Off-Licensed To Thrill!

FORGET PLATINUM discs or touring with Oasis: you can't truly say you've arrived until you've had one of your records cannibalised by a crap style programme.
I'd hate you to think I'm a Norman No-Mates who has nothing better to do than stare at the telly but, er, with time to kill last Saturday between drug-crazed media orgies, I just happened to spy Jeanne Beker going about her Fashion TV business with 'Butter The Soul' blaring away in the background. An honour which I'm sure Cornershop never envisaged when they penned their Beasties-go-to-Bollywood instrumental.
"I think there must be someone at Sky who's related to us because they keep on using our songs for trailers and the soundtrack to yesterday's Premiership goals," laughs rock 'n' roll's first tamboura hero, Ben Ayres. "You can be snobby about it and go, 'Aaaaagh, stop turning us into this year's Lightning Seeds!', but I actually regard it as a bit of a compliment. Not a very well paid one, though. If it was cornflakes we were advertising, we'd be getting tens of thousands of pounds but the going rate for Man United vs. Arsenal is about a hundred quid."
Given that BBC2 were using 'Funky Days Are Back Again' to trail Have I Got News For You and that the lowlights of England's Moroccan odyssey were accompanied by 'Brimful Of Asha', Cornershop ended the June Bank Holiday Weekend #300 to the good. Roughly the same amount of money that Ben was making from the 9-to-5 that he only jacked in last September.
"People never believe me when I say this," he continues, "but up till then, there was no way I could have lived on the money I was making - or not making - from Cornershop. There were a couple of tours that the others had to do without me because I couldn't get time off. It's a really weird feeling sitting in an office while the band you're a member of are on the other side of the Atlantic playing a gig with Los Lobos. Tjinder [Cornershop vocalist] would ring up and say, 'We were fucking brilliant last night!', and I'd go, 'Cheers mate, the most exciting thing I got up to was watching Coronation Street!' Y'know, where would you rather be - Weatherfield or Los Angeles?"
Cornershop are second only to Chumbawamba in terms of how long it's taken them to become an overnight success. Having traded for four seriously impoverished years as The General Havoc, the band decided in 1992 to slim down their moniker and allied to the nascent Riot Grrl movement, landed a deal with Therapy's old label, Wiiija.
"Riot Grrl was as much about attitude as it was gender, which is why we got on so well with Huggy Bear. We were both challenging the traditional concept of what a rock band's supposed to be - white and male - and making records that could be judged on complete face value. It mightn't have been perfect musically but people didn't seem to mind 'cos there was so much energy flying around."
I wouldn't say this if he was within headbutting distance of me, but seeing as Ben's safely stationed at the other end of a cross-channel phone line, I'd like it to be known that I consider their first two EPs, In The Days Of Ford Cortina and Lock Stock ... Double-Barrel, to be the greatest crimes against humanity since the BBC decided to employ Anthea Turner.
"The way I view those records is that they were the first step in the evolutionary process which has brought us to where we are today," he says, displaying remarkable restraint. "They might sound very different but without 'England's Dreaming' or 'Summer Fun In A Beat Up Datsun' there'd be no 'Brimful Of Asha' or 'Sleep On The Left Side'. The great thing about Cornershop is that we're not Status Quo - we haven't 'found our sound' or whatever the latest euphemism for 'running out of ideas' is. I'll be very disappointed if, in another five years, people don't listen to whatever album we have out and say, 'That's nothing like When I Was Born For The 7th Time'."
Which is an altogether rosier view of the future than the one given to an American journalist recently by Tjinder Singh. Asked about the "Cornershop to split" rumours which have been following them around on tour, he admitted that, "We've talked about it. My life has always been about perseverance. That's how things are for me. It isn't that nice all the time, but it does give you satisfaction when you see you've done a good thing. We think we've gotten to a level where that might be all we want out of it."
Combined with Singh's trashing of a Bristol hotel room and complaints that most of his royalties have gone AWOL, it adds up to one decidedly unhappy camper.
"The way it works in England is that we're signed to Wiiija - or will be when the contract is finalised. We've had a verbal agreement with Gary [Walker] which, in order for both of us to move on to the next stage, we now need to formalise. We were as pleased for him as we were ourselves when ' . . . Asha' got to number one. He was prepared to back us when everybody else in the industry thought we were a joke, and himself and Beggar's Banquet, who now partly own and run Wiiija, have always been straight down the line when it comes to money. I'm being purposefully vague about this but the problems Tjinder was referring to have tended to arise when other parties have got involved. Most of that stuff has been sorted out now so we're in pretty good form."
And getting ready to revive their Clinton side-project which, if all goes according to plan, should include a Mr N. Gallagher in the credits.
