From a postcode
to a sound.
B21 took their name from the Handsworth postcode, the corner of Birmingham where two brothers, Bally and Bhota Jagpal, started building a new kind of British Bhangra. From their 1996 debut The Sounds of B21, they fused Punjabi folk with the bass and breakbeats of late-90s UK club culture, and a generation of British-Asian kids finally heard themselves on record.
Their second album, By Public Demand, dominated the British Asian charts. Made in England arrived in 2000 with the song that would carry the band overseas: Darshan, picked up for the soundtrack of Bend It Like Beckham, then performed as an instrumental at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester.
Bally and Bhota kept refining the sound through the 2000s. Breakbeats sharper, hooks bigger, production tighter. They returned in 2014 with the Brit Asia award-winning 12B. Thirty years on from that 1996 debut, the catalogue still fills wedding floors and student nights from Birmingham to Brampton.
