Shelf life
>> Cornershop corner the market in ultimate megamixes

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

After a five-year absence (give or take the Clinton offshoot project), England’s Ben Ayres and Tjinder Singh have re-opened their Cornershop, and business is good. Their boss new album Handcream for a Generation is a Desi-disko, ragga-rockpig, political-pop soul revue where no two tracks sound alike, other than that they sound exactly like Cornershop. Guests include soul legend Otis Clay, deckwrecka Rob Swift and a pair of Oasis louts on the glorious hypno-jam “Spectral Mornings” and the riff-rock anthem “Lessons Learned From Rocky I to Rocky III.”

Mirror: You’ve done a 24-hour-long remix of “Spectral Mornings” for your Web site—why?
Ben Ayres: It was two influences, really. Firstly, we were talking, in the studio, about how much music you could fit on different formats—vinyl, CD, MP3 and so on. We were thinking about how long a remix of “Spectral Mornings” we could do, because there’s loads of instrumentation on that track, loads of layers, and it would be interesting to break it down into different sections. We were thinking of doing an hour-long mix across two sides of vinyl. The idea just grew, through discussion, to a 24-hour-long mix, and at the same time we realized that, as far as we knew, nobody had done it before.

M: To your knowledge, has anyone taken the Iron Man Challenge and sat through the whole thing?

BA: This is it, people are saying that it’ll be a new category in the Guinness Book of World Records. But it would probably be more worthy of going down as the longest track nobody’s listened to in its entirety. I’m sure it would drive you mad.

M: I also read that on May 28, you’re supposed to play a Hells Angels festival in California. Is this true?

BA: (laughs) Well, that was probably us adding things up the wrong way—we’re playing a festival there, and I don’t know if it is a Hells Angels festival. It might be. It’s called the Mountain Air Festival, at a place called Angel’s Camp. We thought it must be a biker rock festival.

M: Which makes me think of the classic-rock-trip video for “Rocky 1” ending in a messy, Altamont scenario—especially with the Sam Peckinpah shit in Nevada recently.

BA: Ironically, the first show we’ve done on this tour was in Las Vegas, with Oasis, and our tour bus was held up for six hours by that incident.

M: Now, especially with “Rocky,” you guys have never made any bones about your frustration with the music-industry machine. Is there anything out there now that gives you hope for the industry, for art to win out over commerce?

BA: Yeah, definitely. In England, there’s Mike Skinner, who goes by the Streets. It’s very London, all about what it’s like to go out clubbing in London, but from a very base level. To be honest, it reminds me of a lot of people I know in London and their approach to life and going out. People are defining it as U.K. garage, but it’s got more to it than that. The music’s very good and bang up to date—in fact, I think it’s the most up-to-date record to come out of London in well over 10 years. :

With the Datsons at Cabaret on Monday, May 13, 9pm, $20