In September 2022, the British Punjabi vocalist Raf-Saperra was inside the walled city of Lahore, Pakistan, self-directing the video for Modern Mirza, a song that’s inspired by a tragic romance in ancient Punjabi folklore. As locals gathered to watch, children started singing the chorus back to him – and it hadn’t even been released yet.
“That’s when I knew it was a hit,” Saperra says. “Music industry marketing people might tell you otherwise, but there is nothing stopping a song if kids on the street are singing along to it.” After their release in December, the song and video duly became the biggest hit to date for the south Londoner, whose booming voice and multi-disciplinary skills have made him a new star across global south Asian communities and beyond.
Later that day, he travelled to the countryside, trading the bustling bazaars for a humble pind, or village. At nightfall there was a power cut and a group of older men asked Saperra to sing for them. “It was dead silent. I cracked a vocal in a high octave and it echoed across the fields. One of the men grabbed my face, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and said, ‘you’ve made my heart happy’. Any doubts I had as an artist disappeared.”
Modern Mirza now has four million plays on YouTube and features on Saperra’s debut mixtape, Ruff Around the Edges, as does NLS (Nach Le Soniye), his addictive UK garage anthem that rang across last year’s festival and club circuit. Ruff Around the Edges is full of other genres besides: boom-bap bhangra, traditional styles like boliyan and qawwali, and experimental ventures into other genres like Afrobeats.
“I believe I’ve produced a rare body of work that has personality – the experience I used to have listening to Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP or Panjabi MC’s Grass Roots,” he says. “From the UK bhangra industry, there’s not a lot that has been as eclectic as this tape.”
Raf-Saperra, whose real name is Adeel Sardar Khan, was born and raised in Streatham Hill, south London, in a Pakistani Muslim household. As a teenager in the 2000s, he absorbed the grime and road rap of his area as well as the musical traditions of his family.
“Outside my house, with my bredrins, I’d be trading the latest Giggs or Roadside Gs or Gipset via Bluetooth on the bus to school. But inside my house? It was Bollywood, Punjabi folk, qawwali, bhangra, from Jazzy B to Surjit Bindrakhia,” he says. “And I think the beauty of that, and why I’m so confident and comfortable doing what I’m doing now, is that my friends were very aware of who I was. They would come and knock for me, and I might open the door wearing the triangular hat that qawwali singers wear, and tell them I couldn’t play because I had Qu’ran lessons. And they’d be like, cool. It was normal. My outside world was aware of my inside world.”
Saperra’s artistic career began as a music video director. He would later shoot the video for Sidhu Moose Wala’s Celebrity Killer after the Punjabi Indian megastar, who was tragically shot dead in May last year, saw his work and messaged him on Instagram. Ruff Around the Edges is full of this passion for film, in interstitial skits that satirise the bravado of Saperra’s persona and relay lines of wisdom from Hollywood icons.
At home, Saperra studied a range of instruments – including the dhol, tumbi and harmonium – and he still continues his classical singing training as part of the prestigious Sham Chaurasi gharana, or Hindustani musical house. When lockdown hit in 2020, he started sharing homemade clips of Punjabi folk covers on social media, drawing global fans impressed by the refined, rustic purity of his vocals.
“Raf wants to keep it folk,” said the influential bhangra producer Panjabi MC when I interviewed him last year, following the release of their single together, Barood. “I’m not an expert on voices, but the crowd are, and the crowd like him a lot … he sounds natural.”
Saperra soon began releasing his own brand of hip-hop-infused Punjabi music with slick, choreographed videos shot in south London. First came the thumping, playful G’lassy Riddim and later Snake Charmer, produced by UK bhangra legend, Sukshinder Shinda.
“Before we even spoke, or he knew who I was, I was banging out his tunes over lockdown,” says DJ Yung Singh, who has played Saperra’s music in sets at Fabric, Glastonbury and Berghain, and premiered the earworm Badami Rangiye on his BBC Radio 1 residency. “We’re aligning. We want to put Punjabi culture on the map, but in an artistic manner, without watering it down or whitewashing it.”
This shared sentiment is a nod to Punjabiyat, or “Punjabiness”, an awakening among those with roots on either side of the Indo-Pak border who are celebrating lost common ground in tradition, language, art and cuisine. As time heals and technology develops, a cultural reconnection is allowing Punjabis around the world to transcend the religious and nationalistic divisions that wrought havoc during the bloody partition of the region in 1947.
He doesn’t want to go into detail, but Saperra says he has faced hostility as a Muslim Pakistani in the UK bhangra scene. But he refuses to let it irk him, “because for me, it’s nothing but love. The love that I feel coming from fans in India being like: look at what our brothers have done in Lahore. They’re repping it with their chest. East Punjab and West Punjab, it’ll always be that. I believe that Punjab is sanjha, Punjab is one.”
Saperra says he wants “to elevate the aesthetic of Punjabi music videos to a non-Asian demographic” but it has historically been a challenge for musicians with south Asian heritage to uphold their roots creatively and still achieve recognition in the UK. “You know you’re not a caricature, your friends know you’re not a caricature, but for some reason the industry doesn’t seem to realise that,” Saperra reflects. The UK bhangra scene – once, in Saperra’s words, “the Mecca of Punjabi music” – is now widely considered to have ceded its former powers to Canada and India.
But his star quality seems to knock down these barriers: peacocking along streets in Streatham or Lahore, he has the relaxed flamboyance of every great pop star, and his vocal lines – heavyweight and yet so finely detailed – are universally impressive. “South Asians aren’t sitting around waiting,” for recognition, he says. “The art speaks for itself.”
• Ruff Around the Edges is out now
