Talvin Singhਤਲਵੀਨ ਸਿੰਘ

Talvin Singh is a British tabla player, producer and composer from Leytonstone, London, born in 1970 to Punjabi Indian parents. Trained in the Punjab gharana, he became a central figure of the Asian Underground, and his debut album OK won the Mercury Prize in 1999.

Early life in Leytonstone

Singh was born in 1970 in Leytonstone, in east London, and grew up there. In his own account of his childhood, he was raised by Sikh parents, his uncles held Indian classical music gatherings at home, and there were always tabla around the house, while Top of the Pops played on television. His parents hoped he would become a doctor or a lawyer. He was coming home in the early hours with armfuls of drums instead, and that double listening, classical music inside the home and pop, punk and electro outside it, shaped everything he later made.

He began playing tabla as a child, and the experiment that defined his style started early. At about 11 or 12 he was recording himself at home, playing tabla along to electro beats and re-recording the results from tape to tape. He has explained that he needed to practise with a metronome, found the metronome boring, and began using electro beats in its place. The classical instrument and the club rhythm were never separate worlds for him after that.

At 16 he travelled to India and studied in Punjab for a year with Pandit Lachman Singh Seen, the tabla master of the Punjab gharana, and he kept returning to his teacher for a time each winter afterwards. The training gave him a formal classical grounding. Back in Britain, though, promoters of classical Indian music found his playing too marked by western influences, and he turned toward building a setting of his own rather than fitting into theirs.

What is Talvin Singh known for?

Talvin Singh is known for bringing the tabla and Indian classical music into British electronic and club music, as a leading figure of the movement that became known as the Asian Underground. He calls his approach tablatronics, and in 1990 he conceived the Tablatronic, a hybrid electronic and acoustic tabla using an internal microphone system, so the instrument could be processed and amplified like part of a modern electronic setup.

Underlying the technique is a stated aim he has returned to often: to bring the tabla to the front and centre of the stage. In Indian classical music the tabla usually accompanies a singer or a lead instrumentalist, even though a solo repertoire exists. Singh's records, club sets and concerts put the tabla itself in the lead role, surrounded by drum and bass, ambient textures and classical players, and that simple change of position is a large part of why his work sounded new.

Anokha and the Asian Underground

In late 1995 Singh founded the Anokha club night with promoter Sweety Kapoor at the Blue Note in Hoxton Square, east London. Anokha, a word meaning unique, ran on Monday nights and became a London hotspot. Singh has described two floors working at once: downstairs at full pressure, around 160 to 170 beats per minute, and upstairs a listening space of ambient soundscapes, trip hop and Indian classical music. Guests such as LTJ Bukem played there, and live features included Squarepusher and Black Star Liner.

Working with creative producer Sweety Kapoor and with Sam Zaman, known as State of Bengal, Singh turned the night into a record. In 1997 Island released the compilation Anokha: Soundz of the Asian Underground, with several of his own productions alongside other artists from the night. The album gave a name and a public shape to the Asian Underground: a generation of mostly British Asian musicians mixing electronic music with sounds from across the Indian subcontinent, openly and on a large scale.

Did Talvin Singh win the Mercury Prize?

Yes. Talvin Singh won the Mercury Prize in 1999 for OK, his debut solo album, released on Island Records in November 1998. The shortlist he beat included Blur, the Chemical Brothers, Beth Orton and Thomas Ades. OK also won the South Bank Prize, so the same record took two of Britain's most closely watched music awards.

OK took about nine months of travelling and recording to complete. Singh recorded in London, Mumbai, Madras, Okinawa and New York, working with the Madras Philharmonic Orchestra and with collaborators including Bill Laswell, Ryuichi Sakamoto and the sarangi and vocal master Ustad Sultan Khan. Island Records left him alone to make it and did not hear the album until it was finished. He has said he wanted it to feel like a journey, structured the way classical music has movements, and even the first single, Traveller, ran to more than 11 minutes. When the Mercury Prize came with 20,000 pounds, he used the money to buy his father, a hardworking television repairman who had never owned a car, a Mercedes.

Collaborations, film work and later albums

Singh's solo career grew out of a busy decade as a collaborator. In 1991 he sang and played tabla on Kiss Them for Me by Siouxsie and the Banshees, which reached number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100, and he toured with the band. In 1993 Bjork recruited him as percussionist and musical director for her album Debut, and he arranged its strings. Through the 1990s his list of studio and stage partners ran from Sun Ra and Massive Attack to David Sylvian and the Future Sound of London, and he remixed Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's Star Rise project in 1997 and Blondie's Maria in 1999. In 2000 he worked with Madonna on her album Music, contributing as producer and musician to the bonus track Cyber-Raga.

His work with Indian classical musicians ran in parallel. Ustad Sultan Khan appears on OK and on Ha, and in 2000 Singh joined Tabla Beat Science, the group built around Bill Laswell with Zakir Hussain, Trilok Gurtu, Karsh Kale and Sultan Khan, for the album Tala Matrix. His second solo album Ha followed in 2001, a more compositional record in which he framed Indian raags inside a deliberate sonic design. Later collaborations include Vira with flautist Rakesh Chaurasia and Together with sitar player Niladri Kumar.

Composing for the screen became a steady part of his work. He provided the soundtrack for the television series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in 2000 and went on to compose for film and theatre projects, taking advice from Ryuichi Sakamoto when he first scored a full film. In 2018 he returned to the Royal Festival Hall in London to perform OK live in a reimagined version, twenty years after its release. Speaking to Mixmag in 2023, in a studio session in Mumbai, he said he was finishing his first major record in many years, one that returns to his drum and bass roots.

Honours and legacy

In 2010 Singh received the Commitment to Scene award at the UK Asian Music Awards. He was appointed OBE in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to music. In 2022 the Ivors Academy gave him the Ivor Novello Award for Innovation at the Ivors Composer Awards, describing him as a major creative and cultural influence who continues to leave a unique footprint on the musical landscape.

His legacy is the space he opened. Before Anokha, South Asian sounds in a London club were treated as an imported extra. After OK won the Mercury Prize, a British Asian artist working from Indian classical training could stand at the centre of British music without translating himself first. The renewed wave of South Asian club events and DJs in Britain in the 2020s, covered in his 2023 Mixmag interview, works in a landscape his generation built, and Singh himself welcomed it, noting the respect passing in both directions between the generations.