- Cornershop English album ‘
England is a Garden ,’ is played on Indian musical instruments flute, tamboura and tabla. - Cornershop gained popularity in the UK after their song called ‘Brimful of Asha,’ in 1988.
The band gained popularity in the UK when it came up with a new song in 1998 called ‘Brimful of Asha.’ The song topped the charts at number one in February 1998 and even displaced Céline Dion’s foghorn Titanic theme, at that time. The album then was dedicated to Indian playback singer Asha Bhosle and was lauded as an indie-rock triumph, as it called Bhosle “Sadi rani”.
‘England is a Garden’ is the first full-length studio album released by Singh and his partner Ben Ayres, after a five year gap. The previous album of Cornershop was ‘Hold On It’s Easy’, which was released back in 2015. Although the band also released ‘Demon is a Monster’ in 2017 to express their anti-Brexit sentiments.
‘England is a Garden’ follows an Indian Bollywood opening, starting with birds singing in their melodious voice in a garden. Tabla and sitar, which adds a mellow flow at the beginning of the music is followed by woodwind instruments that blend the airs of English folk-rock with Indian folk music.
A UK origin newspaper daily, Financial Times, called the album “unmanicured” and said in its review that, “Singh sing-speaks his vocals in the manner of Lou Reed, although gentler in tone,” in the album.
Singh grew up listening to Punjabi folk music in Britain, when his father, who was a headmaster back in India, had moved to Britain in 1965. His father used to work on London buses as he trained to become a teacher in the UK.
The Bhujhangy Group, a popular bhangra band in Handsworth, England was a favourite band of Singh before being exposed to the Smiths and the Stooges, he said in an interview with The Guardian.
The band has been quite vocal about its Anglo-India ties, and it has reflected widely in its albums. Singh during an interview said, “My uncle was in Wolverhampton before us, and he’d said to my dad, come here, it’s all right. But my father said to me once, they’ll not always want you here in this country. That’s always stuck with me. And that’s why our songs have always reflected that right from the start.”
The song released on March 6 gained a lot of attention on social media, as many of the listeners tweeted, showing their excitement even before its release.
SEE ALSO: Indian women had to kill themselves —and other bitter stories of British colonialism revealed in a podcast
A US-government funded NGO just called Kashmir ‘not free’ — and downgraded India’s ranking in the ‘free’ world