I'm not going to tell you the long story about how I came to be where I wasn't supposed to be, under the huge awning that covered the stage, sitting on a stolen folding chair, my camera bag actually sitting on the edge of the stage just three or four feet from percussionist Hamid Mantu. He looked at me a few times with a combination of curiosity and amusement, as I looked like a drowned rat, thanks to the rain storm that had begun just before the show. So the short version is that I snuck my way into that position because my all-access pass didn't impress the security witch guarding the area I was supposed to be in. Joke's on her. I ended up on stage with Transglobal Underground. No, no, not performing; practically on stage right in the thick of one of the most energetic performances I've seen in decades. Four times there were blown fuses, and four times the band came back strong. Their large audience didn't seem to mind at all that they were getting drenched by the infamous Seattle weather (Ah yes, "The Sky Is Crying" could be about this place), and I think I know why.

I think they didn't realize it.

Trance. That's what happens when you listen to this music, but it's better than most trance music in that it takes you places other than around and around in circles. It takes you to African jungles and down peaceful rivers hiding danger; it takes you through Arabian markets so real you can smell the food and sense the bustle; it takes you to India, to Jamaica, and to the back streets of London. To hear this while seeing the band in constant motion fills you up. No room for noticing a little rain. Sounds like a pretty risk-free statement from a guy snuggly tucked under the canopy, leaning on the stage snapping pictures, right? Yeah, well there was a hole in the canopy. Right over me. I didn't realize it until I couldn't see through the viewfinder anymore because of condensation and had to start aiming and shooting on a wing and a prayer.

Sound. Motion. Trance. The calm beauty of Sheema Mukherjee sitting on her perch playing the sitar as vocalists Coleridge, Tuup and Doreen Thobekile dance about below her, not in any pre-conceived steps but just moving with the music. Hamid sits stage left with his various hand drums, and behind him on a riser is... the drummer with no name. Well, at least we can't find any information on him anywhere on the WWW, the tape of the interview that follows only provides an unintelligibly fast mention of the name, and even their record label isn't sure. It seems that this is the way it is in the world of Transglobal Underground: people come and go. Sometimes they even go and then come back. As each new person enters, they bring with them the sounds of their homelands, or at least the sounds that they listen to, and another element drops into the bubbling melting pot that is Transglobal Underground. Try a few bites just from what's bubbling near the surface, like Bhimpalasi Warrior, One Of Our Dhoulaks Is Missing or Spellbound, and then dig deeper to the international roots in the Underground. At each stop there are rewards and plenty to process, and new discoveries around the next corner as well.

Throughout the years there have been two constants: percussionist Hamid Mantu and keyboardist Tim Whelan. As the founders of TGU, they've stayed with it through thick and thin, always willing to try new sounds, never willing to rule anything out. Currently a seven piece band, they have just released a wonderful album called Yes Boss Food Corner and are touring in support of it. That tour brought them smack dab into the rainy Western Washington night on July 27th for the WOMAD (World Of Music And Dance) Festival. It had been a dazzling day and this was to be the capper. Wandering around to the many stages set up in Marymoor Park, Redmond (across Lake Washington from Seattle), we had seen Youssou N'Dour (from Senegal), Ballake Sissoko (from Mali), Isaac Hayes (from South Park), and The Five Blind Boys of Alabama (fr... oh never mind). As a matter of fact, we waited and waited and waited for the lead singer of the Blind Boys to finish the last word of the last song - you know, the kind that visit every note of the scale about 7,000 times until it's more a gymnastics routine than a song and the drummer has been hitting his cymbals so long the sticks are whittled to toothpicks? - just so TGU could start. The Blind Boys' stage was a scant 100 yards from TGU's, after all. But end it did, and on went the show, and let me tell you something: it is not to be taken lightly when a man who just saw Isaac Hayes at his best tells you that Transglobal Underground gave the finest performance of July 27th at WOMAD. I'll never forget Isaac's show, but TGU's changed the way I think about trance music forever.

