Power to the small massive
-Asian Dub Foundation-

Fences and Windows

Community, Collectivism, connection are keywords in Asian Dub Foundation's irresistable assualts on cultural apathy. From their Community Music roots they have established a broad popular base, musically and symbolically perforating closely guarded borders with agit songs constructed from parts plundered without favour or prejudice from global contemporary, classical and pop traditions

Words: David Stubbs
Photos: Jake Walters

I'm midway down Bethnal Green Road, the East London light fading to a grubby mauve, a streetful of the sort of drab, expansive clothing retail outlets whose unfashionasbility is confirmed by their incorporating the word "Fashions" into their names.
Squeezed in here, somehow, is the Rich Mix Cultural Foundation. The East End has a history of diversity stretching back to the 17th century and the first influx of the French Huguenots, to the subsequent establishment of Jewish, Chinese, Bengali and African communities, and this is something the Foundation aims to reflect. Some time later in 2003, this place will be home to a cinema, gallery space, cafe, recording studios and an IT suite for training, communications and study, the sort of establishment that, according to Asian Dub Foundation, exists in "every medium-sized town in France", but is pitifully rare in the UK.

At present, however, it's three floors of vast, empty, plastered rooms, miles of which I trudge through before coming across the single office in which the various members of ADF are milling about, amid visitors, friends and employees. Most of them claim to be knackered following a late night, yet they still bristle with restless energy, swapping beats on headphones, or cracking each other up with a boisterous exchange of in-jokes. This is the group 'comedian' David Baddiel dubbed "a good band, if almost completely humourless", when they took umbrage at a dumb remark made about them following the 1998 Mercury Music Awards.

The entry system leaves something to be desired at present, consisting as it does of bellowing "Oi!" from the street down below and hoping to be heard above the office chat. This time, the shouter is Satpal Ram, who has been out to fetch a carton of milk. Satpal Ram was just released from prison in the summer of 2002. He had been incarcerated since 1987, following an incident in which he was set upon by a gang of white racists in a restaurant. Having himself been stabbed in the face with a broken glass, he hit back with a small knife he used at work to open packages. His aggressor, who at first refused medical treatment, later died of his wounds.

A clear case of self-defence, one might think. However, following a woefully inadequate trial, reading details of which brings back memories of the sort of 'justice' meted out to black people in the 1930s Deep South (or present-day Texas for that matter), Ram was sentenced to life imprisonment. A fierce campaign to secure his release ensued in which ADF were heavily involved, culminating in their blistering 1997 single "Free Satpal Ram". However, it was only last year, and in the teeth of opposition from two Labour Home Secretaries, Jack Straw and Dave Blunkett, that Ram was finally released. Even now he remains 'under licence' and is still fighting to clear his name. Fortunately, on the face of it, he seems anything but broken by his ordeal.

"He's strong and he's still got his wits about him," says DJ and former youth worker John Pandit, aka Pandit G. "But this is just throwing someone's life away after 16 years. He's out, but he's not free."

There are those who vaguely wonder, in this postmodern, post-political era, so long after the End of History, why any group would consider embarrassing themselves by associating themselves so explicitly with 'political' issues. When confronted with a case like Ram's, ADF would retort, how could you not? ADF are unique in having achieved a profile for themselves, despite their unabashed roots in 'community music', a concept which is still likely to excite chortles and images of well-meaning, bearded ex-Open University tutors teaching surly teenagers how to play the triangle. ADF, however, are proof that building from a purportedly unfashionable community base can be as serious and as exciting as your life.

Bassist Dr Das and guitarist Steve 'Chandrasonic' Savale, a former member of Birmingham electronic collective Higher Intelligence Agency, were both tutors at Community Music Ltd in London. There, they met pupil Deedar and Pandit G, and when DJ Sun-J came aboard in the mid-90s, ADF were born. Their mix of dub, punk, bhangra, Bollywood samples, ragga, rap and driving, galvanising backbeats certainly draws from disparate sources to create an irresistible, not to mention combustible whole that has made for four crucial studio albums (including the new 'Enemy of the Enemy', out next month) and the live 'Conscious Party'.
However, they detest the use of the word 'eclectic', with its implication that certain elements, certain cultures, don't really belong together. ADF's music asserts itself as a natural reflection of its members' heritage, and whatever else is to hand. Their influences spread from Sun Ra ("He had a great message and he did lots of stuff for people locally, community projects," says Chandrasonic) to The Fall ("They always struck me as 'after the Holocaust' music, a sort of future-peasant music," says self-styled "world's biggest Fall fan" Pandit G).

