Raf-Saperra on his mixtape, Ruff Around The Edges: "Growing up, my outside world was aware of my inside world"

The new star of British-Punjabi music discusses his rise, growing up in south London and his debut mixtape, Ruff Around The Edges

Portrait of Raf-Saperra by Hark1karan

In November 2021 I attended a screening of The Birth of Punjabi Garage, a documentary produced by Ministry of Sound and DJ Yung Singh. As audience members mingled at the bar, waiting to take our seats, I bumped into the vocalist and filmmaker, Raf-Saperra. Having discovered his folk covers and self-directed bhangra videos over lockdown, I commended his work. We got talking. Contrary to the boisterous persona that he entertains in his videos — necessary swagger for confident performance — I found him humbly attentive to my words and appreciative of the new connection.

Weeks later, we met at the popular Lahori karahi restaurant, Dawat, in Norbury, south London. At the time I was preparing for my forthcoming interview with Panjabi MC. I’d organised conversations with various Punjabi music heads — community photographer Hark1karan; DJs Bobby Friction, Rekha, Yung Singh and Kizzi; Coventry-based rap producer Coolie — who could all speak from different generational perspectives about the legendary producer’s legacy. Over naans and tandoori meat, Raf explained his own take on PMC, before sharing that, by sheer coincidence, they had a forthcoming single together, Barood, that would be released on Christmas Eve.

It’s difficult to overstate how quickly Raf-Saperra subsequently grew across 2022. I spent the year watching and listening in intrigue. Each single and accompanying video he released — Simplicit, Kehra Pind?, Laalkaareh — achieved critical acclaim, radio play and storms of social media shares, racking up millions of views on his own YouTube channel. On any given week you could find TikTok and Instagram videos of people dancing to his songs at weddings and men blaring them from speakers while riding their tractors through the Punjabi countryside, on both sides of the Radcliffe Line.

Over the summer, Raf’s UK garage anthem, N.L.S (Nach Le Soniye), produced by his sound engineer, The Culprit, would become his first true crossover success. It tore up festival and club dance floors across the UK and beyond, introducing a new, diversifying cohort of fans to Punjabi music. To write about the video for The Face in October 2022, I attended part of the shoot on the top floor of a housing block in Battersea, south west London. Raf posed, sung and paused to direct the crew while rocking a dark brown leather Avirex jacket with gold chains draped around his neck, a bucket hat on his head, channelling the look of an urban cowboy.

My wife, Yasmin, and I still play N.L.S on a regular basis in our home, often over breakfast as an uplifting start to the day. It is a living, breathing example of Raf-Saperra’s significance beyond the digital numbers and aesthetic glitz. For us, his music has become a soundtrack with which to proudly celebrate the common ground between Yasmin’s Pakistani Muslim Punjabi heritage and my Indian Hindu Punjabi heritage. I know that many other British Punjabis feel a similar pride when they hear him sing. The subtitles in his videos, which translate the lyrics into English, make his art engaging, digestible and educational for those of us who cannot easily speak the language but can recognise parts of ourselves in its bold poetry.

Earlier this week I profiled Raf and his new mixtape, Ruff Around The Edges, for the Guardian. At the time of writing, the debut project sits at number six in Spotify UK’s Top Album Debuts. The vinyl, CD and tape merchandise sold out within ten minutes. The lead single, Modern Mirza, produced by Bobby Kang, whose video was shot in Lahore, Pakistan, remains Raf’s most successful release to-date.

I revisited Raf to interview him for a third time. We met at Rooster’s Piri Piri, near his childhood home in Streatham Hill, south London. On our arrival he spent ten minutes peering over the counter, speaking warmly in Punjabi to the men minding the grill. Then we ordered food and took our seats.

Portrait of Raf-Saperra by Hark1karan

Ciaran Thapar: Yes Raf, it’s good to be talking again! Last time we spoke was for the video release of N.L.S. It’s been huge — reaching number 22 on i-D Magazine’s top 100 songs of 2022, for example.

Raf-Saperra: It’s been nuts, bro. I’m usually very critical of my music. I think a lot of things can be better. Leonardo Da Vinci said that art is never finished, it’s just abandoned. And the state in which we abandoned N.L.S is crazy, because I don’t think the UK has had a song like that for a while, in Punjabi language, that brought in so many other people. My biggest record to date is probably Modern Mirza in terms of numbers and social media engagement. But I don’t think there are too many dance music fans who don’t know N.L.S after last year. 

It seemed to really cut through to all audiences.

