Sheila Chandra - Ever So Lonely

Not too enthusiastic about the original 1982 version, but this one's pretty neat...



The dream of every musician--

"Certainly Sheila Chandra never regarded ‘Ever So Lonely’s’ chart success as ‘success’ in itself. For her, the real success was the song’s ability to get listeners dancing to what was essentially a basic Indian raga. If British-Asian dance music is able to renegotiate the colour-coded reifications that pervade British popular culture, then this type of dance is certainly a form of postmodern resistance: all the more canny because dancers are unaware of how their dance blurs boundaries, of how they dance to the tune of the snake charmer’s un-namable pastiche. That Sheila Chandra’s audience, and many of those at Talvin Singh’s ‘Anokha’, may have been white and middle class only adds to the sweetness of that ‘success’."

(Jazeel, 2005: 238)

Jazeel, T. (2005). The world is sound? Geography, musicology and British-Asian soundscapes. Area, 37(3), 233-241.