Nitin Sawhney: ‘I feel like I’ve got a lot to say right now’

The 57-year-old musician, composer and producer says he has “felt for a very long time, and I think events have borne me out on this, that this Government is really quite myopic and dogmatic around issues of immigration, and particularly refugees and asylum seekers”, and he goes on to condemn “some horrendous legislation and implementation of crazy ideas, as far as I can see, which are undermining the humanity of the people of this country”.

“I do feel that this Government is out of step with the feeling of the country, where people really want to embrace refugees and particularly people who are Ukrainian right now because of what’s going on,” he says. “People aren’t blind, they can see what is happening to these people, and I do feel frustrated in many ways because I feel this has been happening for a long time.

“Obviously Ukraine has brought this to a head, but this hostile environment policy has been in place since 2013, under Theresa May, and I’m very frustrated to see how that’s played out over time, the demonisation of immigrants and refugees, and I think the Government has continued to do that. Suddenly they’re realising that they can’t continue with that disgusting way of thinking or promoting perception of immigrants and refugees and asylum seekers. People are now seeing through it because of what is happening with world events.”

At this point in time he feels “very proud” to be touring a record hailing the “contribution...and bravery” of immigrants to the UK and further afield. “I think that is something that’s not stated enough, and why I feel very passionately about this tour,” he says. “I have some fantastic musicians and I feel like I’ve got a lot to say right now.”

Twenty-three years on from his ground-breaking album Beyond Skin, a “sonic polemical reflection on nationality, race, religion and identity”, Sawhney found himself drawn back to its themes. “It’s interesting as well, because Beyond Skin has a lot of anti-nuclear sentiment – in fact I end the album by directly quoting from (Robert) Oppenheimer, I actually have his voice on the album talking about the nuclear bomb and condemning his own creation in the name of Hinduism, he’s quoting from the Bhagavad Gita in tears, saying that he felt he’d become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Here you have Putin sabre-rattling with nuclear bombs and you think it’s incredible we’ve allowed it to get to the point where a despot like that can actually be waving nuclear bombs around at the rest of the world and saying ‘I’m prepared to use those’. In his nuclear arsenal he’s got 500 kiloton bombs, the ones that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 10 and 20 kiloton ones, so this is massively greater than that in terms of how many people it could kill.

“And this is my point. When you’ve had people like Trump or Putin, these people are unstable and unpredictable characters who are prepared to say or do anything to save their own skin or to further their own interests, and the degree of narcissism they display makes them obviously not suitable to actually be in charge of huge nuclear arsenals.

“I do find it quite astonishing that we’ve got to this point in the 21st century where people are so enlightened, where we’ve just come out of a pandemic where we’ve had to show compassion towards each other and empathy and understanding on a global scale, only to be met by the leader of a superpower actually turning around and threatening everyone with nuclear bombs. It’s incredible and that he’s prepared to actually back this up and be attacking and invading a country right now in the way he is is just shocking.

“Beyond Skin was looking at issues of identity but the nuclear point was not the main one. The main point was to question how we perceive our own identity. Do we perceive it through the prism of nationality or religion or heritage or context. Then this album is very much about celebrating or looking at the narrative journey of immigrants across the world, particularly in the UK.”

That positive contribution is something that Sawhney feels was lost in the fog of the Brexit debate. “It still remains a fog, to be honest,” he says. “If you try talking to anybody in any kind of sensible conversation, people dig their heels in, in a way that is so intransigent and is just not listening to anything that is being said. It polarises people, and the problem is we got to the point where we became desensitised to what Brexit actually meant. It became a word that was used to wear people down and make people feel fed up and sick and tired of something, and I think that’s what this government preyed upon. In that respect they’ve done a lot to make people feel a sense of xenophobia and frustration with Europe in a way that isn’t really based so much in reality as it is in a war of rhetoric and propaganda.

“I think right now what is really coming through is how that kind of xenophobia, pro-Brexit is actually collapsing so quickly and easily when you examine it in light of something where people genuinely need our help, where we are being called upon to look at vulnerable people see what we can do for them.”

Sawhney might hold strong political views, yet he’s keen to avoid being didactic, preferring his art to be more nuanced and compassionate. “I don’t want to be somebody who’s preaching at people, that’s not really the idea of these albums. It’s always about catharsis of expression and feeling, that’s really how I am as an artist, but at the same time I do have strong political views, I do feel very strongly in relation to what has gone on with this Government over time.

“I also feel passionately about the immigrant journey and the immigrant experience, and I feel very protective of immigrants to this country. You have Nigel Farage constantly attacking people. I can imagine he would have played a great Iago in Othello, he’s really good at sowing the seeds of discontent and bringing out the worst in people’s nature. He’s been constantly stirring things up for a very long time. I think there are a few of those characters who have emerged over the last few years who’s been taking the spotlight and really plunging us into directions that I feel is embarrassing to this country and to all of us.”