It was a cultural moment, a British moment. Big up to the DJs like Yung Singh and Jyoty and many others who’ve been pushing it. Through them, I’ve got to see this unison, how people religiously chant the hook. I was having this chat with my manager recently and I never thought I’d have this impact musically, where I’m seeing halls and stadiums singing my songs. I feel like I spoke and the people listened. I think there needs to be a healthy and respectful relationship that creatives have with their audience, who are ultimately our employers, and I hope that relationship carries on, because listening is communicating, grabbing the mic and singing is communicating. The beauty of N.L.S is how it flirts with nostalgia and tradition but it celebrates the present tense and all its complexities. And to make i-D magazine’s top 100 songs? To be sitting number 22? What a moment for Punjabi music! We were above some of my favourite artists, some influential songs. 

Then you flew out to Lahore in September last year to shoot the video for Modern Mirza. Talk me through it.

We went out to Pakistan and it was a tight schedule. That part of Lahore, around Androon Lahore, the Walled City…it’s not the place most people would choose to shoot a music video. It’s the inner-city. But I was like, this is where we’re from, it’s where my family have lived. This is the community and these are the streets I want to show. The energy was mad, because you’d think that by being a Punjabi artist, shooting in Punjab, there would be this feeling of confidence. But I know the kind of music West Punjabis like, it’s commercial. I didn’t know how it was gonna go down in East Punjab. Then I felt the energy of the people there. And quickly it went from being 10 people standing around me watching the shoot to 80. That might not sound like a lot but when you’re trying to direct your own video it is! And in between takes there was a bunch of kids who started singing the hook back to me. I turned to them, they were all gassed, and that’s when I knew it was a hit. Music industry marketing employers might tell you otherwise, but there is nothing stopping this song if kids on the streets are singing along to it. But none of them knew who I was, so they were asking for my name, and I took time to write it down for them on their phones, on YouTube. YouTube is how people listen to music out there. Meanwhile my manager was yelling at me because we needed to get to the next location. And I was like, bro, they don’t know who I am, I need them to remember! This needs to go viral and then it will spread like Coronavirus…

Portrait of Raf-Saperra by Hark1karan

Which it eventually did! Where was the next location? 

We went to the village of a friend of my dad’s called Shorkot, where people have a long history of being descendants from pre-Partition Indian Punjab. There was a lot of agriculture there. It was important to me, being a West Punjabi excelling in what you might call an East Punjabi sound, to have people living in West Punjab, who have ancestral roots in East Punjab, in the video. After we wrapped everything up, we had a meal. The electricity was cutting out. I remember still having a lot of anxieties as an artist, a lot of doubts, people comparing me to this guy, that guy, what’s my trajectory going to be, etc. I was going through an identity crisis, not so much as an individual, but, as an artist. Like, where do I live in the world of Punjabi music? I’ve experienced a lot of love and a lot of hate. But sitting there being a diaspora kid who’s born in south west London, when it’s hot as fuck, the electricity has cut out…a bunch of older guys were hanging around and they asked me to sing them something. It’s 2am, dead silent, there’s not even the ambient noise of a fan in the background. I cracked a vocal in a high octave and it echoed across the land. To see them in a state of awe…one of them grabbed my face, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and said, “you’ve made my heart happy.” At that moment, any doubts I had as an artist disappeared. I know who I am, and there ain’t noone fucking with this. Then to release the song and video, and see the response that it gets. The video was a celebration of Punjab. I shot this as a West Punjabi from Lahore; Bobby Kang, who produced it, is from East Punjab, and the writer, Roopstar Rhymes, is, too. So the vocalist and the aesthetic is from West but the producer and the writer are from East. And we’ve put this together as a British product. Then it spread like wildfire.

You’ve got a pinned comment beneath the video on YouTube that says: “East Punjab 🤝 West Punjab”. The fact you’re trying to rep for both sides of the Indo-Pak border like this makes me think about Punjabiyat, the idea that Punjabis are reconnecting culturally over common ground, despite the divisions of the past.

One hundred percent. I’ve been exposed to hate, as a Muslim Pakistani trying to make it in the bhangra scene, but 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 and West, it’ll always be that. Because I believe that Punjab is sanjha, Punjab is one. If, due to political reasons, someone drew a line down the middle, that wasn’t our choice. If Punjab had its own choice, it would have stayed whole. How many years was Punjab governed in peace? But since 1947 we’ve not been at peace. The people have love for each other. That’s why I put it there, to remind people that it’s love.

Tell me about your new mixtape, Ruff Around The Edges.

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. From the UK bhangra industry, there’s not a lot that has been as eclectic as this tape. It’s a very sensible introduction to me as a recording artist. And I say recording artist because I don’t want to be limited to being a Punjabi singer. I just happen to be doing Punjabi music, that’s what it is, and I do that shamelessly and unapologetically. But at the same time, this is my contribution to the world and the rich history of UK bhangra. I take pride in being a British artist.

