Introducing, in the leftwing corner, the shoutiest, angriest, bounciest band in the country - ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Asian Dub Foundation.

The year 2000 is the year pop gets angry. The internalisers, the whiners and the emotional scabpickers are going to be marginalised. Bands are going to be coming at you from the least likely places and they're going to be seriously pissed of. Exhibit One - Asian Dub Foundation.

"Asian Dub Foundation," says Primal Scream's Bobby G, "are the best live band in Britain." That true. That's not a matter of opinion. Check them out at London's Astoria on January 27 with Regular Fries and Invasian. Junglist breakbeats, rap polemic, distorted punk-rock electric guitars, speed-crazed reggae basslines, Indian classical music and mental dance beats, revolutionary dub poetry and grass roots activism boiled down into a dynamic sound clash - Lee Perry meets The Clash meets The Specials meets Public Enemy meets Afrika Bambaataa and Zulu Nation meets a fuck-U ("UN-intelligent") Jungle Mk1 anti-drum'n'bass frenzy. Are you drooling yet? And if not, why not? What's wrong with you?

We're in the Union Jack photography studios - ten minutes from the NME office and just around the corner from the ADF HQ - sta round a table covered in a plastic cloth covered in hundreds of little Union Jacks. Cute. So what's occuring?
Well Satpal Ram is still in prison and so is Winston Silcott and the killers of Stephen Lawrence and Ricky Reel are still free. And the liberal press has its 100 per cent cotton knickers in a twist about one issue and one issue only; this "Ali G" person? Is it cool to laugh at him? And if not, is it because he's black?
Asian Dub Foundation groan, slump in their seats, roll their eyes, clutch their foreheads and laugh.

In 1986 Satpal Ram was cornered in an Indian restaurant and cut about the arms and face by a broken-bottle-wielding racist bigot. Satpal defended himself with a penknife he carried from his job as a packer [what would you have done in similar circumstances?]. His attacker, after initially refusing treatment for his wounds, later died in hospital and Satpal Ram was charged with murder. Given only 40 minutes to consult his lawyer [who advised him not to speak in his own defence and to change his plea from self-defence to "provocation"] Satpal Ram was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to life imprisonment. Since then he's been moved between prisons over 60 times. In Durham he was slung into solitary confinement for advising other prisoners to refuse intimate body searches.
In 1996 he lost an appeal where the judges only heard evidence from his attackers. As Irvine Welsh has stated: "The message to black or Asian Britons who face racial violence is - you can be a dead Stephen Lawrence or an alive Satpal Ram."
Hang on, HANG ON! What the HELL has this got to do with music? Just about everything. What's wrong with you?
More than 10 000 people have since signed the petition calling for justice for Satpal Ram. Primal Scream, Annie Nightingale, Mark Thomas, Headrillaz, Massive Attack and Howard Marks have all thrown their support behind the campaign. And so, more than anybody else, have Asian Dub Foundation.
And so can you. You can get copies of the petition and more information from The Free Satpal Campaign, c/o Villa Road, Handsworth, Birmingham B19 1NH, England. And you can write to the man himself: Satpal Ram E94-164, HMP Full Sutton, Moor Lane, Stamford Brigde, York, Y04 1PS, England.
It's Satpal's birthday this month [25.January] so cards would be appreciated.
So, anyway, this Ali G geezer, is he funny? Or what?

Meet Asian Dub Foundation. They're righteous, right-on, right about everything and, heck, kinda cute!
Chandrasonic has just come back from India. He's excitedly telling the rest of ADF about a religious cult called the Ayappa who spend 11 months of the year as ape-shit mental sub-continental lager louts and the rest as totally sobes monks, sleeping on the pavements and making "wicked punky music, yeah! They go, 'Boom ba-doom AYAPPA! Boom ba-doon AYAPPA!'"

Ten minutes from now we'll be joined by ADF rapper Deeder Zaman [aka Master D]. D's the baby of the band and as sexy as sin. He's late because he's been taking a driving lesson. He takes his test tomorrow. Again. He'll not be in the best of moods. He'll glower at the interviewer. Oh dear.