What's more, when it comes to musical sources they have no qualms about distinctions between authentic and unauthentic, pure and bastardised, sacred or profane. They've performed alongside master oud players and mixed with all strains of 'World Music' while on their travels. "19 Rebellions" on Enemy of the Enemy, features a sample of the Brazilian one-stringed berimbau. Dr Das was steeped in Indian classical music as a child. Yet when it comes to tensions between traditional and modern, he says, "It's really not something we think about. I mean, turntables are pretty traditional now. A lot of that is tied down with ideas of 'proper' and 'improper' sounds. Once, the sounds that came out of an electric guitar were considered 'improper' sounds. Everyone in the band, as well as what they do on stage, is also a composer and programmer. What we say is, if you can hear it, then it's real. It's all about composition and ideas."

Despite the level of international success ADF have enjoyed, their major label status (first with London Records and now Virgin France), and the fact that group commitments have meant that Chandrasonic and Dr Das have been able to spend less time with Community Music, they continue to abide by their original principles. For instance, they have been responsible for diverting resources to their side project ADFED, the group's "educational wing", of which Pandit G is a member, ADFED holds regular sound system events and music technology workshops, born out of the recognition that there is an "immense amount of musical talent" happening out there. New strains of subterranean electronica are developing at hyperspeed yet their semi-legitimate status restricts them to a single outlet via pirate radio stations and other subterranean channels. Pandit G bemoans the present, patronising structure of arts funding and its de haut en bas nature - and by way of protest, he recently refused an MBE (Master of the British Empire), awarded for his work with Community Music.

"Anything that's vaguely to do with black projects, it's ten times as hard to get money out of the lottery, or arts funders," he says. "But it'll happen. ANd it needs to happen. You've got the City there, encroaching on both sides of us here in Bethnal Green Road and they're going to meet in the middle. Vacant properties and bits of land are hard to come by. And the centrality of Rich Mix is important, too. Quite often, what happens is that community projects get shunted onto industrial estates and nobody goes there."

Rapper Deedar has since left ADF. However, the group's line-up has now expanded to include a new drummer, percussionist and two new MCs, Aktar and Spex. More than ever, Dr Das insists on talking up ADF as a collective. "People talk about the 'key members', he asserts. "We don't have any key members. Whatever anyone contributes is important, otherwise why is it there?"

I wonder whether they have much in common with the London Musicians' Collective, the experimental music organisation with whom they shared office space in a warehouse on Farringdon Road called Community Music, until the building was closed down in 1996. "They were in the smae building, but I wouldn't say we were particularly involved with them," mutters Chandrasonic. Dr Das, it transpires, has a beef about the "intellectual bigotry" of certain brands of extreme experimental music, and what he sees as the "closed, exclusive circle of people" who practice it.

"We love experimental music but we want more people to do it," he declares. "I love Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Can - but i want to talk to people who are into drum ' n ' bass and Garage. Talk to them about Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman. We're higly experimental musicians but we've always made an effort to make it accessible. That was always the great thing about dub music for me. It's people's music, it's sound systems, goes over huge live but it's highly abstract music. And it's got this really radical idea, which is a melodic bassline, something that's anathema to Western pop traditions: it represents a sonic inversion."

"Also," adds Chandrasonic, "the problem with some of what's labelled avant garde is that a lot of it, in its own way, is as revivalist as Oasis. I remember going to a few so-called avant garde events and it'd be someone playing a tuba out of tune and thinking, 'This was done 40 years ago'. So it's actually even more revivalist than Oasis!"