My only regret is that the following interview was done a week prior to that concert. So many other questions I now have. Next album. Next album....

I reached Tim Whelan in his hotel room at the Ramada in Minnesota as he was puzzling over some technical troubles.

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Cosmik: What's doing in Minnesota?

Tim: Oh, just sitting in the hotel room, staring at some of our equipment which has been doing interesting things onstage.

Cosmik: What's it been doing?

Tim: Just going into a bit of a sulk, you know, and standing in the corner, not making any noise.

Cosmik: Those are bad things.

Tim: I've been weaving a huge rack full of leads around the Ramada hotel and probably frightening everybody silly.

Cosmik: When do you have to have it ready by?

Tim: We're playing here tomorrow night.

Cosmik: You and Hami are the two who formed TGU, is that correct?

Tim: I don't know if anybody really formed it, it just appeared one day. Out of the present group, me and Hami and also Tuup were around at the time, then Coleridge came along a few years later. Then the other three really started appearing around the time of the last album, Rejoice, Rejoice.

Cosmik: This is your tenth anniversary, isn't it?

Tim: It is indeed, yes.

Cosmik: Amazing.

Tim: Terrifying.

Cosmik: (Laughs) A lot of names have come and gone.

Tim: Yeah, some of them completely fictitious people.

Cosmik: Ah! I was wondering about that. Trying to do research for this was a nightmare. Trying to figure out who was who when and where...

Tim: Yeah, and it's no good asking us because we've now forgotten. We've confused ourselves totally now.

Cosmik: The way you've been credited in various publications, it gets to be pretty clear it's the same people billing themselves under different names.

Tim: There was a certain amount of that, yes. There was a feeling that we wanted to show there was no particular lineup. Transglobal Underground itself was what mattered and not the people in it. And indeed it did develop its own little personality and its own life beyond us. On Rejoice, Rejoice, there wasn't really any sort of lineup at all, whereas on this album there is a definite seven piece band with various guests.

Cosmik: So on Rejoice, who was it?

Tim: Um... various people, because at that point we were doing an ensemble club-based set, so it reflected that, really.

Cosmik: So would you say it was primarily you and Hami leading?

Tim: Mainly the two of us, and a little help from Johnny Kalsi, who now works for the Dell Foundation, and Coleridge was doing it, Tuup appears on a couple of tracks and Natasha Atlas was still working with us. But it was a very collaborative album. We even had Hungarian gypsy musicians turn up to record. We had over forty musicians on that album.

Cosmik: Going from something as wide open as that to Yes Boss Food Corner had to be a serious undertaking. I mean, it would take a few meetings to say "this is going to be different, what do we do?" It's a huge change.

Tim: Oh, yeah, yeah. because after Rejoice, Rejoice we weren't sure we were going to play live very much, but probably with Tuup coming back in, who hadn't played live in quite a long time, and then with Sheema, the sitar player, coming in, it gave a real boost to the live act. After that we put together a more permanent live lineup, and that included the other two members, Doreen Thobekile (vocals) and [name unintelligible on tape] (percussion).

Cosmik: So new elements and new flavors came in again.

Tim: Well, Sheema made a big difference, because bringing the sitar in gave us a sound base that we didn't have. We'd been using machines and drums for a while, and she gave us more instrumentation. And then with Doreen coming in, who is actually a Zulu vocalist, that brought in an African element.

Cosmik: How does a change in personnel change your approach as writers?

Tim: I think everybody brings in whatever they've got and it gets mashed around, to some extent. It works differently with people who've been working together for a long time, obviously, then there's more of an understanding of what they're trying to do, whereas if it's more of a collaborative thing then you get more of a semi-improvised sort of vibe. You can go into things a lot more in depth if you've got a permanent band. It's quite simple.

Cosmik: Does the coming and going ever feel like a disruption in the creative energy?