So what about this NME gig, then?
"It's really exciting," says DJ John Pandit [aka Pandit G]. Pandit's got Gary Glitter eyebrows and a Midlands accent. If pushed he'll describe himself as "a half-irish Asian Scot". We have him on a roll, having given him the forum to enthuse about ADFED [that's the Asian Dub Foundation Education project to you]. Its mission? To educate the community, naturally, and whose musical workshop has produced the promising Invasian, erm, youth ensemble...

"We've got the youth [Invasian] from the workshop up there in front of an audience," sparkles Pandit. "Even better, it might be a Regular Fries audience, a load of indie kids, so they'll see the other side and how it works and that'll be good."
So this Invasian are good, are they?
"They're the best," says Sanjay Tailor [aka Sun-J] who is possessed of the slightly chubby looks that would have made him a dead cert pin-up dreamboat in 1970's Bollywood.
"They're wicked," says shaven-headed bassist Aniruddha Das [aka Dr Das]. Das is stern of countenance but quick to smile, he's the Yoda to ADF's Luke Skywalker. Sort of.
"Innes from Primal Scream said he's quite happy to retire now he's seen them."
They your prodigies then?
"No. Well, for Asian Dub Foundation Education, yes," says Pandit G confusingly. "To actually establish this, get the funding for it, get it into some sort of format where we do the teaching regularly and then have one of the first few projects who are that strong and that committed is like, for us, it's like we're almost showcasing it..."

Aaargh! Uh! Help! Can't... breathe! It's those words "project", "community", "workshop", "teaching" and, horror of horrors, "education". There are three sticks which ADF get beaten with and this is the biggest of them - the fact that they teach, that they emerged from workshop, that they use terms like "community" that hve been stolen, eviscerated and turned into empty buzzwords by the soul-sucking parasites of New Labour.

We're being literal here. Chandrasonic was invited to speak on the same platform as New Labour culture minister Chris Smith. They had a nice long chat backstage and then Chris went onstage and pretty much repeated word-for-word everything he'd just been told by Chandrasonic. Very Impressive, Chris! Good Work! And was Chandrasonic pissed off? Ooh, just a little. "He's a scumbag. Politicians are buzzword sponges!"

The problem being that workshops are seen as life-support machines for the third rate. They're associated with patronage, with "subsidy culture", with introverted musos and hapless geeks. And their very existence files in the face of the good old "organic" anti-authoritaritan, let-it-all-hang-out-maaaaaaan rock'n'roll mythology. Trying to express these prejudices to ADF, however, is like walking into a swarm of angry bees.

"If you're talking about kudos and cool," says Chandrasonic, "ADF have always had the idea that what we do is uncool, the very nature of our music is uncool. Who cares what's cool? I think there's a really, really important point in here. Every kind of great new musical movement of force which unleashes loads of creativity has always come from enexpected sources. You look at punk, a load of people say, "Fuck that, we don't care about the musicality, we're just going to do it, for the expression."
Same with acid house. Same with hip-hop. All the pundits will predict that the next big thing will be, y'know, four guys that got together at school blah blah, but that's where it's going wrong because that's what continually produces the same old shit. What we've come out of and what community music does, it actually looks elsewhere for creative energy sources and that's where you get new music because that brings together people who otherwise whoudn't get the chance. You get new voices!"

But the perfect answer to criticisms of dull worthiness are Asian Dub Foundation and Invasian themselves. Brilliant first rate, utterly organic, totally credible and as ungeeky as fuck. Strike One.

The second problem "sophisticated" liberals have with ADF is that they're "Asian". As in - "I really hate the way people seem scared to criticise ADF just because they're Asian". Someone said that to me just this week. No, really. And it's bollocks. So we have to deal with this? We do? Jeez, what's wrong with you? ADF are as "British" as Oasis, Blur or Elastica. Fact. There are shit bands out there with brown skins. There are shit bands out there with pink skins. ADF aren't one of them. Fact. Strike Two.

