CORNER

SHOP

Groove Is In The Heart
Genre-hopping British indie rock outfit Cornershop, still best known for poppy earworm Brimful Of Asha, play their album Cornershop And The Double “O” Groove at the Perth Festival Gardens on Sunday, February 19. Frontman Tjinder Singh talks to TRAVIS JOHNSON about cultural cross-pollination.

In retrospect, it seems that genre-mashing was always going to play a large part in Tjinder Singh’s musical career, seeing has how he was introduced to the concept in the most direct and accidental of ways in his childhood.
As he explains it, “I used to listen to a lot of Punjab folk music, as well as a lot of Sikh devotional music. I used to go to a Sikh temple in this converted snooker hall, and half the hall was taken up by the Sikh denomination, and the back of the hall belonged to a black Christian denomination, and so in the middle you could hear a mixture of the two musics as you walked in.”
Perhaps it’s a long bow to draw, but you can clearly see the impetus to mix together very disparate musical traditions, from simple rock/hip hop crossovers to more far-reaching expeditions into Punjabi folk music. These explorations have culminated in the album Cornershop And The Double “O” Groove, a collaboration with the relatively unknown female vocalist Bubbley Khaur.
“I’d met her very briefly many years ago,” Singh recalls. “I was introduced to someone who could sing in Punjabi by a friend of mine, and we met up to see if it would work, and we’d listen to different records and cassettes and have large discussions and got on with recording the first couple of tracks, which was in 2004. And then we slowly got around to putting the album together.”
“Slowly” is certainly the operative word, with the album taking some six years from inception to release. “I suppose part of it was that she would be very busy, because she lives a more traditional sort of life, and if she wasn’t busy then I was busy, either recording another album or doing other things at the same time, so it just carried on and on.”
Singh also admits to a certain feeling that the album, if released any earlier, would have had a somewhat more difficult time finding an audience. As he explains, “I don’t think the music was connected to any time when we could have released it and gotten people listening to it. I think the last decade that started the century off, people weren’t really interested in guitar bands, and now music has undergone an evolution into more wide-ranging things, and we’re sort of back to what the ‘90s was in terms of people listening to a wider range of things.”
Clearly, the timing was right, and Singh is very pleased with the reaction to the album. “It’s been pretty good,” he says. “Especially with the Asian community it’s been very good, because we’ve never pandered to the Asian community. But part of it fits better in the Asian community, and it’s done very well. The word of mouth on it is still pretty good, and the youth have also got into it and seen it for something different.”