On reflection, however, Dr Das agrees that ADF and the LMC do have a "serious connection" - the late drummer John Stevens, founder of Community Music. "I was just reading an old edition of The Wire and it had an article with Steve Beresford [issue 218], talking about making a film with Steven's daughter about him, interviewing all the people who knew him. And one of the points that came forward from that interview for me was the way his philosophy filtered through to what ADF are doing. We get on with things and we don't really analyse what we're doing too much, but we realised that what we learned from John Stevens is that that's actually how we work, on a collective basis, with a lot of improvisation even if the musical context is different.
We've honed it right down to three minute pop structures, but even within that, and especially with a bigger band, there's a lot of people playing off each other and a lot of listening going on. John always emphasised listening. The idea of collectivity, where everybody is allowed to suggest an idea."
Like a model, or metaphor, for an ideal way of living. "Yes, that's right!" replies Chandrasonic. "Where everybody is expressing themselves individually within a collective aim."

ADF's latest album, "Enemy of the Enemy", is the first to feature the new line-up. But the approach - that is to say, full-on attack - is similar to the previous albums. "Rise to the Challenge", with its tidal backbeat, rapid-fire mic exhortations and Chandrasonic's buccaneering, white riotous guitars creating a sanguine surge which is sustained throughout the album. Ed O'Brien of Radiohead adds touches of "infinite sustain" guitar on three tracks, including the title track. Adrian Sherwood was drafted in as exclusive producer, lending ADF's beats a significant upgrade. His own touch is to the fore on the album's centrepiece, the stately, impassioned, dub-drenched "1000 Broken Mirrors", featuring the voice of Sinead O'Connor. Inspired by the fate of Zoora Shah, a Muslim, Bradford-based woman currently serving a life sentence for the murder of one Mohammed Azam following years of abuse at his hands, the song benefits from O'Connor's treatment. No longer able to belt songs out the way she used to, her hoarse, strained, almost cracked vocals convey all the better the sheer sense of emotional exhaustion and desperation at the heart of this appalling story.

"Fortress Europe" is symptomatic of ADF's present-day global thinking, dealing with the fear, loathing and obstruction directed from within Western Europe towards asylum seekers, despite the European Commission's own research confirming that as populations age and dwindle in those nations, economic migrants are destined to become a necessity, not a burden. "It isn't just immoral, but economically irrational to talk about asylum seekers the way that they do," argues Chandrasonic. "Britain needs skills, labour. And the reason people keep on moving on the way they do is because of the particular world order that we have. We're told by our leaders on the one hand that money has to be free, we've got to globalise, be flexible, blah blah, move with the time. But one of the effects of the economy is to do the same to populations. And while the borders for money aren't there, the borders for people are higher than ever. And no asylum speakers (?) are ever spoken to. I saw one article once about a school in Glasgow where all these people who'd been hostile to asylum seekers who'd been hostile to asylum seekers were now realy pleased with them because the kids were highly motivated and the local school had shot up the league table as a result.

"I hope the song is actually quite stirring," he continues. "You know, rip up the vouchers, break out of the centres, come on over! Use everything you've got to get in!"

From Bethnal Green to Brazil, ADF are a living enactment of thte "think globally, act locally" principle. In the mid-90s, they loathed the parochial Britpop scene, which, at a time when both Jungle and bhangra were springing up and cross-fertilising with rapid intensity, was promulgating what appeared suspiciously to some like a wistfulness for an all-white 60s jangly guitar scene. And they're unlikely to be appeased by the 2003 release of "Live Forever", a documentary film about the Britpop years which, fashion designer Ozwald Boateng apart, does not feature a single black face. Their own outlook is unwaveringly futurist, in the great black tradition of Hendrix, Clinton, Sun Ra, Afrika Bambaataa, A Guy Called Gerald and comtemporaries like State of Bengal and Charged - understandable, since fond nostalgia is not the emotion that leaps into the bosoms of most black people when contemplating the racist privations of the past.

They're also internationalist: all the more so nowadays, since signing to Virgin France. "Britain is just another territory for us nowadays," smiles Chandrasonic.

One of their most recent projects was to compose and perform a new live soundtrack for the Mathieu Kassovitz film La Haine, about Parisian ghetto life, which thety have since performmed at prestige festivals such as the Barbican's Only Connect and the South Bank's Meltdown, and which, touch wood, will be included on the film's DVD release.

