An International underground

The new album from Transglobal Underground, International Times, has just been released and Natacha Atlas, one of the band's main vocalists, is angry about the direction some of the initial reaction to it seems to be taking. The 'problem' dates back to the huge success of their debut Dream of 100 Nations last year. That album brought dance and world music together in what was one of the most intoxicating releases of the last few years. The new album moves more firmly in the direction of world music - but the press seem slightly tired of world music and want to concentrate on the dance 'angle'. Natacha is genuinely bitter about the shifting of cultural goalposts.  

"That makes me sick as well. Someone from the NME rang us about a feature we're to do with them and said 'We don't want it to be about the multi-cultural angle'. In other words that fad is over. And I'm personally insulted - I mean what other fucking angle is there for us? I get sick of it all.  

"A lot of people are treating this as a fad, and it's bollocks. There are a lot of very talented musicians out there, and it's not all rock 'n' roll, and it's not all sung in English, and it's not all for America. So fuck 'em".  

For TGU, the dance scene provided a platform for a type of music which would otherwise have had no exposure - "it was a means to an end - it was a stepping stone". And even when they worked within the sphere of dance venues, they tried to bring their own "organic" approach into play as much as possible. This seems to have made world music more palatable for more people than other artists have succeeded in doing. If dance music was a stepping stone for the band, do they offer their music as a stepping stone to the appreciation of other musical cultures in their own right?  

"With Dream of 100 Nations we slogged it live, and we had a good set. People went to see a dance act and didn't just see a recording studio on stage. And they were pleasantly surprised. It is possible to change people's perception of how they hear music - absolutely. I'm not sure that it's one of our objectives but . . . for instance Country and Western music makes me laugh - but I know that I could hear it from another angle at some point. But people rarely venture out into the unknown when things are comfortable. Generally they're the people who've been brought up in one place and never seen anything. It's too comfortable".  

The new album will probably make for slightly less comfortable listening for people looking for replicas of tracks like the sublime Templehead from Dream . . . This time around, 'ethnic' sounds are presented less as accompaniment to dance structures in their own right, and though samples are still used, International Times focuses more on the music itself.  

"It's a little more sophisticated, a little more organic - but you can still tell it's the same TGU. The new album is different in that it's more focussed on the general areas we go into - so say if one song has got a lot of Indian influences it'll probably be more focussed on that; and if there's another number with a rap or hip-hop feel, it'll concentrate more on that.  

"Nation records have been hugely important in getting us to where we are - just for putting the stuff on the market regardless of whether it would sell. They took a risk in giving the material a chance. We were with a major for a while and they didn't know what to do. They didn't know how to take a chance. In the end they signed Kylie Minogue - they could deal with her, they couldn't deal with us . It's that simple."