TALVIN SINGH: I suppose when I was about five or six, very early. I was a quite hyperactive kid and I just liked to play. I didn't have any drums or tablas. I was really interested in drums. I would just get inspired and get spoons and play on them and then I got my first drums when I was seven or eight.

Did you have an appreciation for Indian music when you were growing up?

No. I really loved it, but at the same time I was into what was around me, which wasn't just Indian music really. You know, when the electro-hip-hop thing happened, a lot of Asians in London were really into it. I think the reason why was because our generation, we weren't really encouraged to go to clubs and stuff, because we were a bit young to do that and also for other reasons. A lot of Asians have a strict up bringing, so I suppose the easiest thing, the most organic thing to do was to get a ghetto blaster and go out in the street during the day after school and just dance and embrace this culture that was actually coming from America. I used to set up my drums and we had this Asian body bumping crew -- a couple of our bands made it to Beat Street, you know that film? I had an old drum machine and my tablas and I used to just program the drum machine and play tablas to it. I was making that music then without even thinking about it. It was just fun. I've always been into loads of different types of music. I think with what we're doing, the most important thing is embracing our cultural environment. Being brought up in a place like London, where everything surrounds you, if you can embrace that and bring it into your repertoire, whether it's art or music, I think that's brilliant.

When did you move to London?

I was born in London. I went to India when I was around 16. I went there and studied with a great master tabla player. My teacher was very much a non-bullshit person, he never wanted to [play classical]. He got asked to play with people like Ravi Shankar and he never wanted to do it. He wasn't from a musical family and he couldn't really deal with all the bullshit, which has to happen, which you really do get in the classical world. There's a lot of beauracracy and snobbery and rubbish really. And I never wanted to be a part of that even though I was playing classical and a lot of promoters wanted me because I was young. I just couldn't deal with it. I just thought I should be able to wear a T-shirt and jeans on stage. I always wanted to play in front of an audience which could relate to everything that our generation has gone through. So a couple of weeks after DJing, I'm doing a couple of classical gigs with this female tabla player who's 24 from Bombay. Our club Anokha is presenting it, but it's going to be a classical vibe. It's good because we're bringing all those energies from the club into the classical thing.

How are these classical shows going to be presented?

Like, you know, in our club, downstairs we have the very heavy beat stuff and upstairs we have the Calcutta Cyber Cafe, which is more kind of chill. It's a lot of the interesting music like the ambient stuff and experimental. We have four CD players and we just DJ CDs. It's good, it's listening music. It creates this atmosphere. So we're going to use that as an environment to bring this classical music, where you can go into another room and hear this authentic music. You can go into the auditorium and you can hear the classical performance. What's happened with Indian classical music is they've given it this concert status and that is not the true vibe of the music. You know you can't sit in a seat and expect the musicians to play from 8 o'clock to 8:45, that's not the style of the music. We're creating this environment for it where it's going to be sit down on the floor, you know we're going to have some nice cushions, and also a surround sound image. We're embracing technology at the same time, but bringing it back to authentic settings -- people sitting down, chilling, enjoying this lovely music.

When did you start Anokha?

About a year and a half ago. We started it at a north London university on Sunday afternoons and that's when [LTJ] Bukem first came and played there. And then after that we moved it to the Blue Note, which is close to where I live in East London and for a long time it's been very much kind of a Bangladeshi Indian community, it was actually like a Bangladeshi ghetto, but it's a vibe. 700 people outside can't get in every Monday night. And when the album came out, obviously it got more popular, but I never wanted to change the ticket price, because I felt the first crowd we had and support were mainly students and art students and so it's like they can't probably afford a higher ticket price. And even if they can, I find it morally wrong to, as soon as you become successful, charge 15 quid now. So we just kept a really good vibe going there.

Are you doing an album with Amar [the vocalist from Anokha]?

I was producing an album, but then I'm not doing the whole album now. I just want to do my album. I feel like I'm an artist before I'm a producer. I think I just need to let that energy happen to myself, because I spent years working with other people and so now I just want to do my own. I'm working with this singer called Meira Asher. I heard [her album] on the listening post in Paris and I just phoned the PolyGram people in Israel and said, 'Do you know anything?' And they said, 'She's a big fan of yours. I'll get her to call you.' And she called me within an hour. We just started rapping. She's brilliant. She's studied like dhrupad singing, which is very authentic school of singing in India, and she studied percussion in Gambia. She's the perfect person I want to work with. A lot of interesting people are going to be on it. I think Flea is going to play bass. It's going to be a pill.

What's your live show like?

I've got my drums, my tablas, which were custom made. I designed them with someone. They sound like tablas, but they're on this special stand; you can see through them. It's like the difference between an acoustic guitar and an electric guitar. You just plug them in like electric guitar. I've got all these effect pedals so I can change the sound and I can be as loud as I want. I always found I couldn't deal with playing, I remember when I did Lollapalooza tour with [Siouxsie & The] Banshees and I was playing tablas on a few tracks. That tour was really hard for me. I just felt that my drums weren't coming across. And I just felt weak, man, because today it's all about loudness. I've got my Macintosh and my samplers right next to me.

Do you ever have sitars?

I don't have any sitars. I want to work with this guitarist who lives in New York. I heard he has this new thing, a sitar-guitar. I don't know, I'm a bit funny with sitars. I like certain sitar players like Vilayat Khan. I went to see his concert a couple of months ago. Most of the audience was a non-Asian audience, you know, it was funny. He talk ed about fusion--but he didn't talk in English, he talked in Hindi. It was interesting what he said. He said, 'I'm not into this fusion stuff. Look we're very good at what we do, our field of music. We're the best, just like Bach or Mozart.' But--and I checked what he was saying--it didn't apply to me, because Vilayat, he comes from India. And my culture is actually in London. And what I'm doing isn't actually fusion. Fusion's about mixing two elements together; and all those elements which are in my music actually exist within me, so how can I fuse those elements? I can't do that. That's my music. That's me as an individual."