Rolling Stone October 30, 1997 By David Fricke Ragas-a-Go-Go With their indie guitars, Indian sitars and cut-and-past dance grooves, Cornershop are a smart British rock band made for the ’9Os and ripe for a U.S. breakthrough On a late-summer afternoon in New York’s East Village, Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayres of the British band are stretched out on the grass in Tompkins Square Park, enjoying an illicit smoke and digging the street musicians filling the sultry air with their respective, cross-purpose recitals. Singh and Ayres can hear coming from various points in the park, a saxophonist blowing free-jazz licks, a drummer playing a snappy, complex pattern on a conga and a guitarist practicing Philip Glass-like arpeggios through glops of Hendrix-style fuzz. “I wish I had my tape recorder with me right now,” says Singh, Cornershop’s singer, guitarist, and main songwriter and producer, tugging thoughtfully at the long, bushy sideburns that frame his broad, dark, Indian features. “That conga player is into something interesting.” “Yeah,” raves Ayres, a lanky white Briton of Canadian birth who plays keyboards and tamboura, an Indian stringed instrument. “For some reason, the music is all coming together right in this spot. It’s like a record waiting to be made.” Cornershop’s own routinely praised records — the albums Hold On It Hurts (1994), Woman’s Gotta Have It (1995), the just-issued When I Was Born for the 7th Time and several early punked-up EPs — sound like serendipity in overdrive: volatile, compelling collisions of primal guitar menace, rubbery ’70s funk, budget-synth techno, urbanweedhead hip-hop and Punjabi folk music, from the north of India. Cornershop make commercially improbable, dangerously messy music. Nevertheless, in Britain, 7th Time has cracked the Top 30, a stunning triumph for a band originally formed as an assault on the pop mainstream. Singh, Ayres, drummer Nick Simms, percussionist Peter Bengry and keyboard and sitar player Anthony Saffrey make a lot of their music on the move, right at the point of inspiration. “Funky Days Are Back Again,” a slinky charmer on the new album, was recorded in a tour bus as Cornershop zipped through Vermont between Lollapalooza shows in 1996. Ayres notes that “Tjinder bought the Casio keyboard that’s on there the day before at a thrift store.” Another 7th Time track, “What Is Happening?” — a playful splash of electronic squiggles and spoken-word samples atop a calm, mathematical beat played by Singh on the dholki, an Indian drum — was conceived in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and partly cut by Singh in New York on a portable DAT machine. And the late Allen Ginsberg’s reading of his poem “When the Light Appears Boy” was recorded in the bard’s New York kitchen in 1995. The music accompanying Ginsberg — a Punjabi horn-and-drum band that sounds like Sun Ra’s Arkestra kickin’ it on the banks of the Ganges — was taped by Singh in India last year as he walked down a street between two temples. “We were playing a record of [Ginsberg’s] Howl at our shows after we came offstage,” says Singh. “He heard about that and was interested in meeting us.” Singh adds that “When the Light Appears Boy” “was supposed to be about Bob Dylan, through the influence of William Blake’s vision of death. We just put the Asian elements underneath, to represent more of what [Ginsberg] had done in his life.” The British-born son of immigrants from the Punjab, Singh, 29, grew up in a Sikh household in the city of Wolverhampton, in Northern England where he played the dholki in his local temple. As a child and teenager he felt the vicious twin backhands of racsim and the English class system. “There would be people,” he says, “who just come up and beat you, who chase you on bikes, because they don’t like you.” But Singh does not play around with the music of his people on Cornershop’s records out of cultural obligation or because of any misionary agenda. He insists that the 7th Time’s letter-perfect cover of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” — which Singh sings in Punjabi — was not a jab at the Beatles for their gentelmans’s adventure in Indian music: “ We thought it was a good song. And the album title — people say, ‘ It’s about reincarnation?’ No it’s got the number seven, which is biblical, and it was used in a lot of good ’70s reggae records like Culture’s Two Sevens Clash. “I consider myself more Asian than English because of color,” Singh states flatly. “But I really dont feel like either of them.” Actually, he says of Cornershop, “the reason we started in music wasn’t because we wanted to be in a band; it was because we didn’t like the industry. It was a very bland time. Much hasn’t changed, either, for him: “Rock’s in a bad state. Preachers are the ’90s Supertramp. The production technique is shit — plastic nonsense.” “It gives us confidense,” declares Ayres, also 29, cheerily, “to know that what we’re doing really stands out because there’s so much crap around.” Cornershop never had any problems getting noticed. Formed in 1992 by Singh and Ayres after they met at a college in the English city of Preston, between Liverpool and Manchester, the band — originally with Singh’s brother Avtar on guitar — was visually provocate and fearlessly raw: loud, anarchic and unapologetic in its crude mix of heavy-manners punk and traditional Inadian music. And Tjinder’s Iyrics, when you could discern them through the din, were blunt in their discontent: “Again and again the racist grind/Your second nature’s as bad as your prime” (“England’s Dreaming,” from the ’93 EP Lock, Stock and Double-Barrel). Even the band’s name was an attitude grenade, a bold reference to the socioeconomic stereotyping of lndians in Britain, many of whom run small grocery stores. “We had people making remarks in clubs when we first started playing,” says Singh. “We tried to do gigs in different places — schools, Christian festivals — rather than just normal gigs where people would be all too aware of what they were seeing and what we were singing about.” (One thing Singh has not sung about, explicitly anyway, is his position on the Sikh separatist movement that has wracked India with religiously inflamed protest and deadly guerrilla violence. “I believe that the Sikhs were going to be given a land that was not given to them,” he says. “I believe that killing on any level is unacceptable. I wish there was an easier answer. But, certainly, I am for a separate Sikh state if pushed on it.”) The fledgling Cornershop confounded the U.K. music press; reviewers loved the concept but couldn’t always hack the chaos. Yet the band immediately got a British record deal, with the independent Wiiija label, after its first London area gig in the fall of ’92. “It was the whole package,” says Wiija head Gary Walker of that show. “Tjinder had the ’70s-shirt thing going, his brother was doing all this noise-feedback stuff on guitar. They had slides going on in the backgroud. They had the look, the sound, and they were trying to shake things up.” Cornershop’s shift from the high-volume terrorism of the early EPs to the trancelike, danceable mischief on Woman’s Gotta Have It — especially in “6 a.m. Jullandar Shere” and “7:20 a.m. Jullandar Sheire,” the long, droning beauties that sandwich the album — was partly born of circumstance. Avtar Singh was concentrating on his work in fashion design and has left the group) and finances were tight. Making a big noise, says Tjinder, “entailed moving a lot of big amps. We couldn’t afford to buy a van. ‘OK, we’ll do it in a car. If we can’t fit a piece of gear in, we won’t use it.’” But, Walker points out, “if you listen to ‘Readers’ Wives’ on Hold On It Hurts, there’s a drum-loop done on a four-track in someone’s bedroom. They did it after a gig, messing around, and liked the loop so much they went into a studio and put the sitar and vocals on top. They were already looking at using beatboxes and bouncy rhythms.” Singh and Ayres are now so deep into dance-music technology that they’ve started a sideproject duo, Clinton, which has issued three singles in Britain. Cornershop have done wonders on indieville resources. Woman’s Gotta Have It was recorded in about a week for 3,000 pounds (about $5,000). When I Was Born for the 7th Time was done in two months, on and off, for a more expensive but still modest 35,000 pounds (about $60,000). In the meantime, Singh and Ayres are waiting for the money to roll in. Ayres has a full-time job in manufacturing control at Beggar’s Banquet Records — he spent much of the summer ordering vast quantities of Prodigy CDs — and Saffrey is a social worker at a home for the elderly. “I’ve been forced not to work day jobs to keep things going,” Singh cracks dryly. But the numbers are getting better. Although Woman’s Gotta Have It sold only IO,OOO copies in the U.S. (where the band is signed with David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label), initiaI pressing orders for When I Was Born for the 7th Time are already double that figure. Yet for Singh — whose family is, in his words, “pretty religious,” and whose father is a schoolteacher, crossing over goes two ways. For example, Singh is not Tjinder’s real last name. “My full name is Tjinder Singh Nurpuri,” he explains. “I used Tjinder Singh so my family wouldn’t know that I was in a band. It was a bit of a cultural thing. It wasn’t a good thing to speak about to the neighbors. “They still don’t know I’m doing it properly,” Singh says of his family. “They think I work at Wiiija Records. I used to pick up my phone for two years, saying, ‘Wiiija Records’ just in case it was my dad.”
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