Nisha Katona

I was born in 1971 in the UK and my parents obviously were Indian.

And so the only music that I would ever hear would be, you know, the high shrill notes of Indian music, this happy kind of Bollywood-esque music in an entirely different tonic scale.

And I never really loved it very much.

But when my parents would go off to surgery, my auntie, who used to look after me, she'd put the radio on.

I was raised near Liverpool, so Radio City would go on and we would hear tunes like this and she'd get the hoover out.

It was like something out of Working Girl.

I don't know if you've seen that with Melanie Griffiths.

And she would start hoovering and we would dance around and we would sit and listen to this delicious, dark, minor chord, pulsing music that was so different to anything I'd ever heard.

What I love about the lyrics particularly, and we've all felt this, you know, I must have kept on dragging through the business of the day.

And without really knowing anything, I hid a part of me away.

And we've all done that.

You know, we've all lived trenches of our life where we are just dragging ourselves through the business of the day.

I must have kept on dragging through the business of the day.

Of course, me and my brother had to learn how to play the piano because we were expected to try and join the middle classes of Britain or whatever.

So music was a big part of our life in that way, but not pop music.

Pop music was something my parents didn't appreciate because they made the mistake of listening to the lyrics.

And it's really interesting, you know, because once they start listening to the lyrics, none of it makes sense.

So they would stop and say, you know, what are these words? These aren't words you should be saying out loud.

And so they were quite disdainful of pop music.

And so I was sort of raised to never really listen to it in the home.

We never heard pop music in the home.

This track, The Day Before You Came, by ABBA.

was one that I discovered with my auntie.

So it's an oblique inheritance, but it really captured my heart and I never tire of listening to it.