Talking 'shop

by Matt Ashare

"I think `Norwegian Wood' was something that shaped what a lot of people in the West thought of Asian music for a long time," says Cornershop singer and multi-instrumentalist Tjinder Singh, referring to the sitar-laced Beatles classic that marked the Fab Four's immersion in the exotic sounds of the Orient. "It was a big deal because it made people see Asian music as very passive, mellow, and easygoing, and that was what they then believed Indian culture was all about, when in actual fact it is not."

Singh is at Warner Bros.' New York City offices doing some advance publicity for Cornershop's new Luaka Bop/Warner Bros. CD, which features a cover of "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" sung in Punjabi. It's a reasonably straight-and-mellow interpretation of the Lennon/McCartney tune -- which may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the scruffy and punkish bent of Cornershop's previous work. But it was, nonetheless, inspired by the same desire to subvert Western assumptions about Indian culture that fuels Cornershop's patchwork of noisy guitars, hip-hop beats, and the traditional Eastern sounds of tamboura, dholki, and, of course, sitar. It's a desire that also comes through in Singh's lyrics, which celebrate fragments of his cultural background, like the new "Brimful of Asha," an upbeat, deliciously catchy ode to Indian songstress Asha Bhosle. Even the band's name plays on the racial stereotyping of Indians as convenience-store proprietors (Apu, anyone?).

Like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Singh was born and raised in England -- but after his parents had left India. He was brought up in an environment of East-meets-West. "I used to play an Asian battle drum called the dholki in the temple when I was quite young, like 12 or something, but the temple was split between Christian gospel and Indian traditions. I actually liked the traditional music very much, so I stopped and investigated it."

Singh put music on hold as he prepared to study business in college, but it caught up with him again when he met Cornershop keyboardist/guitarist Ben Ayres in school. "Ben and I started messing around with noises. We thought there was just a lot of ridiculous music going on at the time that was getting credit, which was nonsense because it wasn't doing anything. But we were just doing Cornershop as a sort of pastime, as a way to meet people socially by going to different cities. Laziness sort of crept up on us."

Laziness?

"Yes, laziness. It was laziness. I didn't want to use my college degree in business-information technology. I thought, `This is okay, I'm doing this band for a while.' And then slowly it turned into a full-time thing. Things like music and stuff -- going out and buying records from second-hand shops -- that's work for me. And that's not really a day's work, is it?"

Okay, but to date Singh and his bandmates' laziness has yielded three full-length albums and four EPs in just four years. And their penchant for "going to different cities" and socializing has led to some unusual and challenging pop fusions. The new When I Was Born for the 7th Time features collaborations with the lovely-voiced, San Francisco-based singer/songwriter Paula Frazer (on the country-flavored duet "Good To Be on the Road Back Home"), Dr. Octagon mixmaster the Automator (on the funky, scratch-and-sample pop numbers "I Sleep on the Left Side" and "Candyman"), and the late Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who reads his "When the Light Appears Boy" against a backdrop of Punjabi street noises recorded by Singh.

"We were using recordings of some of Allen's stuff at the end of our gigs, so when we were in New York last year we got in touch with him," Singh explains. "We sent him some of our music and then just asked him if it would be okay if we came round and maybe worked on something with him. He put forward that poem ["When the Light Appears Boy"] himself, saying that he had always wanted it to be a song, and I recorded him reading it at his kitchen table.

Indeed, that kind of spontaneity is something of a rule for Cornershop. "We've never really sat down as a band and made any big decisions about what we do musically. Things come sort of naturally. People, like Paula Frazer, are upstairs in the studio, so we use them. Or someone like the Automator comes to us with the idea of using a Larry Coryell sample [on "Candyman"], and we use it. It's a case of us liking different types of music and wanting to incorporate them. Whether we're doing sequenced music, elements of Asian music, or some African percussion, we use different sounds because they're good and because we like them, that's all."

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