Although their moniker asserts their Asian-ness, that, they say, is simply a mark of where they come from. Unlike Fun-Da-Mental, who i in their earliest incarnation alarmed many with their anti-Salman Rushdie remarks, ADF are secular in their approach. "There's a whole range of religious opinions within this group, prominent among which is atheist,"says Dr Das. Nor do they feel any particular duty to foist their Asian-ness on the world as a cultural imperative, still less cash in on the current, spicy vogue for all things Asian. The track "Cyberabad" on the new album celebrates the city of Hyderabad in Central South India, home to scientific inquiry and hi-tech innovation. However, it's only this year that they've decided that the time is right to tour India. They've felt no great ambassadorial obligation to do so.

Moreover, they don't have any particular cultural 'inside track' as regards 11. September 2001, except to remakr acerbicallly that it has provided another excuse for world leaders to erode civil liberties, drum up propaganda for war with Iraq, fan paranoia and stigmatise people of brown skin, all themes with on the album's title track. For instance, says Pandit G, "When you see the circumstances of this so-called 'gas attack' on the Tube, these Algerians [referring to several reported London arrests made in November 2002], it's somewhat different. It was based on the possible suspicion that maybe if they knew the right people they might be able to get some gas and maybe they'd intend to release it on the Tube. It's just smoke and rumours."

Elsewhere, on "Blowback", they expound the accurate, if admittedly not entirely helpful line taken by the far left on 11.September - that the US administration is paying the wages of past foreign policy sins.

More significantly, ADF have toured extensively internationally, generally well off the beaten promotional track. One of the many "new connections" they've made was playing live in Cuba. "We went out there beforehand with a couple of videos and a CD which they showed on rotation and we had 5000 people turn up," recalls Chandrasonic. "And the DJ from the main Havana radio station told me that The Manic Street Preachers [one of the rare Western pop acts to play there] had to have people bussed in to fill out the venue....
"We did have a Cuban-first policy," he continues. "We only charged 20 pesos to get in, so that it wasn't restricted to whoever had dollars."

They also went to Brazil at the invitation of the British Council, an invitation they regarded as pleasingly ironic, considering what 'Britishness' had come to mean, in the Britpop sense, only a few years earlier. In his diary of the event on the ADF Website, Chandrasonic writes with humbled joy about visiting projects in the favelas, or shanty towns of Rio, witnessing breathtaking musical/theatrical events worked up from zero resources, against a backdrop of poverty and gangland violence. Their experiences inspired Enemy of the Enemy's "19 Rebellions", about a brutally crushed attempt by Brazilian prisoners to stage a coordinated mass breakout.

ADF have also played in Eastern Europe, in Budapest and twice in Serbia. "Not many people go there," says Chandrasonic, "because most tours are linked with trying to sell new releases. But it's awesome, the level of enthusiasm. We had our biggest ever ADF gig in Serbia. 8000 people. Again, while they're lacking in resources, they're pulling out all the stops to put on a fantastic show."

A little taken aback, I wonder if they weren't worried about, or had encountered, any of the racism which blights Eastern Europe, as encountered recently by black British footballers in Slovakia, for instance. That antagonism reputedly caused the subsequent misbehaviour of English fans. A guffaw from Dr Das nearly brings the roof off the place. "I thought that was a bit rich coming from England, the country which invented racism in football!"

"Historically, there has been and still is a lot of conflict there," concedes Chandrasonic. "The latest thing is Vojvodina demanding autonomy. And we had people at the gig from Slovenia and Croatia having to pay $150 to get visas to get into Serbia. But I think in Eastern Europe generally, there's quite a lot of positivity amongst younger people about music as a means of rebuilding. Especially in Serbia."

Music as a means of rebuilding... by all accounts, on their travels ADF have encountered innumerable, heartwarming, energising examples of what they call "media-underdeveloped" countries making such positive and life-affirming connections. In the decidedly media-overdeveloped UK, it occurs to me, as the late afternoon winter darkness sets in, that such activism and positivism is rare. It's hard, not least for people who should know better, the supposed intelligentsia, to fight their way out of the unsatisfactory comfort of these New Labour times. There are so many excuses to opt out, to flop back into at state of disaffected indifference, to dally with intellectual misgivings about the sanguine certainties of an ADF that result in... doing nothing, a sort of shameful, able-bodied disablement.

