The Last Angry Band In Britain

The record industry mistrusts them, Austria has gone all Nazi, and Asian Dub Foundation are taking their vehement, junglist dubrock into the boiling heart of Europe. "Another 10 dead A&R men? Great!" they enthuse to Dorian Lynskey.

Paris is in fighting mood tonight. It is the last day of yet another strike by France's infamously chippy lorry drivers, who have managed to mobilise an alliance of trade unions and low-paid workers to bring sections of the capital to a virtual standstill. At its height, you could't get a lorry or coach into the city and tonight Asian Dub Foundation will drive overnight to their next gig in Düsseldorf in case negotiations collapse and the blockade is back in force tomorrow morning.

The appropriateness of such militancy on the night that ADF play Paris - supporting fellow firebrands Rage Against The Machine - isn't lost on the band. The land whose students took to the streets in '68 isn't coy when it comes to letting of steam.

Backstage at Le Zenith ADF are amusing themselves with the spoils of guitarist Steve Chandra "Chandrasonic" Savale's recent trip to visit relatives in the Indian city of Hyderabad. A no-frills Indian drum machine taps out a tabla rhythm while another box emits the oscillating drone of a tampura and Savale plays a sitar riff on a dinky keyboard. Amid this at-home-with-Ravi-Shankar- ambience, 21-year-old vocalist Deeder "Master D" Zaman is practising his Indian scales. On stage and record, however, he favours a hyperactive blend of London rap and Jamaican patois.

"I'm a cockney," he says. "That's where I'm from. I'm a junglist. I ain't going to end up in a Qawwali band burning joss-sticks, going, Aaahhh."

A five man jungle/hip hop/rock army spawned from a South London music technology workshop, Asian Dub Foundation have become, as much by circumstance as design, the most radical band in Britain. Their forthcoming third album, Community Music, takes its name from the project that brought them together, and with which they still have strong ties. The band have also established a training arm, ADFED, produced an educational CD-ROM for the Institute of Race Relations, campaigned vigorously for jailed Asian man Satpal Ram, and taught teenageres to use samplers and mixing desks.
One such group of teenagers, the unsigned Invasian, were recently announced as support for Primal Scream at Brixton Academy in April.

"We haven't set out to subvert or change the music business," asserts bassist and founder Aniruddha Das. "We're just getting on with things regardless. I don't want to spend my time fucking vacuuming cocaine out of some A&R man's nose. That's a waste of my time. Let them get on with it! Let them fucking kill themselves! Another ten dead A&R men? Great! I don't care! There's enough work for us to get on with."

As any A&R man will already have noticed, ADF regard the music industry with a mix of amusement and contempt. When the first album, Facts and Fictions, was released on the independent Nation Records in 1995, Q, Das notes approvingly, was the only major British music magazine to even give it a review. ADF spent the next two years without a British record deal. They attribute their popularity in France less to the country's fondness for hip hop and protest than to the simple fact that they were signed there (by Virgin France) and released their second album, the Mercury Prize-nominated Rafi's Revenge, there before their home country took an interest. The initial neglect still rankles.

"What is happening now is a journalist can say they're great despite the fact that they do workshops, despite the way they put all this music together that shouldn't go together, despite the fact that they're not white, despite the fact that they talk about social issues," says Savale, his voice swimming in sarcasm. "Despite all that they're still good."

Savale is ADF's most fervent futurist. Unlike most people, he has no internal whistling milkman with a sneaking affection for Semisonic because they've got "nice tunes". CDs are ruthlessly disgarded from the tour bus stereo after a couple of minutes if they're not sufficiently radical. Despite playing guitar he happily claims "I'm not a guitarist" because he always defers to the bass and the drums. When he first met Das in 1990, their shared loves were On-U-Sound and PIL's Metal Box, the latter a template for his vision of rhythm-dominated guitar music. The duo's initial meeting came about when he responded to Das's small ad in City Limits: "Black Asian musicians required for experimental dub noise project." Their first collaboration was the Headspace sound system, which secured a slot on the Shamen's seminal Synergy tour alongside Orbital, where their set comprised one 20-minute dub track. At subsequent Headspace events the number of people on stage frequently outnumbered those in the audience. A&R chequebooks remained firmly in pockets.

"I was into the E thing," Savale recalls. "But Ani could see back then the emptiness of that scene. It wasn't really saying anything."

When Das convened ADF three years later, its roots wound through Asian dance music. As a tutor in music technology at Community Music, Das met the 15-year-old Zaman, already a veteran of the Joi Bangla sound system [fellow alumni: Joi, Fun^da^Mental and State of Bengal, Zaman's eldest brother] and anti-racist campaigner Pandit. Savale, meanwhile, was nearing the end of a frustrating stint with ambient Brummies Higher Intelligence Agency: "It was like a little police state. You couldn't talk about politics because it would spoil the vibe."