At the beginning of the song Jatti Lahore Di you’ve got a voice recording of someone interviewing you, talking about how the Punjabi music scene was once biggest in the UK, but now it’s moved over to Canada and India…

That’s an extract taken from a podcast I did in Canada with Frequency and Friends. The UK used to be the Mecca of Punjabi music. Even in the 1990s, Jazzy B was killing it in Canada with a folk-orientated vocal style. He came exploding onto the scene. But even he came to the UK, to Birmingham, to work with Sukshinder Shinda. A lot of people had to come to the UK to become successful in this field, to have the best sound. It was a producer-led industry back then, and the sound was here.

What was growing up in south London like?

I love Streatham. At primary school I was the only Asian kid in my class. In other south London in areas like Tooting and Norbury there is more of a prominent Asian population, but in Streatham it weren’t that. And I love it because what I’ve noticed in different settings is that Asian kids will have their Asian friends. There’s not always a lot of mingling. But there was so much mingling in my early years. Growing up around that, the influences…carrying that into secondary school. I started experiencing more parts of London, hanging in Tulse Hill, Brixton, here, there, everywhere, taking in culture and music. Back in those days, grime music found its record distributor on the back seat of the top deck of your local London bus. These were the days of sending songs through infared. We didn’t have the accessibility to the internet back then. If you wanted the new Giggs tune, you probably didn’t know what it was called, because whoever downloaded the file first called it what they wanted to. ‘Giggs - Talking Da Hardest’ was called ‘Giggs Freestyle’… 

Portrait of Raf-Saperra by Hark1karan

So you were around a lot of grime and rap, as well as south Asian styles of music.

Definitely. 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. 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.

Talk me through some of the songs on Ruff Around The Edges. 

Track one is called Saperra to give it a grandiose introduction, to let you know who I am. And that’s in a very contemporary, hip-hop, Bobby Kang-production, 808s- slapping kinda sound. The video’s filmed in Canada. Big hooligan energy with that one. Another track is Jatti Lahore Di, my first duet track with the legendary Naseebo Lal. This song’s exciting for me because it was a very difficult studio environment. We recorded it in Coventry, at Panjabi MC’s studio. It was a hot summer’s day and we were in the booth sweating. It’s a playful boliyan, a boy-and-girl back-and-forth, a style that was big in 1980s Punjabi folk music. This is a head-nod to that era of Punjabi music with a big, brash New York hip-hop sound thrown in.

I notice you’ve got a few interesting and unexpected features…

Yeah, I’ve curated songs that don’t just showcase Raf-Saperra. There are artists that we believe in. We’ve given them a whole track: Tales of the Snake Charmer is sung by Myrgasmic, an artist from Morocco. It cuts into some James Bond cinematic shit. The outro is a recording of director Robert Rodriguez talking about cinema. It was an interview he was having with Quentin Tarantino, and they were discussing the impact of a new body of work. When Easy Rider came out, it was so different that studios were like, “this is what youngsters want, and we don’t know how to make it.” I hold that feeling with this tape. It’s not something that studios will be able to manufacture. It’s not polished, it’s rough around the edges, it’s vulnerable and honest. 

You’ve got that Afrobeats song, ‘Badaami Rangiye’, which Yung Singh premiered on his BBC Radio 1 residency recently.

I want that song to be played in different spaces. With one of the feature artists, Loun, spitting in Arabic and French, it’ll get played out in Morocco, Algeria, UAE and other spots. Despite Punjabis being spread out, I think the world of art and culture is massive, so there is a bit of everything on this tape. The qawwali track, Mast Qalandar, is me tapping into a different type of music that I never thought I’d be doing, especially on my first mixtape. The qawwali is based on a Sufi saint whose shrine is in the south of Pakistan, in the state of Sindh. Whoever hears this qawwali track won’t think it’s me. It’s different. I prepared for that vocal for months with my ustad. There are a lot of different things that I don’t think people will expect a kid from Streatham Hill to be doing. Like sitting there in Lahore in a green shalwar kameez singing qawwali.

To finish off, why do you think it has been hard for south Asian artists to cut through in the British music industry? Why is that changing?

South Asians have been a massive part of UK culture and there is a huge population of us over here, and I just feel like we’re underrepresented. If there is a television show out there and the protagonist is south Asian, chances are the whole show is based or thematically-centred around them being south Asian. It’s like a caricature. You see their inner-life at home, their mum’s wearing a headscarf, there’s a particular way of representing us. But I feel like if you’re tuned in right now reading this, and you’re south Asian, 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. The reason my videos look how they look, the reason I direct them, is because I want to elevate the aesthetic of Punjabi music videos to a non-Asian demographic. I’m Punjabi, so naturally I look into a lot of Punjabi artists like Sidhu Moose Wala, who has opened doors for the rest of us. I feel that came from him saying: fuck this shit, I’m gonna make my own ting. This is me saying: fuck that shit, my visuals are gonna be their own ting. South Asians aren’t trying to sit around waiting any more. We’ve been waiting. Moments like this make me feel proud. Whether people give us the bring-in or not, I think the art speaks for itself.

Portrait of Raf-Saperra by Hark1karan