Tjinder Singh may deny it, but his band has always behaved as if commercial success was something to be endured. I remember seeing Cornershop play in Edinburgh at the height of their popularity, in February 1998. “Brimful of Asha” had gone to No 1. They had been on Top Of The Pops the previous evening. There was a sense of expectation among the crowd that night, but Cornershop played as if they had suffered a bereavement. They then waited three years to release a disco-inspired follow-up, using the unGoogleable band-name Clinton. Their next album proper, Handcream For A Generation, didn’t arrive until 2002. As an exercise in career-building, it was totally perverse.

Handcream didn’t replicate “Asha”’s success, but seven years later it still sounds fresh. Indeed, the initial comparison with Judy Sucks A Lemon… is damning. “Who Fingered Rock’n’Roll” may be conceived as an opening salvo on the state of the music business, but it sounds, at first, like Primal Scream’s “Rocks” dusted in turmeric. Gone is Handcream’s funky energy, replaced – it seems – by a listless hybrid of rock and gospel.

But repeat plays show this to be a misconception. Cornershop’s 2009 incarnation may not have the kinetic energy of the 2002 model, or the accidental pop brilliance of “…Asha”, but it isn’t short on inventiveness. The songs are loaded with joyous harmonies, reflecting Singh’s abiding passion for gospel music, yet even when they allow lyrics about redemption and the Sea of Galilee – as on the epic closer “The Turned On Truth (The Truth Is Turned On)” – Cornershop are unable to stick within the conventions of genre. Yes, the song has a churchy organ, but it’s also doused in the sweat of Southern soul, while the ebb and flow of the groove is built on apparently unconscious reworking of the riff from “Asha”. Whatever, it’s pretty much majestic.

“The Roll Off Characteristics (Of History In The Making)” mines a similar seam. It purports to be an anti-war, pro-people song, but that’s not something you’d glean from the sheet music. It’s an uncategorisable slice

of jazzed-up pop, with lyrics which hang together without making literal sense. Only in Tjinder Singh’s mind would a chorus of “war ain’t nothing but technical plip-plop” seem like a proportionate response to the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the sense of infantile mockery does the job.

Apparently, Cornershop’s absence has coincided with the band busy being parents. Consequently, Singh has spent much of his sabbatical singing to kids. On “Roll-Off”, and elsewhere, the lyrics seem to work on a subconscious level. They don’t exactly make sense, but there is a nursery rhyme quality to them which makes them feel right.

The same can be said of “Free Love”, a psychedelic monster with non-English lyrics, a bubbling bass-line and scything strings. Apparently, the original version was 56 minutes long. Only six of those minutes have survived, but they glide by in a psych haze of fractured rhythms and testcard melodies.

The word for all of this should be “fusion”, if that term hadn’t been debased by association with fretless bass abuse and World Music without a map. But Cornershop aren’t about bad cooking. They’re a cheap transistor radio, jammed on the Medium Wave, simultaneously picking up signals from around the planet, and stitching them together with dub static and interference. It sounds familiar, new, and accidental.

There’s a cover here, of “The Mighty Quinn”. Rock purists may now be thinking about Dylan and the Basement Tapes. Forget it. The song is included because it was the second English 7” Singh ever bought: the Manfred Mann version, obviously. It’s a childish verse, innocently remembered. And that, I think, is what Cornershop are aiming for: music that moves the soul without necessarily engaging the mind. They are trying to re-engineer the seeds of pop and sew them in the hedgerows of memory and intuition. They wait. And wait. Then they plough on.

UNCUT Q&A Tjinder Singh:

What have you been doing for seven years?

Seven years?! Well, we’ve all got kids, except for the percussionist, who’s got bees. We’ve been looking after kids, baking a bit of bread and doing the odd bit of music. I was away in Paris for a couple of years. But we’ve

not stopped. We know our limitations, and I don’t think up until this year that an album like this would have found any water. There’s been white guitar indie music or white and black R&B. There’s not been the room for experimentation that there was in the ’90s. But the resurgence of dance music shows that things are going to change.

What’s it like coming back after so long away?

We have to start from scratch every time, whereas other groups have had a great, boring catalogue of success. It’s rather sad. But the glimmer of hope is that 10 years later, people latch on to it. When we started we didn’t care if Asians were listening to us, in fact we knew that Asians would want to kill us as much as the Far Right for doing what we were doing. But as long as people get into it, somehow, that’s what makes it worth continuing.

INTERVIEW: ALASTAIR McKAY

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In 2001, when Mego announced they were releasing a Jim O’Rourke album, some of us assumed it would be starkly abstract and coruscating.

What a surprise, then, to discover I’m Happy… was the opposite – where a lot of laptop artists were gazing into their Apple Mac’s navel, O’Rourke squeezed some of the most otherworldly electronica from the blue screen’s gaze.

