Asha Puthli’s Love Affair With Italian TV

How the Indian-born crossover artist found disco-stardom in Italy

On November 5, 1978, in the same medieval tableau that hosted Grace Jones, Amanda Lear, Gal Costa, and Italian disco divas, Asha Puthli appeared in a somehow anachronistic space-inspired outfit comprising a golden proto-Thierry-Mugler catsuit with an incorporated cone bra, very similar to the one Madonna would wear in her Blond Ambition tour. She was serenading one Mr. Moonlight. “Mr. Moonlight After midnight I'm yours, you should know Catch me, don’t let me go,” she crooned. 

In the cult tv show Stryx international divas outnumbered Italian-born counterparts, and Puthli’s appearance on this controversial show was far from her first foray into Italian tv. 

Italy was the country where she acquired the most mainstream success. Curiously, you can find “Mr. Moonlight” in several Italo Disco mixes. The reasons behind Puthli’s popularity in Italy boil down to a few considerations. The first is that, for some reason, Italian audiences have always loved a controversial persona. Just like Amanda Lear with her gender enigma or Grace Jones with her hybrid exotic and European sound and high-glam, androgynous looks,  Asha represented a mysterious future for them to know, listen to and explore. The 70s for Italians are marked by the “discovery” of taboos from a social, cultural and physical standpoint. Asha surely represented an intriguing mix of exotic tradition (mainly embodied by her looks and voice), and the futuristic  disco sounds. Far from being just a “trend”, disco music was considered the music of the future, a rupture with the old and an aperture toward the future. Her performance of “The Devil Is Loose” at Sanremo 1978 was an ode to the erotic and exotic, something that the average at-home viewer was not necessarily accustomed to.

Trained in Indian classical music and opera, Puthli developed an early interest in jazz and pop. After graduating, she worked as a flight attendant for British Airways, and, while spending two months in London, she “got to hear real jazz.” She then auditioned for a dance scholarship with Martha Graham, and relocated to New York. Upon her move to New York, as her student visa was about to expire, she was chosen as Ornette Coleman’s vocalist in 1971. It was the first time the free-form jazz pioneer ever used a vocalist Subsequently, she was signed by CBS, where, in her debut, she released proto-disco versions of “Right Down Here” and “Lies” by JJ Cole, alongside the highly eroticized “I Dig Love” by George Harrison. Her subsequent effort –She Loves to Hear Music– includes more proto-disco tracks, including “Paper Doll” and “Legend of Thais.” 

Her most notable record that put her on the map among mainstream audiences is the 1976 album The Devil Is Loose, recorded at the Berlin-based Hansa Studios. The arranger is Dave Virgin King, who also wrote the bass line of Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby,” which reappears in the ethereal “Space Talk,” which, alongside the title track, ended up becoming the most popular release. “[Space Talk] achieved underground immortality with its saunter-encouraging bass, spaceship synth, dip-and-soar vocals, and softly clipped lyrics like ‘Space talk, taking a space walk space’,” writes Ken McLeod in the essay “Outer Space, Futurism, and the Quest for Disco Utopia,” contained in the book Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s: Disco Heterotopias.  The track was championed by a wide range of musical scenes and movements.

“You would hear it played by David Mancuso at the now ‘mythical’ underground New York party 'The Loft’, in the most discerning disco nightclubs across the globe, in the Rare Groove scene, and also being sampled by hip-hop heavyweights such as The Notorious B.I.G / P Diddy, and The Pharcyde,” writes the UK music label Bongo on BandCamp. Curiously, despite the European origins of The Devil Is Loose, the only blatantly Eurodisco track of the album is “Our Love Is Making Me Sing,” which is in line with most of the disco-inflected Continental-European productions of the era. 

Starting October 27, 1977, RAI started airing Nonstop—Ballata senza manovratore. Nonstop was part of RAI’s late-70s experimental shows, and this one was notable for its lack of a host. Rather, music, dance, and cabaret numbers appeared in a seemingly disjointed, but actually cogent fashion. It was one of the first variety shows that did not explicitly reference theater, but rather tailored its performances and lineups specifically for the tv medium. This format influenced several 80s programs, including the seminal Drive In. Puthli was a featured artist, appearing in most of season 1’s episodes. That following February, she appeared among the international guest stars at the Sanremo music festival, alongside Bonnie Tyler, Grace Jones and Sheila B. Devotion. On that occasion, she sang “The Devil Is Loose.” She was a well-established star in Italy, but she wanted to conquer the English-language market and the European continent. 

In the spring of 1978, Belgian producer Jean Van Loo was tasked with producing Puthli’s upcoming album. The intent was to launch her as a full-fledged disco diva beyond the confines of Italy, where she had already a well-established reputation. The specific target was the Anglo-Saxon market, where she was then relatively unknown. The project, titled L’Indiana (partially recording in Italy), echoes the sounds of Summer and Moroder, even though it’s hard to actually determine whose vocals influenced whom. For instance, there are similarities between the sounds of “There is a Party Tonight” and “I Feel Love.”  Alas, the project did not fully pan out. Still, it was quite successful  in Italy thanks to a massive tv promo machine, where the single “Mr. Moonlight” hit the jackpot. As mentioned above, it was part of Stryx’s lineup.

In the United States, this project was rechristened as “Asha” and consisted of an EP featuring Richie Rivera’s mixes of “I’m Gonna Dance” and “Munich Machine (Dedication to Studio 54)” It was largely snubbed.

In 1979, producer Rainer Pietsch rebranded Puthli’s sound first into Electro Bollywood then in new-synth-wave. This marked the twilight of her mainstream career. On a similar note, when she participated in the 1978 Italian movie “Squadra Antigangsters,” her electro-disco track “The Whip” the Italian public only had a lukewarm reaction towards it. 

Despite the ebbs and flows of her career, however, Puthli was at the forefront of disco’s ongoing fascination with outer space and the cosmos. Dee D. Jackson sang about her “Automatic Lover” in 1978, and the same year, Sarah Brightman, who would become one of the most acclaimed classical-crossover artists and musical-theater soloists sang the disco-inflected “I Lost My Heart To a Starship Trooper”; “Spacer” by Sheila B. Devotion only came out in 1979, followed by the Italodisco space anthem “I Wanna Be Your Lover” in 1980. 

Asha had proven to be a being from the future, with her appearance on Ornette Coleman’s seminal “Science Fiction” from 1971. The rising use of synthesizers in disco music, the massive success of “Star Wars” bring the attention (hence the lyrical themes) from the dancefloor to the stars. Asha’s voice matched perfectly the longing and dreams of unknown worlds and civilizations across the universe. 

This year, Puthli will perform at Glastonbury Music Festival. “This is a huge honor, and an incredible way to mark my return to the stage after 44 years,” she announced on Instagram. Personally, we can’t help celebrating how, in the last few years, disco music is being rediscovered and reappraised beyond its mainstream Studio 54 confines.