When Muhammad Ayyub moved to Birmingham from Pakistan in 1961, he immediately felt homesick. Back in Gujrat, he had enjoyed a “pleasant and social life”, collecting records, watching films and going to festivals alongside his teaching job. But here, in the early years of south Asian migration to the West Midlands, there was little he could engage with – he and his small community only had each other’s homes to gather in and reminisce. “Now we have TV channels, concerts and musicians visiting from India and Pakistan, but at that time it was different,” he says. “We missed our music, we missed our culture.”
Fed up with low-paid, unstable work, Ayyub opened a shop selling transistor radios on Balsall Heath Road in 1966. Around the same time, the cinema next door had introduced Sunday matinee screenings for south Asian films and people would gather in his shop afterwards, discussing the scores and expressing longing for the sounds they had grown up with. Prompted by their requests, Ayyub began importing records from India and Pakistan. The initial order, which took more than six weeks to arrive by ship, went like hotcakes, he recalls, smiling.
