# 1999     Cornershop -   SLEEP ON THE LEFT SIDE

                                                                                           When I Was Born for the 7th Time, Luaka Bop Records, 1998

GLOBAL CHART ACHIEVEMENTS:                             # 23  in the UK           voted one of the top albums of the decade               by Rolling Stone and Spin magazines                     top 20 hit at MATT RADIO

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“We thought it would probably be ten years down the line when people finally appreciated what we’d done,” says Ben Ayres, multi-instrumentalist/songwriter of Anglo-Asian blendmeisters Cornershop. “Without being bigheaded... ”

Over a decade since their initial meeting as design students at northern England’s Preston University, founding members Ayres, vocalist/songwriter Tjinder Singh, and the mercurial Cornershop collective are now fully appreciated champions of the pan-cultural musical ethos.  In 1992, initial enthusiasm over their stance as sitar-led, angry young indie-rock pariahs waned into accusations of “one-dimensionalism” by the British press.  As a result, 1995’s radiantly eclectic Woman’s Gotta Have It was widely overlooked in the U.K.  America, though, proved their missing link; that year they signed with David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label, recorded a song with Allen Ginsberg (“Weird, ” says Singh. “It was about death”), and earned accolades from such diverse artists as Perry Farrell, Joan Osborn, Beck and... Metallica?

“When we played Lollapalooza,” says Ayres, “We had Metallica roadies saying, ‘we dig your sound — hey, wanna smoke some bud?’  We had five weeks of being... cartoons.”  “It was cool, though,” adds Singh.  “People kept saying how righteous we are.  In San Francisco we’re especially righteous, apparently.”  The follow-up album When I Was Born For The 7th Time takes Cornershop far beyond Woman’s noisy sitar action into fulsome explorations of jazz sleaze-funk, spaced-out hip-hop, and smacked-out dub, stopping for a crafty cover of the Beatles’ Eastern-tinged vignette “Norwegian Wood,” sung entirely in Punjabi ( “We’ve taken the song full circle,” Ayers says succintly).  Add to that an authentic C&W feel between Singh and Paula Frazer from 4AD’s Tarnation in sublime Tammy Wynette homage on "Good to be on the Road Back Home," and you have a record of astonishingly inventive crossbreed scope.

The whole album was recorded in a big puff of smoke, Singh admits.  “It was fairly spectacular,” explains Ayres.  “Our engineer went a bit mad, actually, and was put on medication.  We told him not to work with us.”


source:  Sylvia Patterson, Spin magazine