After a night on the town with Talvin Singh, Sheryl Garratt says the world’s trendiest tabla player is more inspired than arrogant
It seems there are two Talvin Singhs, both of them Londoners who play the tablas and DJ at various clubs. One of them is the arrogant, pompous name-dropper you may have read about in interviews to promote his new album Ha a man who takes himself too seriously by half. The other is the charming, funny man I’ve often met in clubs who talks a million ideas a minute and always has some new person to introduce, new project on the go. It’s this Singh I’m out with tonight.
It is a relaxed night at the Mint Bar in Clerkenwell, a sari-clad DJ Siren is playing classical music “mainly Western, with a little Indian thrown in” over gentle dance beats. Here we meet up with Singh’s friend Suchitra, an actress making a short visit to London from Bombay; with Mukul, a DJ who is just back from university in California; and Shwetul, another long-time friend.
Over dinner and a few glasses of wine, the conversation moves from Bombay bars to the effects of the dot.com boom in San Francisco and Bangalore, takes in the video Singh was making the night before with Jerry Dammers and an Asian breakdance crew from Hitchin, and somehow ends with us discovering that most of our parents own Jim Reeves records. Although Singh’s dad at least had the grace to buy the disco classic Car Wash too.
Talvin Singh was born in Leytonstone, east London, where he still lives. His mother is from Madhya Pradesh in India, his father from the Punjab via Uganda. Here Raghbir Singh worked as a TV engineer at Granada and is still a bit of a dab hand with non-digital electronics which comes in useful when his son wants his analogue synths fixed. Retired now, Raghbir watches a lot of Bollywood movies with his wife. Which is weird, Singh says, because he was more of a Clint Eastwood man before.
Singh first showed interest in playing the tabla at the age of four. At 16 he went to India to study for two years. Before that learning wasn’t always easy. Some in London’s close-knit Indian classical scene were helpful, others less so: “I had to hustle.” Whenever any of the Indian masters was playing at the Royal Festival Hall he’d go down there early, try and get backstage: “To show my respect to the artists, and hoping they’d show me a lick or two.”
Last year Singh did a tour performing solo, just him, his tablas and a visual artist reacting to the complex rhythms live on screens around the venues. He played a couple of nights at the Union Chapel in London, rose petals strewn on the floor, candles lit all around him, and many of the “classical policemen” who used to dismiss him now in the audience.
“They all want me to record with them now,” he says coolly. “I greet them, but I’m like, ‘Yeah. Tomorrow.'” He’s equally dismissive of Western artists who try to call him in to add exotica. “I can’t be arsed with people who borrow other cultures just to make themselves seem a bit spicy.”
Some would see this as arrogance, but he loves interacting with other musicians and sees his solo albums more as collaborations with a cast he’s assembled and directed, like a movie. He just doesn’t like being used and mentions a concert he did with one big star, who took in Singh’s quilted Nehru jacket from Alexander McQueen, then asked, “Why aren’t you wearing something Indian?”
Growing up there was other music too, sounds that to varying degrees resurface in his work now. Like many suburban boys, Singh liked The Jam and affected a mod look for a while. When electro hit the United Kingdom, he hung out with local breakdancers and bought an 808 drum machine that he later used to keep time while practising his tablas. There was the dub reggae that appealed to so many London Asians, a thriving jazz scene, and when acid house took off he would go to the clubs and watch. “I wasn’t taking pills. It was only later I found out it was inspired by ecstasy. I just liked seeing it all. And it wasn’t just white people black people were into this new electronic sound.”
He never felt comfortable mixing his Indian training with house music, even though he loved it. But when drum’n’bass came along, like many young Britons he found a music in which all his influences fitted comfortably.
Anxious to prove that his parents’ investment in him had been worthwhile, on his return from India Singh threw himself into session work, playing on bhangra records, and with artists like Bjrk, Sun-Ra, Massive Attack, Courtney Pine and Siouxsie Sioux. But it wasn’t until the monthly club night at Anokha (“unique” in Hindi) that things really came together.
While Indian classics played in an ambient soundscape upstairs, Singh would play drum’n’bass records downstairs, with jazz singer/jungle MC Cleveland Watkiss often performing live over the mix and West End club girls dancing in trainers and saris. The first Anokha compilation, billed as Soundz of the Asian Underground, came out in 1997 and a year later Singh released OK, the album that was to win him the Mercury Music Prize.
Since OK, he has collaborated on an album with New York producer Bill Laswell and tabla master Zakir Hussain under the name Tabla Beat Science. He went to the mountains of Morocco to produce an album by the Master Musicians of Joujuka. He’s also spent more and more time in India, where he recently began doing his TV interviews in Hindi and Punjabi for the first time. His records don’t sell particularly well there most Indian kids with access to the Internet download their music instead. But right now Singh is more concerned with explaining himself, setting himself up for the long term.
‘My deal with a major label is not going to last for too long the two albums I’ve made for Island are hardly commercial but hopefully I’ve got years of making music.” And plans, lots of plans. There will be another Anokha compilation this year and the club recently reopened in a new monthly home in Brick Lane. There will be a series of collaborations released on his own label and he’s hoping to bring his elderly teacher Ustad Lakshman Singh to Britain for the first time as part of a Meltdown festival he’s programming on the South Bank in April.
The Aids awareness organisation Red Hot and Blue has asked him to make a compilation, but he’s hoping to convince them to commission new work instead. He wants to travel round India collaborating with regional artists Punjabi folk musicians, Tamil rappers to make music that might reach people an advertising campaign would not.
As he talks, Singh sprays out ideas: a book, a compilation, a film, an art work, a new collaboration. Some are forgotten a day later. He works at others with an awesome tenacity until they come off. His enthusiasm is infectious, and you find yourself volunteering to edit the book, appear in the film. In his 30s now, he says his new challenge is finding a balance having a life with room for something other than music.
We ended our night out at Herbal, a small, crowded club in Shoreditch where Damien, a DJ friend of Singh from the acid house era, is playing hard, bass-heavy beats while an MC delivers a frenetic, staccato stream of consciousness. In the space of a few hours, in one small part of London, we’d taken in experimental electronica played by Japanese and Canadian artists, Western classical music mixed by a British-Indian DJ and banging dance beats with rapping by an MC whose parents are probably Caribbean. None of it seemed particularly unusual. It’s what living in London in almost any of Britain’s cosmopolitan cities is all about.
Earlier we’d been talking about the classical purists who have questioned Singh’s right to fuse his traditional training with more modern influences. “I hate the word fusion,” he said. “It has nothing to do with what I do. A lot of my music is just about growing up in London. My Indian classical roots, my dance roots, that whole mod underground vibe, it’s all part of me. Part of us. We’re not fusing anything. It’s in us already.”
Talvin Singh’s Ha is available from selected music stores on the Island label
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