This reissue adds an extra disc, but the original’s the charm, rich with disquietingly gorgeous dream logic.

JON DALE

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It used to be 1979. It’s now 2009. Billy Childish – author, poet, painter, musician, influence on everyone from Tracey Emin to The White Stripes – will be 50 in December. In that time – the time that U2 have only been U2 – Billy Childish has been The Pop Rivets, Thee Milkshakes, Thee Mighty Caesars, Thee Headcoats, The Buff Medways, The Del Monas, Jack Ketch & The Crewmen, The Musicians Of The British Empire and, of course, Billy Childish. And in that time, the time that music has convulsed and shapeshifted like Morrissey getting a lawyer’s bill, Billy Childish’s musical vision has remained extraordinarily similar.

I remember hearing him on John Peel in the late ’70s, except then his band were called The Pop Rivets and I wouldn’t have known who he was. The song (not included here) was called “Beatle Boots” and, even at the time, even on a radio show where most of the songs were not over-produced, or over-tuneful, or excessively musicianly, “Beatle Boots” sounded like a compressed, one-take, rough headache of a sub-demo.

It was great. And it marked, really, the end of Childish’s brief parallelness with New Wave music. Like Swell Maps’ Nikki Sudden, who began his career fitting in perfectly with post-punk and then veered off into his own world of Stones and Thunders, Billy Childish’s view of things has always been a highly personal one. People stroll into shot on occasion – Jack White, say, or Kurt Cobain (who seems to have fulfilled a Stephen King-like “I am the recommender” role to rough guitar music of the early 1980s) – and sometimes the big world lets Childish onboard for a while (his poetry and painting are now considered “proper” by art and literature types), but none of this seems to affect Childish, who is still entirely concerned with mapping out his own life and mind.

One aspect of that life and mind only is collected here, and in brilliant quantity; a representative selection of the music Childish has made in the past 30 years. He’s run all those bands with the too-many “e”s in their names, and musically they are all variants on the same thing; Childish’s view of the world, seen through two kinds of punk, garage punk and, er, punk punk. It is in a way a sort of pop life in reverse compared to that of the bands he’s clearly in love with. Those bands, ’60s bands as not-that-disparate as The Kinks and The Kingsmen, if they developed, went forwards in time, but Billy Childish’s bands have gone backwards in time.

It’d be slightly inaccurate (but tempting) to say that as Childish’s punk and post-punk contemporaries got into – looking just at the 1980s – funk, brass sections, Scott Walker, country rock, electro, David Bowie, hip hop and Chicago house and “developed”, they lost whatever it was they had, the primal wobbling thing that made them exciting in the first place, while each year Billy Childish and his bands got closer to the primal wobbling thing.

And this is the thing that draws the admirers to him – he records with old mics! He sounds a bit like The Sonics! He sort of references bands six people love like The Beatstalkers! These songs, like Childish himself, do tend to shore up that viewpoint. There’s 51 of them on this double CD, and with the odd exception – the ulto-indiepop of The Musicians Of The British Empire’s “He’s Making A Tape” (“and it’s not for me!” sings The MBE’s Nurse Julie disconsolately), or the slightly Fall-ish “Mass Ignorance Culture” by Jack Ketch & The Crewmen – Archive From 1959 is a couple of hours of rough-arsed, broken-tongued garage rock which, once you stop playing Name That Riff and you set aside the idiosyncratic titles (“Punk Rock Ist Nicht Tot” by Thee Headcoats, “The Day I Beat My Father Up” by the same band), could be from any rough-arsed, broken-tongued garage band of the ’60s.

Of course (well, of course-ish), that’s not really true. Music, as The Who once said, must change. Admittedly, they said it in a terrible song at a point in their career when they’d gone from being the greatest garage band in the world to being a weird, brandy-sodden, neurotic disco-rock band, but they were right. A pop world where everyone recorded at Toe Rag Studios and thought stereo was a channel too far would be a horrible place, just as a world where Elton John samples over a drum beat constitute a “mash-up” is not that good either. But as a personal vision of music, as a vehicle for a unique attitude, and as a compilation of 51 rough-arsed, broken-tongued garage songs, Archive From 1959 is great.

DAVID QUANTICK

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Uncle Tupelo‘s Jay Farrar’s recent work with Son Volt, the band he revived with a new lineup in 2005, seems preoccupied with disappearing worlds and the loss of arcane traditions. It’s a feeling deepened on American Central Dust, in which he takes stock of the global banking fiasco to give things a more piquant air of wistfulness.

The songs themselves are thoughtful, ambling between folk, country and mid-paced roots-rock. More roughed-up stuff like “When The Wheels Don’t Move” might have served better, but there’s light (sideways Keith Richards tribute “Cocaine And Ashes”) and dark (“Sultana”) in equal, engaging measure.

ROB HUGHES

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