And, talking about "four guys that got together at school blah blah", ADF's close relationship to Bobby G's Primal Screamers might, at first glance, seem rather odd. For are not the Scream, possibly more than any other band in Britain, the living embodiment of the tired old retro-schmetro livefastdieyoungandleaveagoodlookingcorpse rock'n'roll 4skinnywhitegeizt? And, oh dear, we've just kicked over another beehive.

"What we've got in common with them," shouts Das over the outraged yells of the rest of the band, "is that Primal Scream are serious music fans. They are serious music enthusiasts, right? They were coming to our gigs way, way back, before I knew who they were:"

Have you had an influence on them? The political nature of recent lyrics for instance?
"No, I think they've always had it," claims Pandit.
"If they were a straightforward rock'n'roll band you wouldn't have seen Bobby outside the Home Office campaigning for Satpal", says D.
"Bobby's from working-class, tradesunion, Glaswegian background," points out Das. "Mani talked to me about how he went around in gangs that went round beating up Paki-bashers, y'know? They've always had that."
"The thing about those guys is that they've got a vision for music," says Chandrasonic. "They actually believe in the social importance of music. Very few groups have that."

And the third fly in the ointment is that ADF are "political". Duh!
"Now it's just like there's no difference between Tory and Labour and there is no avenue for people to express themselves..."says Pandit.
"It's about building a new vocabulary, " says Das, "and using new forms, to politicise new forms of expression..."
"Pop music in general has become a myth," says Sun-J. "It's become over-glamorised, there's real substance, no-one's talking about the grass roots, no-one's talking about real issues that affect you or I or people in the street. They're just talking about themselves. They've got their heads in their arses, ain't they? It's the way people are living now. They're just thinking about themselves."

"A lot of it's to do with sponsorship and marketing," claims Chandrasonic. "Like the Brats thing!" he splutters further, warming up to full rant. "When our speech about Satpal was censored on TV. I can see that even though the people who did it completely lied about it, they just "forgot", right? The reason for that was obviously the sponsorship thing [Er, the director of 98's Brats telly coverage claims it was cut for space reasons...]. There's a high level of self-censorship. We can't offend the sponsor! Do you know what I mean?"
"Err on the side of safety," adds Pandit. "I mean, what is pop music?" asks Chandrasonic. "It's not even about the music, it's about behaviour, clothes, funny asides, everything has to be whimsy or comic or smashing hotel rooms or taking drugs. It's like the behaviour has become commodified."
"And the artist is seen as some great up there which no-one can attain to," says the wonderfully dressed Pandit in a funny aside. And then he roars: "Ayaaaaaaaaah! Come and join us! How'd it go, man?"

D has just walked in, straight from his driving lesson, clutching a book and looking really pissed off.

"I don't think we have a problem with people writing about themselves or writing love songs of whatever," says Das "we have a problem with people who have a problem with us writing about what's going on. And we find it really strange how that offends a lot of people!"
"Is this guy being very cynical throughout the whole interview?" snaps D, nodding at the hack. Oh dear.

Um, so what about this Asian Underground tag?
"All kinds of people use the tube", claims Das. D frowns. You guys!

So, anyway, how did we end up in the position where to call a band political is seen as some sort of an insult? Me, I blame The Smiths. Almost overnight sometime in 1980-something the effortlessly rootsy and indefatigably righteous mix'n'match of 2-Tone was replaced by a conservative and bleakly monochrome version of what a band should be, of what a band could be. Radicalism replaced b defeatism. Self-pitying introspection the new cool. "Ghost Town" replaced with the supine whine of, "I was looking for a job and then I found a job/And heaven knows I'm miserable now". Multiculturalist innovation and experimentation replaced by four interchangeable skinny white guys with guitars - one of them invariably whining.
Which brings us to now. With "indie" a meaningless, burnt-out shell. With Britpop a joke so old that Bob Monkhouse wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. With anybody with a brain who gives a toss about alternative pop looking around for a modern and uniquely British sound and finding it in the banging, clattering, swooping, hoot, rant and holler of ADF's cross-mongrelisation of four continents and ten centuries' worth of music. This isn't "fusion" insist ADF, this isn't "eclectic" this isn't some embarrasssing but awfully worthy cheap holiday in somebody else's misery. Tear it down to it's basics. It's jungle - music which is simultaneously uniquely British and wonderfully unEnglish - crossed with punk, hip-hop, dub and Indian musics in a way that could only have happened in the post-imperial, identity-crisis-stricken, multifuckingcultural UK.

