Nitin Sawhney: 'AI is going to force people to think about what is valuable in humanity'

Sunday headliner Sawhney has been impressed that the event, co-produced by Dialled In, Bradford 2025 and Serious, includes a diverse array of talent, many of whom are local. “There’s a lot of different types of artist,” he notes. “When I first saw it, I thought the bill looked good – there’s Afrobeat and drum and bass and jazz, things that sit well with what I do, so it felt good to do something like this.”

His set will feature “stuff from across the back catalogue”, with the possibility of “some new arrangements for some of it”, he says. “It will be quite reminiscent of some of the stuff we did at Glastonbury last year. We’ve consistently had amazing responses for just about every gig we’ve done over the last 20 years, but I just want to make sure we always retain that standard of what we do. But I think here feels exciting, it’s the year of culture, I’m excited about participating in something like that.”

Sawhney’s most recent album, Identity, featured a wide range of guests, from Lady Blackbird and Joss Stone to Guy Garvey and Gary Lineker. Its theme, the composer says, was a response to “a lot of negative discourse about people and their identities”.

“I get sick and tired of it,” he says. “People want to be themselves and to be recognised for who they are and feel they should not have to make that a fight with other people, just to be who they are in a peaceful, relaxed way. Unfortunately, there’s so much stupid and totally ignorant discourse that is out there. Quite a lot of it is generated artifically to undermine people and to make them feel inadequate in different ways. I think that’s part of some kind of bigger game plan that is frustrating to watch.

“So Identity felt like an important album to make, to celebrate people’s identites and our collective humanity – and that’s really where I’m focusing at the moment. There are various projects that I’m looking at which are about celebrating humanity as a collective, and the value of our collective consciousness.”

In an age of artificial intelligence, he feels that is of increasing value. “We have to constantly question what identity is, and the value of our humanity, when AI is around the corner. There is so much division that is constantly being encouraged by people who should know a lot better who unfortunately have been our chosen representatives in the world, and I feel it’s important to dispel a lot of that ignorance – or challenge it.”

Although he has taken an “eclectic” musical approach on all of his albums, he says: “Essentially they come from feelings I have and thought that I’ve got about the world. It’s really important to me that every album that I do has some kind of thematic power and meaning to it.

“I’m proud of that and I feel that I’ve consistently maintained that with the albums that I’ve done, even with many different record companies. That last one came out through Warner Music, the previous one (Immigrants) was with Sony Masterworks. I’ve worked with a lot of different labels over the years and we’re talking to another one right now (about his next record). It feels good, I like working in different ways with different people and collaborating.”

Sawhney, whose previous album was about the positive influence that immigrants have made to the UK and further afield, was clearly deeply disappointed by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s controversial ‘island of strangers’ speech. He says he is “not bloody surprised” that Starmer later said he regretted making it. “The thing is, though, it’s just a lot of hopping on bandwagons,” he says.

“In 2014 I said that Nigel Farage and Ukip were very dangerous in that their interest was to stoke division. He presented this bonhomie face of right-wing (ideology), standing there with his pint looking like a twisted version of Toad from Toad Hall, but I think at the same time he connected with a lot of people in the way he presented himself. That’s because he was cynical and critical. It’s easy for people to jump on a bandwagon of criticism without delivering any constructive solutions, and also to attack people who are vulnerable, scapegoat them, which is what he does extremely well and efficiently.

“People don’t look at the origins of all this. You think about all the dark money that came over after there was a Supreme Court decision in America in 2010 where they changed the law so that a lot of companies could put a lot more money behind right-wing political organisations, and then suddenly Breitbart News and Fox News and all of these organisations were making a lot of money from sponsorship from companies.

“It went from a comparatively small amount of money to $6bn or $7bn every year being put behind right-wing organisations, then that went up and up and eventually found its way into Europe and we’ve seen these shifts. It was something that I was talking about a long time ago, I went on Channel 4 News to talk about it when I could see those shifts starting, and I think that’s been borne out. I’ve checked it. You can ask AI, even ask Grok, (Elon) Musk’s own thing, which is actually quite funny because it constantly undermines him and they can’t control it because it’s a learning algorithm, so I find that quite hilarious. it calls out right-wing stuff quite often.

“This is the thing: facts are facts. When a lot of organisations that are supposedly neutral are saying this, that factual information is viewpoints and that other viewpoints need to be represented, no, lies don’t need to be represented, factual information does. The simple fact is there is a massive net benefit to immigration and we’ve suffered as a result of a lot of the right-wing views that have become mainstream now and have increasingly impeded our ability to do things in a logical economic manner. It seems like economics and basic common sense no longer rules the day​.”

