Tune Tuesday – Brimful of Asha

On this day in 1997, the band Cornershop released their album, “When I Was Born For the Seventh Time.” The album contains their single, Brimful of Asha.

I was working in the mailroom at EDS and making deliveries when I first hear this song. The first line to jump out at me was, “Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow.” I actually thought I heard it wrong. I had no idea what the song was about, but thankfully, Songfacts.com filled me in.

“Brimful of Asha” is about India’s filmi music industry in general, with a reference to filmi star Asha Bhosle in particular. The word “asha” also happens to mean “hope” in Hindi, something that certainly wasn’t lost on Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh when he wrote the tune – many of Asha Bhosle’s movie songs were filled with messages of hope that the younger generation took to heart and dreamed of better lives.

Music and dance scenes are pivotal to India’s Bollywood cinema, making up the most important scenes of all major films in that nation. As a result, soundtracks are by far the most popular musical releases in India, representing 72% of total music sales as of 2009, according to the BBC.

Of the filmi vocalists, Asha Bhonsle is one of the most beloved; she is believed to have sung on over 12,000 songs behind movie scenes in Bollywood. It is this Asha who is “on the 45,” a “45” being a record single.

The chorus sums up the entire song: “Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow, mine’s on the 45.” It’s a story of a person going to a record single to find hope and a place to rest their head.

Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh was interviewed by Songfacts in 2017 and he said that the song was partly responsible for the band’s break up.

“It’s a lovely song to be remembered by,” said Singh. “But the way it brought success falling from the skies also meant that it changed focus on to the remix, so it took the carpet away from underneath us as an album artist. We’ve never been able to fully recover.

So, though it’s been very good in many respects, it’s also meant that we’ve been pigeonholed very easily, and that we’ve been put down very easily. The slow process of people getting into us through the albums as such has been even more elongated.

Maybe we didn’t want to be in it for the long haul. Maybe we just wanted to burn out and get on it. And maybe if that hadn’t happened, then heaven knows.”

I suppose it is totally ok to grab a bosom for a pillow to listen to our song today…..