The Arts: Nitin Sawhney's latest album has a stellar list of collaborators and a stunning collection of sounds, as he looks to make music devoid of boundaries, he tells Arminta Wallace
HE'S ONE OF those people who appears to be maddeningly good at everything. An accomplished classical pianist and flamenco guitarist, he's just as much at home on the sitar or tabla. His compositions range from symphony-sized works and ballet scores, through to television advertisement soundtracks for Nike and music for computer games. He has 40 film scores to his credit and five more in the pipeline. Last year, a retrospective of his music sold out a BBC Prom at the Royal Albert Hall. And he still does a spot of DJ-ing, including a stint at the Singapore Grand Prix.
I could go on - I haven't even mentioned his seminal role in the creation of the TV sitcom Goodness Gracious Me, or the fact that he's an ambassador for this year's European Year of Intercultural Dialogue - but you get the picture. In any case, fans of Nitin Sawhney would happily trade it all for just one of his studio albums. Maybe his breakthrough, Beyond Skin, which won a Mercury Prize nomination and a South Bank Show award in 2000. Or the following year's Prophesy, which featured - among others - the voice of Nelson Mandela; or 2005's Philtre, with its shimmering arrangements and insistent rhythms.
His new album, London Undersound, though barely a fortnight old, has already notched up some high critical praise. It's a trademark Sawhney soundscape - sophisticated Latin sounds, superb use of the female voice, a spot of drum'n'bass, the sublime moment when qawwali meets contemporary cello. It's also a meditation on London's identity in the wake of the 2005 bombings and the police shooting of the Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes. The variety of musical styles and contributors, from the Pakistani singer Faheem Mazhar to Paul McCartney, is thus part of the point.
The miracle is in the mixing and how Sawhney gets such disparate material to hang together, so that you're not listening to some mad compilation but a smooth, if undeniably edgy, earful. But where does he start?
"Panic!" he declares, on the phone from his studio in south London. "It's really about trying to capture feelings and ideas and thoughts. I think once it starts from that, everything else is largely irrelevant, because you just follow that flow. It doesn't matter how you go about it - whether by taking the computer and playing around with it, or by picking up the guitar. But I do quite often end up with a sense of panic. I don't think there's any set way of doing it. I've sometimes tried to analyse it afterwards, but . . . it just comes. And you rely on it coming, because it's been coming for years."
THE STARTING POINTfor London Undersoundis easier to pinpoint. The opening track, Days of Fire, finds young singer Natty telling the story of how he not only witnessed the explosion of a bus in Tavistock Square in the summer of 2005, but was also near Stockwell Tube station when the police shot and killed Jean Charles de Menezes two weeks later.
"I've known Natty quite well for a few years, and I'd talked to him about it, and I just thought, 'Well, that's an amazing starting-point'," Sawhney says. "And it gave an impetus to the rest of the album, because a lot of it comes from that feeling of being unsettled or uneasy about things that have changed in London since then."
The city, he says, has become polarised in a way that he finds uncomfortable and threatening.
Would he categorise this feeling as anger, or sadness? "A combination of both," he says. "And a sense, I suppose, of delayed shock."
Thus the album is both a celebration and a kind of lament. But it's personal, not polemical. These London stories are layered and lyrical. One track, Bring It Home, was recorded at what Sawhney calls "the four corners of the city": Billingsgate Fish Market, a Battersea children's home, Southall's Asian community and the clubs of Camden.
"The idea was to create a kind of ritual," he explains, by recording in each location at exactly 6am, midday, 6pm and midnight. "By creating this kind of rigid self-discipline, something interesting happened. It opened up the day. I also felt connected with London, and I really enjoyed that."
En route, he and his crew took in some unusual urban experiences, from breakfast at Spitalfields market to a late-night visit to Shunt. "It's a new music club where lots of geeky types sit around with computers and come up with weird electronic music," he says. "It's between these two ticket machines at London Bridge. You go in and it's like a whole system of tunnels and archways. That was really cool."