Growing up in Kent, Sawhney was exposed to a broad range of music from an early age. He says: “I was very lucky from the influences I had from my dad and my mum and my brothers. My dad listened to a lot of flamenco and Cuban music, music from Africa and from all over the place, he was very eclectic in his tastes. My mum listened a lot more to Indian classical music, she was really interested in Indian classical singers and musicians, and my brothers would always have rock albums and then I was really interested in jazz, from an early age I was playing jazz and classical music on the piano and flamenco on the guitar. So I had all those influences but then I got into tabla and sitar when I was in a teenager and I ended up in bands and orchestras and quartets, so I grew up loving music and it was my escape route from everything.”

At home and in school Sawhney began to adopt a “dual identity”, avoiding talking with his parents about the racism he and they were regularly having to confront. He says he didn’t really talk to his parents much about racism until he was an adult. “I’d say probably with my mum more I spoke about it in the last few years, but I didn’t really ever address it with my dad. I know that he went through some difficult times, both of us did. They tended to be a bit like the Raymond Briggs’ animation When The Wind Blows about racism, the way that couple are about nuclear bombs, my parents were like that with racism. They were very trusting and wanted to look for the best in people always, and I find that really inspiring. They didn’t complain, they just got on with things. They were very hard working people and they also were very generous in spirit.

“It was interesting seeing that but then I didn’t really have anyone I could talk to very easily about racism. I was pretty much the only Asian kid in my school and my brothers were quite a bit older and they hadn’t really experienced it. I walked right into the eye of the storm in terms of the time. I was a teenager in 1976-77 when the National Front were really becoming powerful and of course that affected a lot of what happened to me at school, whether it was through a racist music teacher or some of the experiences I had getting attacked or racist abuse, all kinds of stuff.”

In the 1990s Sawhney contemplated a career in comedy alongside his university friend Sanjeev Bhaskar. The pair formed a duo called The Secret Asians and co-wrote the award-winning radio and BBC TV series, Goodness Gracious Me.

Sawhney was about to appear in the TV show when he “had to make a choice” between music production and acting. “I contributed a great deal to the development of Goodness Gracious Me because I did two radio series with them,” he says. “It’s great to see Sanj blossom into a serious actor, we’re still good friends and continue to support each other a lot.”

Sawhney’s most recent musical commission was Ghost in the Ruins, for Coventry UK City of Arts. He feels it was a “fantastic” project to be involved in, despite some lukewarm reviews from national papers. “It sold out every night, the BBC filmed it, there’s going to be a lovely programme on it, the World Service covered it, we had an amazing response from the audience, each night the choir and all the musicians took five bows,” he says. “I found the negativity of the broadsheets fascinating. I was astonished by it, as was everyone who participated and everyone who went to the shows.

“If you look through my Twitter timeline, the response was so effusive, people were blown away by it, and we were really happy, but there were a number of errors that came out (in the press). I’ve experienced this before and I had told people at the time this is not going to go well for me in terms of the critics and everyone was really surprised I was saying that, but it just happens any time I have anything to do with classical music, especially if I bring in any Indian classical elements, which I did with this, or If I do anything which is challenging their perception of what classical music is I tend to get slated.

“That happened when I did at piece for the Royal Opera House (in 2010). I was astonished by the ignorance that came from critics on that where they said ‘oh it’s world music’. I was like do you know how I came up with this composition? I was basically using calculus and ideas from physics, I was using Schrodinger’s cat, I was getting into all kinds of new ways of creating composition which was nothing to do with what you would call world music. It was a very complex classical piece and I also stuck to the recitato and aria thing. I was told to do it in 20 minutes and it was supposed to be an experimental piece, which is why I did all those things, and I wasn’t even told the critics were going to come, in fact originally I was told it wouldn’t even have an audience, it would be a series of experimental workshops. It the suddenly had audiences who did give it a standing ovation every night but these critics would turn up and say ‘this isn’t opera, it’s world music’. You just get so frustrated.

“I was talking to Julian Joseph, the great Black pianist, and he was saying the same thing. As soon as he got into anything to do with opera, there was so much fear around it and insecurity. The problem with Coventry Cathedral was a lot of people thought it was me with a take on Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, it wasn’t. It was just that he had done one 60 years ago, I was doing a piece which was about the cathedral now and looking at the community and involving quite a number of choirs. Everyone was really reporting back how much they enjoyed the experience and that was, for me, the whole point of it.”

Nitin Sawhney plays at St George’s Hall, Bradford on March 19. www.nitinsawhney.com