Talvin Singh: ‘I started feeling insecure about my music’

In the late 1990s, the tabla player, electronic producer and composer Talvin Singh seemed to be everywhere: working with everyone from Madonna and Massive Attack to Sun Ra and Björk, before winning the 1999 Mercury Prize for his debut album OK. His club night Anokha at the Blue Note had become a cornerstone of newly hip Shoreditch in east London. He was acclaimed as the godfather of the “Asian underground” sound.

Then, very suddenly, both Singh and the Asian underground faded from view. His second album Ha came out in 2001 to scornful reviews (the NME called it “ponderous” and “meandering”), and Singh seemed to stutter. In 2016, an article about “Forgotten Mercury winners” in ShortList magazine speculated that he was “living a normal life”.

Now, nearly a quarter-century later, Singh is back. When we speak, he’s in Delhi visiting his tabla-makers — our FaceTime call is repeatedly delayed by traffic issues — and about to head to Mumbai for final recording sessions for his first major release in 22 years.

He’s also preparing for an upcoming concert at London’s Southbank Centre, as part of fashion designer Nicholas Daley’s Woven Rhythms event, where he’ll be playing an improvised set with vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Coby Sey and performer and composer Lucinda Chua — clearly finding resonance with these younger boundary-dissolving artists.

Born in Leytonstone, east London, in 1970, Singh played the tabla as a child, before mixing them with the electro of the early 1980s for him and his friends to breakdance to. His father was a TV and hi-fi repairman: “There was always gear in the house. Me and my cousin put StreetSounds electro tracks on cassette. I’d play tabla with the beat and record it live on another cassette machine.”

By 16, music was his only focus. As well as studying with the renowned Gurudev Sangeet Acharya Lachman Singh in India, he threw himself into session work on pop, jazz, bhangra and reggae records, including with jazz musician Courtney Pine and poet Benjamin Zephaniah. “After a session would finish, I’d just ask, ‘Can I stay and chill for a while?’” he says. “And I’d sit in the control room and ask questions.”

This led to touring with Siouxsie and the Banshees in the early 1990s, then to becoming musical director for Björk’s 1993 album Debut and the tour that followed — including opening for U2 at Wembley Stadium.

The wine wasn’t ready to be drunk, so I put it in the cellar — and now, when I listen to it, it sounds better than it did then’

All the time Singh was working on his own music, with its lush, rich production and melody woven into drum ’n’ bass complexity, which culminated in OK. Despite its lengthy, gradually unfolding tracks and cosmic outlook, it was absolutely rooted in the pleasure principle, the euphoria of the dance floor effortlessly melting into Indian classical and folk, and even Japanese music.

So what happened? Why did he struggle? Partly, Singh says, it was a crisis of confidence: he never stopped recording his electronic work, but “I started feeling insecure about it. I would share it with a few people then not get much feedback, and I thought: well are they judging it against my past music? Are they judging my progression? Or do they just not get it?”

After Ha, his main releases were low-key collaborations: lengthy ambient jams with the band Sangat, and more traditional duets with sitarist and Ravi Shankar disciple Niladri Kumar. By the early 2010s those petered out too.

Another part of the problem — ironic though it might seem — was the launch of the BBC Asian Network in 2002. Although it offered a much wider platform for music of Asian origin, Singh argues that it actually did the reverse for many crossover artists. While he acknowledges that the station had its value, “I don’t think it served South Asian artists who had a more universal outlook on music, whether it’s electronic or classical.”

Nonetheless, he kept plugging away. Living between Suffolk, London and India for the past 20 years, Singh has run studios, continued study with his guru (who died only last year, in his nineties), taught young Indian musicians himself and helped maintain collections of traditional instruments. He has also gigged continually — everything from larger-scale shows from Switzerland to Dubai to low-key local gigs such as his duo shows with pianist Tom Robertson in Suffolk, which brought him to Nicholas Daley’s attention. 

Meanwhile, he has stayed plugged into the underground scenes of London: he waxes lyrical about the global bass DJ team Boko! Boko!, Punjabi east London dubstep/grime mainstay Sukh Knight and the new generation of jazz musicians in London, which he says has “finally taken its own uniquely British shape with electronic and bass music”.

Bit by bit, the confidence has returned. Fired by his experiences in Mumbai and Delhi (whose creative, freewheeling spirit reminds him of “the London of the 1990s”), he has re-explored elements of his old sound: “Cool ambient bits, 173bpm drum ’n’ bass, 808 bass.” All will feature on his new album when it appears at the end of the year. If his one recently released track — a contribution to a 2022 compilation inspired by curlews — is anything to go by, his sonic manipulation skills and knack for blissful ambience are indeed still strong.

A convert to the “community feel” of music-distribution platform Bandcamp, Singh is now also considering releasing music he made after Ha that has stayed under wraps until now. “The wine wasn’t ready to be drunk, so I put it in the cellar — and actually now, when I listen to it, I feel like it sounds better than it did then, even to me.”

Above all, he’s happy that his appearance at the Southbank Centre is going to put him back at the heart of “the music, the fashion, the collaboration of London, improvising with these amazing young musicians”. He beams: “It’s going to be a beautiful thing.”

Southbank Centre, London, on September 15, southbankcentre.org.uk