Brimful of Asha is a classic one hit wonder.

Actually, if it had not been for a remix by Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, chances are very few people would have heard of it al all.

Cornershop come from Wolverhampton, England. The band is a partnership between Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayers. They specialize in an unusual fusion of Indian pop music and English dance music.  Their name is a satire on the clichéd image of East Indians in the UK, who are thought to run the majority of the countries’ corner stores. Brimful of Asha, which came out in the summer of 1998, is pretty much their high water mark. While they have released music sporadically since, they have never had anything else that even smelled like a hit.

I love this song for a couple of reasons. A huge portion of my own work with GBS has been about taking defiantly local places, words and ideas, and making them interesting to the rest of the world. Our great question as a band has been ‘how do you take something obscure and insular, and place it into a context that everyone else can get’? The whole idea of placing folk songs in a pop context is part and parcel of this equation.

Cornershop is not a folk band, but it is safe to say that in the early 1990s, when they wrote Asha, Singh’s Anglo-Indian culture was as unknown as its Newfoundland equivalents. Nowadays, everyone has heard of Bollywood, but a decade ago, that was not the case. Asha is a tribute to an Indian singer, Asha Bonsle, who specialized in voice-overs for Bollywood musicals. The fact that many famous stars actually lip-synched to her voice was well known, and seemingly not a problem.

Singh lovingly recites a series of images from his youth, his Punjabi culture seen through the lens of life in the grey British Midlands. Better than anyone else I have ever heard, he evokes the fantasy of a more exciting life that can be spun from nothing more than a voice on the radio, or even better, a cheap 45 rpm record player. The groove is absolute killer, a testament to the skill a good remix guy can bring to an otherwise ordinary arrangement. I do not have a clue about Singh’s world, really, but this song tells me everything I want to know, and makes it sound like a wonderful place to be.

There are two other reasons I love this song:

a) Band co-leader Ben Ayers was born in St. John’s, a fact sneeringly included in every UK interview with the band I have ever read. It is always dropped in as if it was some terrible hardship he had to overcome, like growing up in an orphanage or something. I always react the same way - St. John’s? What’s so bad about St. John’s? I have often been tempted to write him a letter.

b) The chorus of the song:

Everyone needs a bosom for a pillow…

I don’t care who you are, that is brilliant.

www.cornershop.com