MUCH HAS BEENmade of the appearance of Paul McCartney on the album, mostly to speculate about whether his song My Soulcould possibly be "about" his relationship with his ex-wife, Heather Mills. For Sawhney, though, the song operates on a totally different level of meaning.
"It's symbolic of how I feel with cameras on every street corner. Being watched all the time, having my sense of freedom invaded," he says. "Anyone can feel that way. It's a universal feeling. Privacy is an important thing, and it has been eroded over the past few years. Now they're talking about body scans at airports. Democracy becomes a sham the second you have to give way to authorities who can do any kind of search that they want with you. It's literally becoming an Orwellian world - and that does disturb me."
The jury is still out on whether the inclusion of Sir Paul counts as inspiration or insanity on Sawhney's part. The impact of his performance, however, is undeniable. When the great pop idol starts to sing, his voice is cracked and thin, a stark reminder that this isn't the golden age of British pop any more - and there's no going back.
"People have said, 'Well, he doesn't sound like the Paul McCartney on the Beatles albums'," says Sawhney. "And I said, 'You know, this is a 65-year-old man'." By the end of the track, though, the ghost of a great singer - even a great songwriter - emerges through the music's quickening pulse. "Can you imagine any 65-year-old man giving a vocal performance like that? It's fantastic. The last bit of that track is absolutely brilliant."
Another star collaborator is the sculptor Antony Gormley, who provided a series of stark black-and-white drawings, including the cover image of a ghostly figure emerging from a tunnel. How and why did he get involved? "I worked with him before on a dance project with Akram Khan. He came down and listened to the album, and volunteered to do a drawing for each of the tracks, and didn't charge me a penny. He just said he'd like to do it."
Sawhney's instinctive talent for working with other artists is a major factor in his live performances, always a tricky transition for a studio artist to negotiate.
"In Dublin we'll have Ashram Shrinivasan playing flute and vocals," he says. "We've got Tina Grace, and Luci Joules. We've got Ian Burdge, who doubles up as a bass player and cellist." Aref Durvesh will be the tabla player, while Sawhney himself will take care of keyboards and guitar. "And we've got Martyn Kaine, who's a mind-blowing drummer - God. The best drummer I've come across, actually. So we've got a killer band."
This interest in collaboration has nothing to do with celebrity box-ticking. Sawhney's own background has clearly contributed to his acute awareness of themes of identity and equality, both in music and in life. He was born in Kent in 1964. His parents - a biochemist father and a classical Indian dancer mother - emigrated from the Punjab the previous year, and Sawhney and his two brothers were the only Asian kids in their comprehensive school.
SAWHNEY IS ONrecord as saying "everything that we are, that we think, that we feel, comes from one". Which, when you think about it, has the sound of a mission statement.
"Yeah, it is what I'm about," he confirms. "I believe that wholeheartedly. It comes from Hindu philosophy. It comes from theoretical physics - which I read a lot about. It's the main thing that I do with my time, really." Are we talking Large Hadron Collider here? "Yeah, I'm really interested in that. To me, the Big Bang is really about the fact that we all came from a singularity. We came from one. And inevitably, in that fact, we are all connected."
Joined-up thinking isn't, however, necessarily rated in a music business that often seems obsessed by genres, distinctions and superficial differences.
"Well, that's because the music business is run by a lot of paranoid and insecure people," says Sawhney. "They're in the business of making records that sell, and enable AR people to keep their jobs. In order for that to happen, they look at music with an insecure eye and listen to it with an insecure ear. So the music that is pushed at us comes from insecurity. Once you get back to listening to music carefully enough, with an open mind and an open heart, it emerges as something pure; something that has no boundaries.
"Boundaries come from insecurities. That's why you get all these arseholes talking about immigration policies and shit like that - because they're just thinking: 'I don't want these brown people near me because they freak me out. I don't understand them, I don't know about their lives and I don't want them to get in the way of my life and my way of looking at the world.' That's where people who have boundaries around them are coming from.
"But you can't impose that on the world of music without it sounding contrived, limited and constrained. And I don't want to think of music that way."
• Nitin Sawhney plays Tripod in Dublin on Friday.London Undersound is out on the Cooking Vinyl label