"I think British culture generally has had this postmodern ironic thing, the idea that nothing can really move you..." says Chandrasonic. "That's the point, isn't it: we are confronted with a whole lot of propaganda and fears and worries and the 'war on terrorism' - and we're in a time when we've come out of the era when the world was split between the West and the Soviet Union and now the fortresses are being built around the issue of Islam as a new Great Enemy. ANd so you've got this paranoia that's almost as bad as the 50s and is disabling."

In these otherwise depoliticised times, do ADF feel they're carrying a lone torch? "The thing is, we're saddled with this sense of being on a mission but to us it's really quite natural," protests Chandrasonic. "Imagine if cinema was restricted in subject matter the way that pop music is right now, where there are only a few lyrical concerns you're allowed to have - ego, how much money you've got, sex, hedonism. Which is all fine. But imagine if movies were restricted that way. The only thing that would get made is "American Pie". What is the big deal about what we're doing? It's just the era that we're in."

There aer various reasons for the collapse of polemical pop - the triumph of marketing agendas over other, more radical ones. The fact that most of the major countercultural movements belong to part of ancient history, even rave, the last convulsion of dissent, which issued its own call to arms against the Criminal Justice Bill in 1992, is an issue of ever-diminishing relevance for anyone coming through their teenage years nowadays. The collective embarrassment over the failure of the mid-80s Labour-linked collective Red Wedge, which persuaded the like of Paul Weller not to bother anymore and to stick to the 'politics' of the romantic/personal, resulted in the depolarisation of British politics. But there was also a difficulty about the sort of signifiers which used to be insisted on in 80s agit-pop. Whether it was Billy Bragg's mock-Arthur Mullard cloth-cap vocals or the rather clipped, austere, dry funk mannerisms of groups like The Redskins or THe Style Council, they embodied a fear of musical extravagance, as if that would represent a sonic version of 'champagne socialism'. Chandrasonic insists that Asian Dub Foundation suffer no such inhibitions.

"With us, the radicalism is integrated into the music," he declares. "Not to knock any of the acts involved in Red Wedge, but musically they were quite middle of the road. For me, Public Enemy got it seriously right. They sounded like they were from the future. They were futuristic-sounding records, a real force, musically and visually. Radical art's got to be radical sounding, radical looking - at the same time without becoming avant garde, up its own bottom."

Furthermore, just as old leftists used to insist that, no, really, Nicaraguan coffee really was very good once you got used to the taste, there's a guilt about admitting that politicos like, say, Chumbawamba don't have much to offer musically beyond the tubthumping they ironically acknowledge in their biggest hit. To do so is as churlish as critising Lenin's brown boots as he rallies the workers on his triumphant return to Moscow. ADF, by contrast, could, if you chose, be enjoyed as pure hedonism, never more so than when they're caught live. "Our whole thing has been about taking our technology out and making it work in a live situation, not just about creating a track or a product," insists Dr Das. "It's more about expression and expressing it in a public space."

Whereas so much electronica offers only the static spectacle of mere onstage sound engineering; whereas much independent rock has sunk into wan MOR inertia; and with dance music redused to the choreographed sham of the 'live' PA, ADF are shock troops in the war against despair and inevitability, infectiously dynamic, be it in Chandrasonic's low-slung swagger, Pandit G's DJ-ing tussles, or Sun-J's elegant pogo-dancing. It's live that ADF reinfuse the sort of abstract nouns which inform them - community, activism, collectivism, connection; on stage were they defy the complex, structural forces which have depoliticised and de-energised an entire generation; drag us out of our esoteric cocoons; slap us about the face a bit and create a sense of 'we' again.

ADF prove that something can be done by going out and actually doing it - just ask Satpal Ram. As Chandrasonic puts it, those who say that nothing can be 'changed' are operating by a very narrow definition of the word. "Politics isn't just about belonging to a party or taking part in a demonstration," he asserts. "It might simply be about deciding to get up in the morning after lying in bed for three weeks. Thanks to the music."

"We're long term optimists and short term pessimists," insists Dr Das. "My pessimism might last half an hour! Real changes take a lifetime, it takes generations. But you've got to do your little bit. We're not necessarily going to see the fall of the Roman Empire in our lifetimes, but..."
"We might do," interrupts Pandit G.
"Yeah!" agrees Dr Das, buoyantly. "We might!"