Sheila Chandra

Sheila Chandra stands among the era’s most distinctive and commercially viable vocalists for her efforts to merge non-Western traditions with mainstream pop during the 1980s and 1990s. She first entered the studio while still a teenager as the lead singer of Monsoon, a group whose British-Indian fusion blended new-wave textures with raga rock reminiscent of George Harrison’s work on tracks such as “Love You To.” That approach produced one album and yielded the surprise British hit “Ever So Lonely” in the early 1980s. Dissatisfied with the parent label’s insistence on more commercial fare, Chandra moved to the independent Indipop imprint in search of greater artistic latitude for her solo work.

Between roughly 1984 and 1987 she issued five solo albums, gradually abandoning Monsoon’s Asian dance-pop in favor of a more introspective strain of world fusion. During this period she assumed primary songwriting duties, frequently in tandem with producer and husband Steve Coe, who had previously contributed to Monsoon alongside Martin Smith; Smith continued to assist on Chandra’s initial solo releases. Indian instrumentation remained prominent, and electronic rhythms were occasionally retained to preserve dance-floor viability, yet Chandra increasingly ventured outside conventional pop and rock frameworks. Her experiments encompassed wordless melismatic passages, percussive vocal effects, multi-tracked vocal layers, extended song cycles, and a twenty-seven-minute composition rooted in a single raga. Caroline later reissued the Indipop catalog in the United States.

Chandra reached full artistic maturity on her 1990s recordings for Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, which Caroline again distributed in the U.S. Far from signaling a retreat toward safer territory, these albums realized a mature world fusion incorporating Indian ragas, British folk elements, Middle Eastern chant, intricate studio overdubbing, and vocal-percussion pieces that approached outright experimentalism. With Martin Smith no longer involved, Chandra and Coe alone generated the drone-based instrumental backdrops that framed her predominantly wordless vocals. Pop and rock considerations receded entirely as she concentrated on expanding the expressive range of the human voice across Indian, Spanish, and Islamic idioms, as well as material suited to the repertoires of June Tabor or Laurie Anderson. The resulting body of work positioned her as one of contemporary music’s foremost boundary-crossers—never a superficial dabbler—imbuing each piece with a haunting, spiritually resonant elegance. In 2010 she received a diagnosis of Burnt Mouth Syndrome, a neurological condition that terminated both her recording career and her capacity to speak.