I’ll be honest, until a few years ago, I couldn’t have told you who produced Kung Fu Fighting. I knew the song, obviously. Everyone knows the song. You could play those opening bars to a person who hadn’t listened to music since 1987 and they’d still know it. But the man behind it? No idea. And that, in a nutshell, is the story of Biddu Appaiah’s career. One of the most remarkable trajectories in the history of pop music, attached to a name that most people couldn’t place in a lineup.

That’s worth getting angry about, actually. Because what this man did across three decades, across two continents, across genres that had no business talking to each other is the kind of thing that should have its own chapter in every serious book about popular music. It doesn’t. So let’s fix that.

Biddu was born in Bangalore in 1944. Not exactly the most obvious origin story for a man who would end up shaping British disco and launching South Asia’s pop music industry, but that’s rather the point. He grew up listening to Western music on the radio, Elvis, the Beatles, American jazz creeping through the static, and somewhere in that listening, something clicked.

In 1967, he moved to London. Just like that. Packed up, left, went. The London he arrived in was the one that gets romanticised in documentaries, Carnaby Street, the tail end of the swinging sixties, a city that thought it had invented cool. For a young Indian man with no connections and very little money, breaking into that world wasn’t charming or whimsical. It was hard. He waited tables. He played in bands that went nowhere. He knocked on doors and got told no, probably more times than he’d care to remember.

But he kept going. And, crucially, he kept learning. Specifically, he became obsessed with the studio. With what happened between a song being written and a song being heard. With the gap that a producer fills.

Here’s the thing about Kung Fu Fighting that makes it almost funny in retrospect: it was never supposed to matter. Biddu was in the studio with a singer called Carl Douglas in 1974, and the track was recorded in about ten minutes as a throw away B-side. Filler. An afterthought.

Eleven million copies later, it was the best-selling single on the planet.

It hit number one in the UK. Number one in the US. It soundtracked the Bruce Lee craze, the martial arts film boom, the whole slightly delirious cultural moment of the mid-seventies when karate seemed to be everywhere. And underneath all of that, the novelty, the timing, the cultural lightning-in-a-bottle quality of it, was a production that was genuinely, almost annoyingly good. That groove. That hook. The way it moves. That’s not an accident. That’s Biddu.

A lesser producer would have overcrowded it. Would have added strings where they weren’t needed, filled every silence, tried too hard. Biddu left room. He understood that the best pop productions create space for the listener to climb inside, and Kung Fu Fighting has that quality in abundance. You don’t listen to it so much as get pulled into it.

One of the things that separates genuine talent from a lucky break is whether you can do it twice. Biddu could do it several times over.

His work with Tina Charles through the mid-to-late seventies produced some of the most pleasurable pop records of the era. I Love to Love (But My Baby Loves to Dance) went to number one in Britain in 1976 and then spread outward from there, reaching audiences across Europe and beyond. It’s a song that still sounds — and I mean this as the highest possible compliment — completely effortless. You can hear how much work went into making it sound that easy, if that makes sense.

What Biddu was doing with Tina Charles was essentially architecture. Building songs that could bear the weight of repeated listening, productions that were warm without being cloying, hooks that were obvious without being stupid. It is harder than it sounds. The pop music landscape is littered with the wreckage of producers who got one right and spent the next decade trying to work out what they’d done.

Biddu knew exactly what he’d done. And he kept doing it.

Now here’s where the story gets really interesting. Because at the point where most producers in his position would have dug in and kept working the British market, kept capitalising on a hot streak, Biddu started looking back toward India.

This was not a commercial calculation. In fact, it probably looked like the opposite of one. Indian popular music in the late seventies was essentially synonymous with Bollywood. Film songs dominated everything. The idea of a standalone pop industry, independent of cinema, was almost conceptually foreign. There was no infrastructure for it, no precedent, no obvious audience.

Biddu saw it differently.

His collaboration with Nazia Hassan, a Pakistani teenager with an extraordinary voice, produced Aap Jaisa Koi for the 1980 film Qurbani. The song was something new that was genuinely new, not just in the “fresh coat of paint” sense but in the structural sense. It sounded like the future. It drew from Western disco and pop production without feeling like an imitation of either. It was unambiguously South Asian and unambiguously modern at the same time, which was not a combination anyone had managed quite like that before.

The song was enormous. And what followed was the album Disco Deewane, released in 1981 which was even bigger. Fourteen million copies. Fourteen countries. Nazia Hassan became a phenomenon, and Biddu had done something that, in hindsight, looks almost audacious: he had demonstrated that India and Pakistan had an appetite for contemporary pop music that had nothing to do with films. He hadn’t just made a successful record. He had proven that a market existed.

The Indipop explosion of the nineties, everything from the MTV Asia era, the cassette culture boom, the whole ecosystem of South Asian popular music that developed outside the shadow of Bollywood, owes a debt to what Biddu did in those years. He showed the way. Not by accident, not by luck, but by understanding something about music and audiences that other people had missed.

There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about Biddu, and it’s the same reason you probably couldn’t name the producer of most of your favourite records. Producers are functionally invisible. The singer is on the poster. The singer does the interviews. The singer’s name is what people remember.

This is fine, mostly and it’s just how the industry works. But it means that someone like Biddu, who shaped the sound of pop music across multiple continents and multiple decades, gets a fraction of the recognition that his contribution deserves.

What makes his story particularly striking is the sheer variety of it. Most producers find a lane and stay in it. Biddu crossed lanes constantly, from British pop to disco to Bollywood to Indipop.  and didn’t just survive each crossing but thrived. That speaks to something deeper than technical skill. It speaks to a genuine curiosity about music, a refusal to be defined by geography or genre or whatever the market happened to want at any given moment.

I think about Biddu sometimes when people talk about the so-called discovery of South Asian contributions to British culture. There’s a tendency to act as though this is new, as though the influence of South Asian artists on British music is a recent development that needs excavating. But it isn’t new. It goes back at least as far as a young man from Bangalore who arrived in London in 1967 with very little and ended up helping to soundtrack a decade.

He didn’t wait for the door to open. He didn’t wait for anyone to make space. He just made the music, got it in front of people, and let the work speak for itself. And then he went home and did it all over again in a completely different context.

That’s not a footnote. That’s a legacy.

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