The year was 1980 and the month April. Mumbai, then Bombay, was on the cusp of change. It was a time when Mumbai’s cloth mills were closing down and its finance industry was still in its infancy. Capitalism was a decade away and the waiting time on Ambassador car deliveries stretched into years. But already, a tiny, well-travelled set was trying to bring home nightlife experiences from elsewhere.

Leading the charge was a members-only nightclub, Studio 29, which had displaced a landmark barbershop called Wanderers, which was housed in the Bombay International Hotel (now Hotel Marine Plaza) on Marine Drive. Sound systems, turntables, lighting equipment and a big disco ball had all been imported from England. The brain behind it was Sabira Merchant, now a renowned grooming and etiquette expert. “My partner at that time said, ‘How can you put a record on and expect people to dance to it? You need an orchestra.’ I told him it’s called a discotheque and people will come.” Merchant drew confidence from the firm hold disco already had on her target clientele—20-somethings with money to spare. “I wanted it to be a classy place,” she says. “Nothing existed outside the five-star hotels at that time.”

Scarlet-walled, with shimmer curtains, velvet-upholstered chairs and Monroe memorabilia, Studio 29 caused a minor riot among Mumbai’s party set when it opened. The English DJs belted out Billboard hit after hit—spanning disco, rock, even heavy metal.

The result: “It was like we finally had our own Studio 54 here in Mumbai,” exclaims Sangeeta Chopra, who used Studio’s dance floor and its signature sound and light spectacles to choreograph more than 60 fashion shows. The ‘we’ she refers to consisted of Mumbai’s original occupants of Page 3—models like Anna Bredemeyer, Kimi Katkar and Sangeeta Bijlani, budding actors Jackie Shroff and Salman Khan , artist Nikhil Chaganlal and producers Aarti and Kailash Surendranath.

At its peak, Studio 29 had 700 paid-up members till Merchant, for want of space, put a stop to new entrants. Director Feroz Khan immortalised the nightclub in the Bollywood classic Janbaaz when he shot the song Give me Love there. Surendranath, whose production company worked on the film, says, “Feroz Khan wanted to shoot the sequel to Pyar Do Pyar Lo, which we had earlier shot in a London club. I said to him, ‘Why don’t you shoot at Studio 29?’ Feroz went, saw it and loved it.”

But by 1985, falling footfalls and a labour dispute put paid to disco dreams. Twenty-six years after the club downed its shutters, Studio 29’s fan following endures as India’s first modern nightclub, which, as Chopra puts it, “was in the right place at the right time.”

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