"What we're going to do now, I think, is alternate between Cornershop and Clinton which is basically us messing around with technology and different dance elements," Ayres explains. "It's something which Tjinder and myself started in 1995 and gives us the freedom to do things that wouldn't necessarily work in a band context. A lot will depend on our respective schedules but Noel's offered his services and we've a few ideas that he may be able to help us tease out.
"It all stems from the time he came up to myself, Nick and Tjinder at a Beck gig in London and said there were a couple of our tracks he liked, and 'Why don't we play together?' To be honest, we thought it was the beer or the chemicals talking but, sure enough, a year later Oasis offered us the support on their US tour which was perfect because When I Was Born For The 7th Time had just started to take off there and we wanted to broaden our audience. I was as gobsmacked as everybody else when he made jamming along to 'Jullander Shere' part of his nightly routine. He never admitted it but I think he was living out his Beatles-in-India fantasy!"
A lot of influences have been claimed on their behalf - a Spanish hack recently losing the plot altogether and comparing them to Gary Glitter - but whose back catalogue would Cornershop admit to rifling?
"We really try hard to do our own thing and be original, but among the artists we rate are The Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, Curtis Mayfield, The Jimmy Casper Bunch, Tapper Zukie, Scientist, Lee 'Scratch' Perry and The Blind Boys Of Alabama. We played after them in Northampton, Massachusetts and I've never seen anything like it. There was a bloke on stage whose job it was to mop the singers' brows with towels and hold them back as they got more and more intense. It's not just a name, they really are blind and get so into it that they lose their sense of positioning. There were a couple of occasions when I thought, 'Oh God, he's going to tumble into the crowd', but the roadie saved them."
If you fancy seeing a spot of unintentional stage-diving or merely want to wallow in their gospel-flavoured wonderfulness, the Blind Boys visit Whelan's on July 25th as part of the 1998 Guinness Jazz Festival. While we're talking legends, who would Ben's all-time musical heroes be?
"(pause that isn't so much pregnant as feet up in the stirrups waiting to be induced) The young Bob Dylan, the young Marc Bolan and Billie Holiday at pretty much any age. We were talking about Noel Gallagher's fantasies a moment ago - well, one of mine is to hear Billie Holliday fronting T. Rex."
I tell you, having seen Jimmy Page on MTV the other night with Puff Daddy, I reckon anything's possible. While it would be grossly unfair to credit Fatboy Slim with all the fame, fortune and Blue Peter badges that have come Cornershop's way this year, it has to be said that prior to being given the Big Beat remix treatment, the best 'Brimful Of Asha' could muster on the UK chart was a rather lowly number 65.
"He liked ' . . . Asha' so much when he heard it on the radio that he 'phoned Wiiija and said, 'I've got the beats, give me the track!' I prefer it when people come to you, rather than the other way around, because it obviously means they're interested in what you do. I'm not sure how we'd have reacted if the remix had been unrecognisable but, as it is, he took all the key elements and beefed 'em up which worked brilliantly.
"And, yeah, it got us onto Blue Peter which was really good fun. I took my daughter, Molly, with me and we all got badges which impressed her no end. Having not cared one way or the other, she suddenly realised that there are advantages to your dad being in a band.
"Actually," he says, switching into proud-parent-mode, "I'm pleased because along with the standard kiddie fare like Aqua and Boyzone, she's started dancing around to The All Seeing I single. Give it a couple of months and we'll have her hooked on dub reggae!"
Ah yes, the family that skanks together, stays together. Cornershop are so taken with this dance lark that they've farmed another of their tracks out to ace New York scratcher Cut Kenneth and donned their wellies for the Creamfields '98 mudfest.
"The vibe was great but the sound and the weather were terrible," Ayres rues. "Talking to people afterwards, you couldn't hear any of the percussion or Tjinder's vocals, which is why a full Big Beat Tent was half-empty by the time we finished. I went to see Primal Scream there and they had exactly the same problem. The PA had been set up for DJs rather than bands which meant everything was reduced to a big bass thud. As a day out, though, we enjoyed ourselves."
Which, I must say, didn't appear to be the case when Cornershop frowned their way through their recent Red Box headliner.
"Nah, that was studied concentration," Ben deadpans. "We were a bit stressed at first because, with Dublin Airport being closed, we'd had to drive down from Belfast and had about five minutes to sort ourselves out before going on stage. Once we got into it, though, it was a great gig."
Currently in the States where When I Was Born For The 7th Time is about to sell its 250,000th copy, the 'Shoppies return home next month for a series of festival dates which include July 9th's The Big Day Out in Galway.
"I'll have a word with the rest of the lads and make sure we'll all be smiling!" promises Ayres. n