Guest Blogger: Cornershop's Tjinder Singh on Readers' Wives

If you orbit about in the Twitterverse - you may have spotted a few fevered tweets back awhiles when I first fell under the spell of Cornershop's new LP Cornershop & The Double O Groove Of. What a joy and a gem of a collection it is. So a super-scoopy do then to get happy shopper himself Tjinder parking up on my corner of cyberspace...revisiting Cornershop's earliest recording, in his own words..

David C became our drummer over time. He had his own French Film Blurred fanzine, and output for us was very prolific in those days - an album a week. Not only did he like it, he encouraged it, & over the passing of many bells ringing in last orders, he finally joined us. In fact, he decided to learn drums - furthering our confidence.

At the same time my brother had joined too, playing guitar, but I talk of David more here because like most drummers do, he introduced us to an ex-boyfriend of his sisters, Andy Green, now located in Hove. We liked what music Andy had done & after playing Brighton he hassled us to do a mix of 'England’s Dreaming', which we liked so we took him up on the offer to work with him.

Me, my brother Avtar, David & his girlfriend Emma went to Hove near Brighton on a daytripper, well in my brother’s car actually. After a quick breakfast we got going. David & Emma went shopping & my brother took a deserved rest.

Well versed as I was in cassette tape technology, this was the first occasion I had used a sampler with a sequencer. At that time it was wonderment to see a track come together so quickly. The Akai sampler, an S950 has a certain crispness to its sound quality, not forgetting that vinyl has already gone through its many stages of recording & mastering - you are halfway there. Andy Green(away) put the selected audio into the sampler & quickly arranged it in the sequencer, & before we knew it a track was developing, & before I knew it I wanted to make music this way. The only live track inputs were feedback from an overloaded microphone, and my vocals. As the bass & drums had been put on, I started writing lyrics - it had got this far & I didn't want to leave without a finished track.

Andy was very good at explaining the processes, pulling in audio, trimming the start & end points, & triggering via sequencer, repeat half a dozen times, add feedback, add vocals, & then we mixed it on a TASCAM 424, all done at gas mark 7, heading back home by teatime with a very different 3rd single on an Agfa D30 cassette - I was the happiest Wog in the world. Oh I forgot the sitar was then put on after.

Written by Tjinder Singh p&c ampleplay'11



Getting back to the future - you can taste test, a track from The Double O Groove right below - or nip along to catch Cornershop LIVE tonight at the 02 Academy Islington.

A huge thank you is due to all at Cornershop HQ  for their help in putting this together..