An additional problem, he says, is that ideologies “have gone out of the window”, adding: “It’s what happens. You have stochastic modelling, like Cambridge Analytica, where they will statistically analyse what is going to get people in power and what is going to help them retain power and make a great deal of money, and those are the factors that they make decisions on the basis of. What happens then is we end up with a lot of, effectively, propaganda all over the place, putting out misinformation and disinformation. That’s where, I think, the problems lie.”

As an artist, Sawhney likes to counteract such arguments through the work that he creates. He treads more carefully with social media.

“It’s very difficult because also when you say certain things, you can add to the toxic discourse that’s out there, that saturates and desensitises people, so you’ve got to be very selective and judicious about how you say things and where you say things and how much you say,” he says. “So it is quite a complicated thing to put your views out there at the moment, and also it can be distorted and twisted round by certain platforms. It is important to be careful about how you say things and what you say and to whom.

“But I think we are at a point where even people like Elon Musk are going to be confronted with their own issues because when you have his own AI platform (Grok) questioning what he’s saying ad actually correcting it, then he’s got no choice but to confront himself and I think this will happen more and more.

“AI is going to force people to think about what is valuable in humanity, in community, in how we interact with other human beings. We don’t have a choice but to say what is it about us as human beings that is worthanything, and one of the big things is compassion, thinking about each other with consideration and not falling into a trap of being aggressive with each other or undermining each other because the problem is that AI will jump on that soon and it will say, ‘Well, we’ll do this because you seem totally incapable of running your own world affairs. You’re killing each other, you’re destroying the planet, you’re not really thinking about what you’re doing and clearly you have idiots running your world, people who are guilty of all kinds of crimes and you’re OK with that. Well, that’s not logical, it doesn’t make common sense, so we will take over.’

“It’s farcical in one way and sounds ridiculous, but if you listen to people like Geoffrey Hinton, who was the godfather of AI, and quite a few people like him are warning about this. They’re saying don’t be fooled, this is a real possibility if you’re not careful because there’s more and more control being handed over to AI, and AI is getting increasingly capable of decision making autonomously. I think where that happens we could be confronted with a situation where we have to say, hang on, we are worth something in this world, but the question arises, why are you worth something. I think it’s only our compassion and our consideration for the world around us that marks us out from anything else.”

Last year, Sawhney suffered a heart attack and has had three subsequent operations. Today he says he feels “great” and does a lot of workouts. “I never really had a problem with my heart,” he says, “it’s a genetic predisposition to clogged arteries, my ethnicity and my heritage is part of that. My mum had two heart attacks, my dad had a triple heart bypass when he was younger than me. All of my extended family of uncles and aunties have had heart issues, so it is very much in our genes, but having said that, now I’ve had the stents I’m considerably healthier than I was. I can feel it, generally there’s a lot better blood circulation and it means that I can do things.”

Today, he says, he chest-pressed and bench-pressed more weights than he has ever done in his life. “I can to three sets of 15 to 20 pull-ups which I couldn’t do when I was younger – I can push 180kg of weight, I’m pretty strong, which has been built up over time. When I was younger I liked to kickbox, I did triathlon training, so I’ve always stayed fit. I think because I was fit and I’d stayed reasonably healthy my recovery was fast. Within a very short space of time I was back to touring and we played Glastonbury only a few months after.”

He says the experience has changed his attitude towards work. “I’m more conscious that everything you do could be the last thing you do, so I am thoughtful about what I’m doing and how I’m doing things,” he says. “I do consider work-life balance a bit more than I did. Having said that, I’m probably working harder than I’ve ever worked but it’s projects that I’m really enjoying and just pacing myself with everything, thinking through what I want, just making sure there are ways in which I can benefit from sunshine and travel and things like that at the same time as getting the work done. For example, I’ve got a really nice laptop system now that allows me to work in different countries, I’m able to travel to places and spend time in a hotel room and get a lot of work done that way with a small keyboard.

“I wouldn’t not that all the time because I find it’s more beneficial to have a big weighted keyboard like a piano and work that way, and also have really nice microphones around for me to record the guitar and stuff. But for quick turnaround of ideas, it works fine just to work at home where I have a lot fo equipment as well or also at other venues like hotels as well.”

Summer Sounds runs at Cliffe Castle Park, Keighley from Saturday August 2 to Sunday August 3. https://bradford2025.co.uk/whats-on/