Tim: I can see various times in the history of Transglobal Underground where there've been different feels to it, you know? A few years back we were an ensemble club act and there'd just be four or five people at a time on stage, there'd be a lot of video and we'd have a DJ out on tour with us and that sort of thing. Right now it's a live band feel, so it varies very much. Best thing to do is not to worry about it and let it all happen naturally. Those of us who are here now are here because we want to do it, whereas other people have come in and done a few things, but for whatever reason they've wandered off later on.

Cosmik: Some of them almost seemed to be experimenting, like pushing the envelope and then bailing, and then some stayed and kept pushing.

Tim: It varies. For instance, Natasha Atlas was a very big part of the band for a long time, and then she basically took far too much work on as herself.

Cosmik: I understand you still work with her as producers.

Tim: Oh, yeah, we do.

Cosmik: It's pretty cool that you don't have bad breakups like other bands. I want to go back to the beginning now, because TGU is the quintessential Cosmik Debris band. I mean you mix genres together. You don't believe in borders. In 1991 when you and Hami started Transglobal Underground, was this the blueprint, or the result of the different people bringing their sounds in?

Tim: Um... you know, it's really hard to remember, but I think when we first met Nation Records there was that idea in the air. But I wouldn't say it was that thoroughly defined. It was just the idea of trying to define some different sounds musically, whether it was different sounds from around the world or just sounds from different parts of Britain. It's now hard to remember what we were actually aiming at, but I think we actually knew. I mean, we had a number of people from different backgrounds like rock, house or whatever that were dissatisfied with what they were doing and were trying to move into something different, and they ended up in the same place.

Cosmik: As you started to bring the sounds together, was there a point where you were surprised yourself that "hey, this sounds really good with this"?

Tim: Well, no, it was the complete excitement of the technology as it developed in those days. It was like "My God, you can combine this thing with THIS thing!" And then you look around and you realize you can bring in all sorts of different musicians on top of the basic framework. It was just a constant process of "What can we try here?" Some of it worked and some of it didn't. There's definitely an excitement in discovery, which I think the first album has definitely got in it.

Cosmik: Do you do any listening now to keep the inspiration well filled, or is that poison?

Tim: Personally speaking, I don't listen to too much music. This makes me fairly unique in this group. As we tour around America, the bus is getting crammed full of vinyl. Maybe it's breeding in there, I don't know. It's frightening. People are wandering into the record shops and buying all sorts of stuff. We pick up a lot of old 70s funk stuff while we're over here. We came back with a lot of stuff last time we were in the states. There's a lot of vinyl you can pick up over here that you wouldn't be able to find in Britain. A lot of stuff from that period wasn't released in Britain or was released in very small quantities.

Cosmik: Here I was picturing you buried under tons of CDs just trying to keep up with what new sounds are out there.

Tim: Yeah, I don't think that's, um... I mean, in terms of what you listen to, you do pick up stuff on the radio, but I think it's also fairly important to also keep a clean head, you know? We live in a world where music is everywhere, and it becomes just so much wallpaper.

Cosmik: You don't want to pollute the ground water, then.

Tim: Yeah. You've got to preserve a certain distance from it sometimes, otherwise it just eats you up and you find yourself singing advertising jingles. Or BECOMING an advertising jingle.

Cosmik: I don't think you have anything to worry about there. It's fresh. I should tell you about the first time I heard this CD. Well, first of all, the first night I had DSL on my computer, I used my Real Audio to go out and listen to radio stations around the world, which I'd always done, but now I could really hear them, you know? I'm still listening to Africa, Iran, Ireland, India and all these other places. It felt like being really high, hearing all that. First time I heard Yes Boss Food Corner, I felt exactly that way again. It felt like listening to all the world again. I still equate the two experiences.

Tim: We try to keep the same feeling of excitement, of discovery. Well, obviously the technology is now accepted, it gets bigger and bigger, but it isn't a big deal anymore, so you have to sort of move farther out and try to find new things to excite yourself and keep that feeling on the records.

Cosmik: It has to be tough to do.

Tim: It takes a while. It's a funny process with us, because we can start something, have it totally written out before we go to the studio or try it out live and THEN go to the studio, or totally make it up in the studio. We've got no formula about how we make anything. We just trust that it'll all work out, somehow, in the end.

