, so she went to London to his showroom.” A loyal friend, Puthli says Gibb refused to replicate the outfit but told Summer: “‘If you want to buy my clothes, you can go to Harrods and buy them off the rack.’ So she had to buy it off the rack.”
Puthli continued to release records in Europe but kept a relatively low profile from the mid-80s onwards. In the early 2000s, she collaborated with ambient enthusiast Bill Laswell and, at one point, even started her own cable TV show. Her music, however, has captivated crate diggers for decades. British DJ and author Bill Brewster, who licensed Space Talk for a 2013 Late Night Tales compilation, first heard The Devil Is Loose 25 years ago. “It took me months to find a copy, this being long before Discogs. Musically, Space Talk is hard to categorise, because it’s not really disco or funk or pop, it’s all of those things combined. It’s one of those perfect tracks to play at the end of the night; the music brings you down to earth,” he says. But Puthli likes the idea of her music being discovered by life on other planets, too – in 2009, the song was transmitted into space to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s historic moon landing. At a party, she told Buzz Aldrin: “The whole human race doesn’t seem to appreciate this, but somebody out there is going to.”
Finally, Puthli is rising again. She has played shows here and there, but none like her triumphant performance on Glastonbury’s West Holts stage last month, with a band helmed by the esteemed drummer Shawn Lee. “My tour manager kept texting me, ‘Do you have wellies?’” she says. “But in the end I settled on wearing my bathroom slippers.” Woman’s Hour presenter Anita Rani was there in the crowd: “Watching a phenomenal female artist get her just deserts was remarkable,” she says, “but to see a south Asian woman finally get the recognition she deserves brought tears to my eyes.”
Today, a new generation of south Asian creatives have been energised by Puthli’s story. In the US, singer-songwriter Raveena named her 2022 album Asha’s Awakening after her, while UK musician Nadine Shah’s 2024 album Filthy Underneath referred to Puthli’s sound and fashion. “I hadn’t seen south Asian women being presented in that way, with that style of music – it was super sexy,” Shah told me earlier this year. But Puthli never thought about it at the time. “I was just being myself,” she says.
As much as her past and what it stood for is fascinating, Puthli is very much living for the present: there’s a documentary in the works, as well as another Disco Mystic compilation of remixes of her music on the LA label Naya Beat, and a forthcoming guest feature on a track by British-Bahraini duo Dar Disku. She’s encouraged by the next generation of south Asian musical talent, who have increased visibility at festivals this year, not least at Arrivals, Glastonbury’s first dedicated south Asian space.
“They mean a lot to me,” says Puthli. “Because the whole idea of doing this journey…” She drifts off and returns to the thought later. “I was about to get emotional, so I stopped. But I feel that the journey that I made against all odds makes it all worthwhile. When I see young people and they’re getting recognition, they’re getting the platform … The time is right for them now.”
• Asha Puthli is at Jazz Cafe, London, on 3 August, Bristol Beacon on 9 August and We Out Here festival, Dorset, on 18 August
