Cornershop first exploded into the music weeklies after burning Morrissey pictures, proclaiming themselves to be the first Asian indie band and playing gigs that could kindly be described as ‘rough around the edges’. The music papers loved them. They gave great interviews, they did exciting things and they had enough energy and enthusiasm to power a small generator. However, there was a slight problem which hindered their pop star status. They couldn’t really play. People were left gaping at some of their worst gigs where the playing was so ramshackle it couldn’t even have been called a shack.

To some, this was part of their charm, and considering the riot girrl thing (another scene that looked better on paper than it sounded in the Camden dinge pit) was going on at the same time, being able to play seemed incidental in your chances of being a pop star. The fact that Cornershop were on Wiiija as well as Huggy Bear just cemented the link between them in people’s minds.

However, by the time Cornershop had learnt to develop and knew how to implement some of the ideas they had, the press had lost interest. “Everything went really fast at about Suede’s time.Before that there was a little bit more space to experiment with music but nowadays you’ve got to present a finished article or get dropped. Everything has to go really quickly through the machinery now, so that’s why you’ve got things like Symposium, The Stereophonics and stuff. Just playing stuff which has been done again and again.”

So says Cornershop’s main man, Tjinder, when we meet him before their appearance at the ‘India Five-0’ festival, with a venom that can only come from a man who knows exactly which side of the horribly derivative crap / really good innovative music coin his band is on.

Although Cornershop disappeared from the music scene for a couple of years after their fifteen minutes of fame, they’ve been working continously, touring America and recording this album and its predecessor. “The last album was out at about the end of ’95 and by that time a lot of the press interest had died down so a lot of people didn’t even check it out or know that it was out. That sort of led to people thinking that we weren’t doing anytthing but we have been recording and touring pretty much incessently.” In this mid period they laid the groundwork for their new album ‘When I Was Born For The 7th Time’. Moving rapidly away from the fuzzy, messy indie sound that was their trademark, they’ve stumbled across a fluid hybrid of Asian instruments, indie guitars and hip hop lite beats that seems completely natural but completely in tune with the zeitgist. “It will be interesting that more people will hear this album and more people will be getting back to what we’ve done before and realising that there is a link.”

It certainly surprised me when I chanced upon ‘Brimful of Asha’, the recent single, which blew all my conceptions of Cornershop out of the window and made me feel pretty stupid for missing out on their previous stuff. It seems that through touring America, Cornershop were able to test the boundaries of what was expected of them and so develop into a far more interesting band. It also meant that they met Allen Ginsberg with whom they collaborated on the track ‘When The Light Appears Boy’. “Well, when we did that. It must have been almost a couple of years ago to the day. We went round to his house with David Byrne with idea of talking to him about maybe doing a collaboration. He was showing us all his books, he’s got an amazing collection of books, and he said ‘oh yeah, there’s this poem that I’ve always seen as like a rock song or a pop song or whatever’ so he dug it out and read through it and we just taped it on his seventies tape recorder there and then.”

This is just one of the bizarre tracks on the album. There’s a twisted country track called ‘Good To Be On The Road Back Home Again’ on which Tjinder duets with Tarnation’s Paula Frazer, a track on which One Inch Punch front man Justin Warfield contributes and a version of ‘Norwegian Wood’ sung in Punjab. “We were sort of playing it on some radio sessions in America and we just thought it would be good to have a different lilt to it. There’s a lot of bands doing Beatles covers and what’s the point if you’re not going to stamp your influence on to it and make it a bit different. It keyed in to the sitar thing as well which we felt comfortable with”.

The fusion of British and Asian music was fairly crassly commentated upon when Cornershop were first in the limelight but now with there being talk of an Asian music scene being popular in Britain it seems a good time to bring this up again. “There’s not really a movement going on at all and in the end it’s just a made-up thing, but it’s good that it’s getting a bit of interest and it’s good that some people are doing some interesting things, but in the end it’s not really substantial,” says Tjinder.

“We try to steer clear of peope that try to pigeonhole us and we don’t think about scenes and things. The worst thing you can do is try and associate yourself with what journalists are trying to do.”

The thing is that the Asian influence on Cornershop is just as apparent as their hip hop and dance influences. They use sitars but only because they make cool sounds and they use Asian rhythms only when they feel it will fit in with their songs. There’s just as much stupid scratching (‘Butter The Soul’) or Velvets guitar (‘Brimful Of Asha’) in Cornershop as there is Asian music. In the end they’re almost embarassed by the ‘Asian’ music tag. “There is a lot of bad music that Asian fusion has brought about and I think a lot of it was shown last night on television. I think a lot of it was awful, apart from Ravi Shankra who was excellent.”

In the end, the Asian thing is incidental to what Cornershop do. It becomes a bit like asking Beck why he has a folk influence. The point with Cornershop is not why they are making this music, but that they are at all.

“The only reason that we’ve carried on is because when we first started out we thought that we had a couple of original thoughts to say and we feel that we’ve been quite original at the moment and it’s good to persevere just to show some motherfuckers that they were wrong. That’s what it’s about at the moment.”

“We’re not a band for the sake of being a band or anything. It’s more a case of wanting to make righteous music.”

Cornershop were talking to Ben and Dave, in September 1997.