Twenty-one years of When I Was Born for the Seventh Time

Cornershop at the Charlotte, Leicester, 1995

Cornershop - When I Was Born for the Seventh Time (1997)

In the early 1990s, Cornershop were an incendiary, rough-edged, Indian-Anglo indie band based in Leicester; an historic city with a medieval king buried under a car park and a more modern history where middle England and British Commonwealth families met and lived (sometimes uneasily) alongside each other. 

This was where I first met and photographed the band during their early abrasive gigs as they progressed from their initial statement of intent singles to creating eclectic, pick ’n’ mix albums that referenced and challenged the orthodoxy of western rock n’ roll. Sometimes they did so wittily (a compilation album of their first two EPs was entitled Elvis Sex-Change) and at other times, Cornershop didn’t just want to bury the King of Indie, but to set a funeral pyre, as they did to a poster of Morrissey in response to his increasingly blatant racism. 

Like their records, reactions were mixed and sometimes disparaging, which made for a tense dynamic regarding their perception within the UK, particularly by the then influential, weekly music press. However, by the time of their third album, 1997’s When I Was Born for the Seventh Time, Cornershop had gone beyond making ripostes to Britain and were unexpectedly reborn as a multifaceted and globally aware phenomenon. Even among their supporters, I wasn’t alone in having failed to imagine that they could have created an album that continues to startle in its originality, ambition, breadth and delivery. 

Some context for this transformation comes from how the album was midwifed by their original independent Rough Trade backed record label, Wiiija, with added international backing from David Byne’s Luaka Bop label and co-production by rising hip-hop producer, Dan the Automator. However, that doesn’t take anything away from the album’s cohesion and diversity that continues to sound timeless, contemporary and even anticipatory. While the amusing song-sketch, Funky Days Are Back Again took its inspiration from New Labour’s then rise to power, its vision of dungarees and worker’s strikes backed by a primitive casiotone soundtrack might be even more suited to post-Brexit Britain.

Like Cornershop themselves, When I Was Born… has been somewhat overshadowed by the success of its second single. Their tribute to vinyl culture and Indian cinema, Brimful of Asha, cleverly referenced all the band’s genre mixing and globetrotting musical influences but in a post-modern twist, it became a catalyst to itself and an astonishing international hit, courtesy of an unsolicited Big Beat remix by Fat Boy Slim. On the album though it’s preceded by the strangely hypnotic, sloping album opener, Sleep on the Left Side, which acts as a perfect foil before giving way to the deceptively simple, Richman-esque riff that announces Brimful’s joyous arrival. 

clockwise from top left: 
Tjinder Singh, 
Ben Ayres, 
Peter Bengry, 
Nick Simms, 
Anthony Saffery

From there the double-album’s fifteen tracks dovetail into each other, including a number of instrumentals featuring looped samples and sitar breaks. There are also some rather special guests but before that, Cornershop have some star turns of their own. In particular, We’re In Your Corner, which starts gently enough with Anthony Saffery’s sitar and Ben Ayres’ tamboura before a sharp Punjabi “Hanji” greeting marks the entrance for Nick Simms’ drumming and Peter Bengry’s percussion. With Cornershop’s main figure, Tinder Singh now singing assuredly in Punjabi, the band hit their stride and have the confidence to let the song rise, fall and rise again on this epic, hypnotic track. On the album’s closer, Singh returns to his mother tongue on an otherwise faithful cover of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood. 

In between more multilingual voices appear as Lourdes Belart counts in Spanish from uno to quatro on Good Shit, followed by a duet with American country singer, Paula Frazer, on Good To Be On The Road Back Home. While the former extolls the joy of being on the journey as Singh describes “feeling good behind the wheel”, the latter lists an increasingly number of dislocated places (Tokyo, London, Chattanooga and New York City), that lie between the narrator and his home. 

According to the album’s credits, such references nearly match the number of locations where When I Was Born… was written and/or recorded in, including Singh’s bedroom on London's Holloway Road. And if that wasn’t enough global locations, when Good Shit was released as the album’s first single (with its title appropriated for public consumption as Good Ships), the cover featured an African-American astronaut - without helmet but with full afro - enjoying a space walk above Earth.   

Two American poets of rather different kinds complete the album. On Candyman, Justin Wharfield provides a hip-hop delivery over a looped Larry Coryel guitar riff alongside Singh’s declaration to be the song’s returning protagonist. The track itself has remained so fresh that a decade later it was dropped untouched into multi million dollar global marketing campaign to sell footwear. Meanwhile, in one of Allen Ginsberg’s final recordings, the original beat-poet provides a reading on When the Light Appears Boy, as what sounds like a carnival parades past, several floors down on the street below. 

Over twenty years on and in a world that’s become increasingly compressed and polarised, When I Was Born…continues to describe the experience of global citizens from multiple origins with their own histories, loyalties and soundtracks. It might even just be that wherever you are now, the sound you hear outside your own window was foretold on When I Was Born for the Seventh Time.

When I Was Born for the Seventh Time was released on 08 September 1997 by Wiiija 

An edited version of this review appears on the Corneshop website 

All photos © Greg Neate, neatephotos.com

More photos of Cornershop gigs are collected here 1992-94 and 1995-98.