Asha Bhosle, considered the absolute queen of playback vocalists in Indian cinema, popularly known as “Bollywood”, died this Sunday at the age of 92 in Bombay, after being hospitalized for cardiac arrest.
Asha was the sister of the also legendary Lata Mangeshkar, who died in 2022, and had recently appeared on the new Gorillaz album, on the song ‘The Shadowy Light’, in a song that she agreed to record herself. That is to say, his intervention was not in the form of a sample, but rather a new recording.
Bhosle has marked the musical history of India by performing numerous songs from Bollywood soundtracks that have become popular anthems, such as ‘Aaja Aaja Main Hoon Pyar Tera’ for the 1966 film ‘Teesri Manzil’, or ‘Dil Cheez Kya Hai’ for the 1981 feature film ‘Umrao Jaan’, among many others. It is estimated that Bhosle recorded up to 12,000 songs.
Bhosle was, of course, the artist honored on ‘Brimful of Asha’, Cornershop’s 1997 smash hit, which for the first time took the crossover between indie-rock and Bollywood to the top of the UK charts. A few years earlier, Asha appeared on ‘Bow Down Mister’, a single by Boy George released under his group’s alias Jesus Loves You.
