[8] Laila was born on 17 November 1952 in Sylhet, East Bengal, Dominion of Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) to Syed Mohammed Imdad Ali, a civil servant from Rajshahi posted in Karachi, and Amina Laila (née Anita Sen), a musical artist.

In those days, Ahmed Rushdi was the leading film singer who introduced rock n roll, disco and other modern genres to South Asian music.

Following Rushdi's success, Christian bands specialising in jazz started performing at various night clubs and hotel lobbies[12] in Karachi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Dhaka and Lahore.

Laila became a fan of singer Ahmed Rushdi whom she considered her guru (teacher), and tried to emulate not only his singing style but also the way he used to perform on the stage.

[3][13][14] While she was a student of Saint Lawrence Convent, she won an inter-school singing competition in Karachi in the then West Pakistan.

[15] When Laila was 12, she performed as a playback singer for a male child actor in the Urdu language film Jugnu.

[21] She gained popularity in India with the songs O Mera Babu Chail Chabila and Dama Dam Mast Qalandar.

[16] In 1982, she won Golden Disk Award as her album Superuna composed by Bappi Lahiri was sold over 1 lakh copies on the first day of its release.

[27][28] Laila has sung in seventeen languages including her native Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Pashto, Baluchi, Arabic, Persian, Malay, Nepalese, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, French and English.

She first married Khawaja Javed Kaiser, secondly a Swiss citizen named Ron Daniel and then actor Alamgir.