And it works, it sounds right and it sounds modern because ADF and their protégés don't have to force anything, they own it, we all do. It's mongrel music, it'll confuse Tim Westwood and Ali G and the LA gangsta wannabes of the Staines Massive every bit as much it will those brilliantined buffoons who think these islands haven't produced any great music since Elgar and Benjamin Britten. But that's their fucking problem. ADF are the sound of transition, the sound of confusion, the sound of Britain - the sound of a country which finds the flag-waving of others a tad confusing if only for the fact it doesn't have a fucking clue which flag to wave for itself. Hey, nice tablecloth.

And it comes inseparably rooted in and utterly reeking of rightousness, radicalism and - fuck it, yes - politics. So what? The best music always has. Strip the "alternative" of its ideology, of its anger, of its -shriek- "politics" and then ask yourself, what is it alternative to, exactly? It's time to rewire your brain. To totally re-evaluate your concept of "cool". Politics are part and parcel of any real alternative. Always have been, always will be. By definition. Strike Three.

We're bashing through the tracks of the new ADF album. Which is sexily entitled - guess what - "Community Music"! [Oh, get over it!] It's brilliant. It's not all bhangramental rocket rants like "0fficer XX" [about the police cover up at the Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry] and "Real Great Britain" [which is about everything], there's slower, more patient stuff as well. And when I say we're blasting through the tracks, I mean we're trying to blast through the tracks because Neat Little Chicken McNugget Style Soundbites R Us, ADF ain't. Pandit G's just finished a five-minute mini-lecture about globalisation in reference to the track "Crash" and then... "On the other hand," says Chandrasonic, "globalisation..."
...Produces bands like ADF?"
"Yeah, if you like, and also that protest in Seattle was and international protest on a massive scale. The good thing that comes out of this is that everything becomes international. People don't think according to a country the way they used to. That's the good side. But you can't forget the hundreds of millions who are not even involved in this at all. I mean India's a really good example. In India you've got islands of total futuristic modernity. You've got hitech silicon valleys, I mean the town where I lived, Hyderabad, it's other name is Cyberabad. There's been a massive investment in computer technology. You've got an urban middle class in India of about 150 million that have got satellite TV, the Internet, things like that. Bombay has got more in common with New York than it has with a village just outside Bombay. And then you've got 700-800 million people in India who completely have nothing to do with that world. You've got different worlds in the same country.

And when "Community Music" goes quadruple platinium and you all become multi-zillionaires, how in touch with the "community" are you going to stay, boys, hmmm?
"Well great! We've got and organisation called ADFED, people can put their pennies into that, develop up the next generation of people, that's what we want to do. We think ahead. We're not fools and OK - we'll ask people to put their money where their mouth is. You want to sponsor us? Sponsor ADFED. Let's get a whole generation of poeple of there!"

"It's about concrete things," says Chandrasonic. "It's about getting funding, about making things happen. If I have to stand up there with a dickhead like Chris Smith then I'll do it, it's not about about cool or kudos! 'Cos if the end result is bands like Invasian then it's worth it!"

So this Ali G fellow. Is it OK to laugh at him or not?
Beehive Three. Howls of protest. Everyone shouthing, "No no no no no NO!". But we're not having it. We demand an answer.
"I don't think he's funny," says D. "He's not sorted himself out. He should be careful about who he oppresses. The 11'O Clock Show is about as funny as shit as well, y'know? It's bad, it's really bad! The Mark Thomas show is the complete opposite end of the spectrum."

Things wind down. D pushes a book about the Stephen Lawrence inquiry across to me.
"I was reading this on the tube coming over here", he says. "That's why I was so pissed off when I arrived..."

Bummed out? Get therapy. Angry? Form a band. Let's howl the vile, dishonest, parasitic, two-faced and unbearably smug New Labour consensus into oblivion. Agitate, educate, organise - all that shite. Let's be hearing from you.

Steven Wells