Bhajan Boy
Self-released, 14th February 2025
Bhajan Bhoy’s Ajay Saggar has been a presence within the Lancashire music scene since the 1980s and, like all Lancastrian presences, casts a shade that stretches the land, even from beyond the county’s borders. Having lived in the Netherlands since 1991, Bhoy On The Wire is Ajay Saggar’s Lancastrian shade. The album is a 40th birthday gift to Radio Lancashire’s On The Wire show, which Ajay started listening to in 1984 on an overcast day veiled in the grey Lancashire sea of wet mist. Recorded in early 2024 and broadcast in April of the same year, Bhoy On The Wire released this Valentine’s Day and each track is a love song to a Lancashire town that shifts between the fabric of fantasy and the Real in Blackburn, Lancaster, Clitheroe, Blackpool, Burnley, and Preston.
It was in The Ferret, Preston, where floral cologne smothered what little oxygen remained in the crowd, that I caught Bhajan Bhoy supporting The Primevals – third on – sandwiched between punk and garage rock inspired bands. Some of Ajay’s past lies in putting on DIY shows in Lancaster in the 80s, so this confluence between past and present, tide and time felt fitting – despite the differences between Bhajan Bhoy’s walls of noise built around him and the more traditional efforts of the evening.
As I watched Ajay perform, a stain upon the wood flooring watched me. The Stain, pulsating with each reverberation in note, danced freely in the hallowed cavern that Ajay had carved from audio attrition with his guitar alone. I’d spent the best part of the afternoon wandering through Manchester in search of a “proper caf”, to no avail. My fibre was brittle by result, so The Stain throbbed a fresh wound in my peripheral whilst Ajay’s lip quivered and his eyes poured over each string in enduring contemplation. Between the two amplifiers, conducting their industrial symphony in delay from left to right, The Stain hissed “You are hearing the guttural clang of noise from a factory that’s machinery produces dreams.”
When people speak of Lancashire they often wax lyrical of sandstone and limestone, of chimney smoke and bruised skies. None of these are so deeply disparate from the English experience as a whole. Bhoy On The Wire retains the dreamlike nature of Ajay’s solitary guitar-driven production at The Ferret, but encompasses electronic soundscapes that sound less of the industrial machine and instead reveal something softer – a more delicate thread that runs through the county – whether it be evoked from horse’s hooves and a synthesiser’s lamentful cascade of electronic rain in “The Milkman (Blackburn)”, or from the dark turn between dream and nightmare bordered by the funfair motif in “What Lurks Behind Those Illuminations? (Blackpool)”, or even from the neo- noir stroll through “Campus Blues (Lancaster)”. This softer Lancashire summoned by Ajay seems to call to him, even 30 years on. I wonder if it will always call the same to me.