(Published in Selector magazine, 2001)

Asian Dub Foundation arrive on our shores soon, to deliver their fully charged live show, a glorious musical mixture of hiphop, traditional Indian music, reggae, politics, and punk. They are currently in the midst of the UK music Festival season.

"We're having a wee break at the moment," says Pandit G, ADF's DJ, on the phone from London. "Everyone wants to get out of London in the summertime and we're back in London, very relieved!" He and fellow band members (Dr Das on bass, Deedar on samples/rapping, Chandrasonic on guitar, Sun J on keyboards) are playing at about 20 Festivals during the European summer. A lot of the Festivals have very similar lineups; "Sometimes, In Europe particularly, people book top international bands and forget about the local music that's coming up. It gets very samey. We like to play to a more diverse audience. We played at a Festival in Ireland recently, that had a lot of local bands as well as top International bands, which was great."

You've been together as a band for seven years now, what inspires you to keep making music? "Well, we've still got a lot of stuff we want to talk about, different issues we want to raise, and different styles of music to put forward. We never had any game plan, at first: we never thought, for example, we'd be going out to play in New Zealand! We came out of a little organisation called Community Music in London (which they are still involved with), and it just grew. We never anticipated it, given our backgrounds in either music education, or anti racist work or civil rights work, we never thought we'd end up making our living as musicians.

Community Music is not aimed at making kids into rock stars, like Fame or something, but what we find is that a lot of people who may be excluded from schools or learning, find that making music is a way they can get self confidence, through the whole process of expressing themselves through music."

What do you want your audiences to walk away with from your shows, and records? "I think, particularly with the live experience, we've got a bit of a reputation as a good live band, and we enjoy the communication with the audience, and even though we're talking about serious issues like freeing Satpal Ram, we like to have a party. We call it a conscious party. Especially at Festivals, people haven't heard you before, and they get carried with the live experience and want to know more about what we doing. But also, we try and communicate directly with the audience. In current rock music, artists and celebrities are treated as icons, and most of us look up to them in awe. We're trying to turn some of that around and break down those barriers.
That's very much what we're about. The music that we do, people say 'oh, its all these different styles, they can't work together', but in a way they are like a metaphor for all the different people; the reggae, the punk, the bhangra, the jungle, the hip hop. You could see it as a metaphor for all the people that exist, particularly in London; all the different communities, the different minorities, and all the different music they like. That is the community music.

We're at a time where music is put into little genres, and one doesn't relate to another one, so a fan of one type of music isn't open minded to a fan of another type of music. We deliberately go out and play to different audiences, like, we supported Rage Against the Machine on a European tour earlier this year. We've done collaborations with artists from France, from Bangladesh. We try and get the maximum amount of variety in our audience, people who like all different types of music.

What can we expect when you play here? "It'll just be a party, mate! We thrive on the enthusiasm of the crowd, if we get that, we give it back. It's always a good challenge, so we'll see what the New Zealand audiences are like!

We're playing Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, then New Zealand. I'm not even sure how far it is. As you can imagine, we think its next door like England is next door to France"


You guys obviously take what you do very seriously, but what do you do for fun? "Well, there's this false belief that, because we talk about serious issues that we don't have a sense of humour. I think you just have to wait and see us play live, cos we've got a wicked sense of humour!" laughs Pandit. "With playing live, we find ourselves in a position where we've got a platform to talk about things, and for most bands, it's just 'shut up and play music', do some terrible angst ridden thing, you know? We don't do that; we try and bring people in to what we're talking about.

Okay, in New Zealand, there might be separate issues. What we're on about is we're second generation Asians talking in particular about life in the UK. But I think a lot of the parallels come across wherever we go. Like for example, in France, where we've had our most success, many of the things which we've been talking about are very close to what's been happening there, in regards to things like immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. Even with the language barrier, we've managed to get these issues across to people". See you at the barricades for a funky good time!