The young dancer got a little huffy when singer Raminder Bhuller and his music-producer son asked her to cover herself.

Or at least stop taking scissors to her already skimpy outfit.

“We begged her,” Bhuller says, laughing at the memory. “She threatened to walk out.”

When the Bhullers arrived at the music video shoot in Bollywood Mecca Mumbai (Bombay) they assumed it would be a traditional bhangra production involving brightly coloured traditional garb and folk dancing.

The album “Vanjli Wala” was his fifth, but his first collaboration with his son Rayman, the well-known drummer.

Raminder calls his son the best producer he’s ever worked with, one willing to take the time to get the sound exactly right.

The Mumbai shoot was going to be the video of a song about a man asking the woman in his life when she will come to his street.

Perhaps because of the street reference, the director decided to go with something edgy and urban, playing off the imagery of rap videos.

He’d hired a group of young men and women to dance and lip-synch the song with Bhuller – the men dressed to look like homies from the hood and the athletic young women, a la rap videos, dressed to show as much of their trim figures as possible.

It was either go home or make the best of it.

Which is how Bhuller, a cheerful 48-year-old married father of two from Surrey ended up in a hoodie, baggy pants, and b-boy bling (some of it borrowed from his son) doing his best to look serious and intense.

In a sense, it was no different from other videos he’d done where he wore traditional garb. It was acting, playing a character.

The young woman in the barely-there outfit and her fellow performers got to shake their stuff, but the Bhullers made sure they maintained a safe distance from the old-enough-to-be-their-dad singer, and pressured the director to limit the amount of exposed flesh seen in the final cut.

Bhuller broke up more than once during the shoot, laughing so hard the camera had to stop rolling.

A careful viewing of the completed video reveals a faint hint of a smile here and there, the look of a man who finds the whole thing funny and is trying to keep a straight face.

It is a very different look for Bhuller, who is usually seen in videos beaming happily as he leads a line of dancers in traditional clothing against a backdrop of centuries-old architecture.

A year later, the video, titled “Birkan Feat” has become one of his most-viewed clips on the Internet, one of the first things that comes up when “Raminder Bhuller” is run through search engines like Google and Ask.com.

He isn’t likely to do a second one in that vein, however.

Future directors will be quizzed about their vision well in advance of the actual shoot, just to make sure he doesn’t end up arguing over skirt lengths and cleavage again.

dferguson@surreyleader.com