Traveller - Talvin Singh (1998)
The sweeping, cinematic opening song from a seminal album that won the Mercury Prize, making its creator a flag-bearer for the late-1990s Asian Underground scene
Last month, after watching England fail to beat Denmark in the group stages of the Euros, I cycled quickly across a sunny West London to attend an evening with legendary musician Talvin Singh at Ladbroke Hall. It was the first event of an ongoing series curated by MEETING RIVERS, a South Asian-influenced music archival platform.
First, Singh took to the stage to perform with his tabla. Then he joined Sach Dhanjal and Kam Bhogal for a conversation about his creative journey since he burst onto wider UK musical consciousness nearly three decades ago.
Raised in East London, influenced by traditional Hindustani music as well as nascent contemporary British electronic genres at the time, Singh’s debut album, OK, won the Mercury Prize in 1998. It cemented his name as synonymous with the rise of the so-called ‘Asian Underground’ scene reaching its earliest crystallisation.
After their conversation, against a backdrop of projector slides showing the many print magazine covers and archival photographs featuring Singh with famous collaborators across the years, Dhanjal and Bhogal played some of their favourite vinyls from his catalogue from tall, majestic speakers.
One of them was the 11-minute opening song on the OK album, Traveller. I’d not heard it before, and it blew me away, transporting me back to boyish interactions with 1990s British Asian life among my Punjabi family in Southall, but also my rising awareness of the sounds, moods and social politics of wider British society in the rest of my upbringing and everyday experiences.
Drum-and-bass playing from speakers at the town summer fair, the UK garage playing from pirate radio stations I might accidentally stumble upon, the Brit pop bands on the TV screen alongside Tony Blair’s cheesy triumphalism. The internet. The Matrix. The 1999 Cricket World Cup.
Traveller builds in three acts. The first combines the repeated, vocalised mantra of “The World is Sound” with an underlying flute, futuristic synths and dizzying drums. In the second, the flute breaks free in a soothing solo. The third adds an epic collective of strings.
I’m inclined to stop trying to describe it and let you listen. I’ve turned to it multiple times a day since that first evening of listening; it will now be one of my songs of 2024’s summer, 26 years after its release.
Sit back with headphones and take it in.
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