/ 12 July 2002

Rock around the shop

After five years, Cornershop have made a dazzling comeback, writes Alexis Petridis.

Many music artists feign indifference when their single hits number one, but only Cornershop really hated the experience. In January 1998 Fatboy Slim’s remix propelled Brimful of Asha, off Cornershop’s second album, When I Was Born for the Seventh Time, to the top of the charts. Cornershop looked as if their world had fallen apart.

Live, they performed the song in a perfunctory manner, wearing the expressions normally associated with being sent to the headmaster. They quickly scuttled back to obscurity, a move that at least spared leader

Tjinder Singh inclusion in 1998’s glut of articles about “nu-Asian cool”, a “scene” that existed largely as an excuse for Britain’s Sunday lifestyle sections to patronise Indians.

In a world filled with poverty, repression and incurable disease, it is difficult to muster sympathy for rock bands who sulk when they sell a lot of records. Nevertheless, Cornershop were ill-equipped for long-lasting stardom. Emerging from Leicester in the early 1990s, they gained fleeting notoriety via publicity stunts (picketing EMI, releasing records on curry-coloured vinyl, accusing Morrissey of racism) and a reputation as the worst live act in musical history.

Understandably, the appeal of a band who could barely play, performing punk songs in Punjabi, quickly faded. Singh and bandmate Ben Ayers were forced to define a more original sound — a fusion of rock, dance beats and Indian music — through trial and error. Their lauded albums Woman’s Gotta Have It and When I Was Born for the Seventh Time charmed through shambolic eclecticism and unpredictability, qualities not in keeping with a career as Top of the Pops stalwarts.

Cornershop were clearly happier experimenting out of the limelight than worrying about a follow-up single. After Brimful of Asha, they spent four years releasing obscure white labels, DJing and dabbling with a monstrously self-indulgent side-project called Clinton.

It seems to have done them good. Their new album, Handcream for a Generation (Wiiija), is a dazzling return. Its 13 tracks throw disparate styles together with a confidence that recalls the early-1980s Clash. It bears little musical resemblance to The Clash’s Sandinista!, but it shares that album’s fearlessness, a determination to chance its arm at any genre it fancies.

Music Plus One offers a thumping take on the disco-house of Daft Punk, Motion the 11 does booming roots reggae. Lessons Learned From Rocky I to Rocky III sounds like Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones performing Bob Dorough’s children’s song Three Is the Magic Number.

What should be an incoherent jumble is held together by sheer exuberance. In contrast to the sour-faced duo trudging through Brimful of Asha, the band playing on Handcream for a Generation sound positively gleeful. This is record-collection rock of the best kind, an album audibly in love with music and its boundless possibilities.

Most of the lyrics are opaque to the point of incomprehension: anyone who knows what Singh is driving at in Wogs Will Walk deserves a cash prize. Lessons Learned From Rocky I to Rocky III, though, lambasts the irritating habit of pretending to like bad music in order to appear aloof and ironic: “Reporting damage in the soft rock ship … the supermodels can’t get enough of it.”

Like Sandinista!, Handcream for a Generation’s ambitions are occasionally overreaching. Fourteen minutes of Spectral Mornings, a guitar-and-sitar jam featuring Noel Gallagher, is pushing it a bit, while Slip the Drummer One, a collaboration with New York hip-hop DJ Rob Swift, meanders about in a directionless, pot-headed haze. More frequently, however, experiments yield triumphant results. Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform is a genuine one-off, a song featuring a children’s choir that doesn’t fill the listener with a desire to hunt down and murder everyone involved in its creation. No more gloomy faces for Cornershop, then.