CORNERSHOP aren’t like most other bands. If they were farming machinery, they’d be a combine harvester — albeit one built from scratch from a dizzying variety of other equipment. 

Their career has taken in everything from punk to funk, disco to dub and all manner of musical destinations besides. 

“Being not so easily pinned down has had its problems. But it has made for a more interesting career,” says Tjinder Singh, Cornershop frontman for 20 years and more. 

“The word ‘underrated’ always comes up. This would be a good thing but, after so many years of it, it’s becoming hard to wear.”

Best known for their 1997 single Brimful of Asha, which reached number one thanks to a big-beat remix by Norman Cook, Cornershop’s career has been one of multiple critical, if not commercial, highs. 

Eclectic, enduring classic When I Was Born for the 7th Time was nominated for the Mercury music prize, Handcream for a Generation fits in soul legends alongside ’70s space rock, Clinton was a political disco side-project and their gorgeous tracks with Punjabi-British singer Bubbley Kaur were compiled into a stunning, if frustratingly overlooked, LP. 

And that’s barely the half of it. If you’ve never listened beyond their breakthrough single, dive in — you’re in for a treat.

“Sounding different to most groups has its curse because the lack of a pigeon hole has left it easy to overlook us. Then again our last three albums have done very well and we are still getting new followers,” says Singh.

Their latest album certainly intrigues. Hold On It’s Easy is a new version of their debut album, the riotous Hold On It Hurts, with a lively orchestral style.

“There was also an element of humour about doing a very noisy Riot Grrrl album in an easy- listening format,” Singh explains. “It came about because over the years we have got to know many a different musician, so it made the whole thing possible.”

Cornershop’s place in the Riot Grrrl hall of fame, despite being an all-male group at the time, gives a good indication of how central politics has been to the band. I hear from Singh shortly after the Conservative general election victory which, he predicts, will be “another five years of tragic governance from the Tories.”

The band gained early notoriety for burning pictures of Morrissey, when the miserablist Mancunian was flirting with far-right imagery, outside EMI’s headquarters.

The ideas and stances were always there — it just needed some degree of musical ability to back it up, as well as filtering the huge number of influences Singh and Ben Ayres, the group’s other mainstay, were attempting to channel. 

“I was brought up with Indian music around me, folk and devotional in particular,” says Singh. “Then a lack of Western vinyl in my parents’ Ferguson music cabinet sparked the need to map out my own music planet view.

“Collecting records became a hobby but linking that to how people who were trained in music were playing eventually led me and Ben to start playing and eventually recording and luckily we couldn’t play a note so we ended up with a final layer of enthusiasm over it all.”

As well as being musically joyous and adventurous, Cornershop’s lyrics have also been worthy of extended study — though, in some cases, a knowledge of Punjabi helps. 

By turns political, nostalgic, angry and deeply surreal, words matter in the band’s self-contained universe. They think about these things, even if it takes you half a decade to figure it all out. If they tell you that disco is half-way to discontent, my advice is to take it literally.

And to count the letters.“If one understood every line there would be no need to keep an extra ear out. How hollow life would be,” says Tjinder, when I ask about a line from Lessons Learned From Rocky I to Rocky III that had continued to puzzle me.

But no longer. “The ‘I understand guns in the A&R office’ line came about in a conversation of how US hip-hop stars use weaponry to help them in meetings,” he explains. “However, to the listener, does the line condone the use of guns, or is it merely an understanding or observation that it goes on?”

“A song like Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform, which was John Peel’s favourite Cornershop track, also provokes many questions of the listener and sometimes the answers vary or change over time.”

As I finish the interview, I cheekily ask Tjinder his favourite pub in rapidly gentrifying Stoke Newington, the north-east London suburb we’re both familar with as residents.

“Best pub is The Shakespeare for me — still unchanged, good jukebox, allows dogs, and you never know who you will meet.”

If Cornershop were a pub, they’d be all that — and more.