He and Sanjay "Sun-J" Tailor, a dancer from the Headspace days, completed the line-up in July 1994. In keeping with the collective ideal, it is band policy to allow each other an equal share of songwriting royalties.

"There was no masterplan whatsoever," says Das. "It's just for the first time we had the chance to work with other people of colour and to talk about our experiences. I never thought that would happen."

The rest of the band retire to their bunks. The bus's selection of videos [Rattle and Hum, Bean and, Zaman notes with disgust, Bernard Manning] is not a tempting one and they are exhausted. Savale, though, entertains Q into the wee hours with tales of outsider art, the software industry in Hyderabad, and arguing the toss with Thom Yorke about highbrow cultural commentator Noam Chomsky. He recommends a band from the Republic of Tuva, a mountain district sandwished between Mongolia and Siberia. From different sides of a vast river, they can only rehearse during the winter when it is frozen. Savale thinks they're one of the best new bands in the world but doubts whether they'll ever be signed. He saw them at Womad but rails againt the "world music" traditionalists and their blanket approval of all things ethnic.

I'd hate people to like us because we're cuddly brown people having a go," he grumbles. "We've got the right to be shit. That's important."

Asian Dub Foundation have a reputation for being difficult interviewees. Huddled backstage in Düsseldorf's grim Philipshalle, they hand around Q's tape recorder to check that it's working. This is traditional. Once, they delightedly report, they had to provide a journalist with batteries, pen and paper. Q's first question, however, is met with ice-breaking banter and very poor puns.

"Let's be straight about this," says Pandit. "Is he really going to get serious answers?"
"Of course," deadpans Das. "Seriously funny."

ADF's suspicion of the press runs deep. The charge most often levelled at them is that their roots in Community Music and distaste for sloganeering are unsexy. They have conspicuously failed to slot into the "Asian Clash" category.

"The press see us as a part of a tradition that really we're not part of," retorts Savale. "A lot of so-called political bands like The Clash exist in this area of symbols, like a t-shirt with Che Guevera on, or the Sandinista hats or red stars everywhere. Even the record company would like to promote us as this revolutionary band. But that's not what we're about."

In the next few weeks they will meet with Home Office minister Paul Boateng as representatives of the campaign to free Satpal Ram. In 1986 Ram was having dinner in a Birmingham restaurant when a racist attacker slashed him with a broken wine glass. Ram retaliated by pulling out a pen-knife he carried from his job in a warehouse and stabbed his assailant, who later died in hospital. Found guilty of murder, he has now served 13 years, during which time he has been moved from prison to prison 59 times. The high profile of the campaign to free him [supporters include Primal Scream, Irvine Welsh and comedian Mark Thomas] is largely down to ADF's involvement over the past three years. Primal Scream have even included his address on postcards mailed out to promote their Exterminator album.

"Someone who's got Screamadelica and running around going, Get your socks [sic] off honey! will get this postcard," approves Zaman.

"We get asked what we see as genuine political commitment," Das elaborates. "It's when a band go out og their way to do something. The Primals have helped raise several thousand pounds for the Satpal Ram campaign. They didn't have to do that. They could have written about the homeless and made a lot of money out of it."

That said, the two bands do make strange bed-fellows. Bobby Gillespie's belief in the rock'n'roll tradition is not shared by ADF.

"Bad behaviour and laddishness is a commodity in itself," spits Savale. "Everyone wants to write about the last gang in town. It's a celebration of the tosser. Why is that good? Why is that sexy?" "Is stuffing white powder up your nose sexy?" Das continues sternly. "Is trashing a hotel room sexy? I think it's boring. I think it's establishment. It's not rebellion. Maybe 40 years ago it was slightly rebellious to do that but I think it's the most unsexy thing on the planet. Learning to use drum machines and mixing that with guitars and making the maddest noises, I think that's extremely sexy."

As evidence they point to their work with Romany travellers in Hungary, or the fact that most e-mails they receive request information on music technology or political campaigns. Their ambitions, it seems, lie more in these areas than with the band itself. They allude to the idea that their record label is not entirely on their side.

"We always get asked, Are they telling you to do this or do that? But it hasn't really come like that," says Savale. "The problems have come through small practical things. Something's not done that should be done. It just shows there's less attention paid to us. We've always felt like we've had to work twice as hard for half as much."

At the moment, there are no definite plans for a fourth album.
"Who knows what we're going to do?" Savale says with a shrug. "This is our third album and we've got to promote it but it's all about stages. After this stage things are going to get very interesting. Things could go somewhere else. Invasian, I think, are the next step forward. ADF are no longer the exception. We're not a flash in the pan."

And with that, ADF adjourn to a nearby park nestling unexpectedly in the industrial sprawl. With the tape recorder off, their brows unfurrow and they lark about, bounding across steams, feeding the ducks and spinning giddily on a roundabout. For half an hour the most radical band in Britain bear an unlikely resemblance to the Beatles in Help!

"We're uncool but very cool," Zaman declares.
"Yeah," adds Savale. "We're the men from Uncool."