Cosmik: It seems like you'd get almost jaded after a while.

Tim: Thing about this group is that every time that happens, something happens to jerk you back into something fresh.

Cosmik: Back into a state of excitement over something?

[Pictured: Doreen Thobekile & Coleridge]

Tim: Yeah, exactly. For instance, last year we got a chance to tour a whole lot of countries we'd always dreamed of going to but never had the chance to. We went to South Africa, we went to Singapore, we went to India, so there were a whole lot of new experiences to pick up from all along there.

Cosmik: The genres that go into the melting pot are constantly evolving out beyond you, but I've noticed that you keep some sounds alive that otherwise might be forgotten. Like house music today sounds nothing like house music in 1992, and that sound isn't around anymore in the clubs, really, but you've preserved a piece of it here and there.

Tim: Maybe because we came along at that time, although we certainly saw ourselves as the anti-house music. But a lot of it got in there because we were making dance music.

Cosmik: I'm talking about today, though. I'm still hearing that groove instead of the jagged edge. These are just flashes in your music, like everything else, though. It's all about the trance as a whole.

Tim: The trance scene is what got people to listen to us in Britain, but then again, "trance" is another word that's completely changed from what it would have meant at that time.

Cosmik: Trance is where I wanted to go from house, but it seemed like it was going too quietly on its own. You just took just the groove, it seemed, and moved on. I wondered if it was conscious.

Tim: No, not at all. If we had any conscious thought about what we were doing in terms of the grooves, I think it was going back further than the 90s. A lot of the stuff that influences us, in the basics, is the funk and dub 70s music. We've been listening to a lot of Fela Kuti and a lot of African music lately, and you can hear that in [our music].

Cosmik: You know, I've never heard a sample that I recognize as being someone else when I listen to TGU. I admit I haven't heard every single thing you've done, but I'm not hearing blasts of other bands. Do you sample?

Tim: We largely sample ourselves these days. The thing is, when you start you think "wow, you can put this sound together with that sound and it makes a third sound that isn't any of the first two sounds," which, incidentally, is probably why you don't recognize any. Occasionally, on some of the other albums, there's been a clear sample, and then you credit it and it's as simple as that. Everything else has been distorted and we can't remember where it came from ourselves, but a lot of what we do now is sampling the people around us. Because obviously that original excitement is gone, you know? I mean, sampling has become a sort of cliche in that sense. Also, with the growth of digital recording, it's very hard to tell what is a live recording and what is a sample. The barrier between that is gone. You know, you can record a drum track or a vocal and muck around with them and change them all around. You can take a five minute drum track and do all sorts of odd things with it. Which, in fact, is the case on "London Zulu." That's a straight live drum track, but it's been changed around quite a bit.

Cosmik: Is this why there is no "typical" Transglobal Underground song?

Tim: Yeah. I think the growth of technology has so many possibilities in it that you keep on expanding what you can do. The important thing is not to let the technology take over too much. We come to a point where that gets chucked out the window and it gets switched off and we just get on with mixing it, you know?

Cosmik: But... I really hate to say "in your genre," because your music covers so many genres, but in what you do and the way you do it, it seems to me that trying not to let the technology take over would be like trying to keep a lion back without a whip. How do you go about not letting it take over? [Author's note: After seeing the band live a week after this interview and watching them dazzle the crowd during one of the four power outages, using only acoustic drums and the energy of their own motions on the stage, I realize I was young and naive when I asked this question.]

[Pictured: Hamid Mantu]

Tim: Well probably not being very good at knowing how it works in the first place. (laughs). We've been fiddling about with this Apple Mac for about two years now and we still can't work out what the fuck we're meant to be doing on it. Maybe we'll get there one day, but we make more mistakes than get things right, and it's the mistakes that get in there, largely. We're not huge tech-heads, let's put it that way. We use what we use because music comes out of it, and generally, if there's some fascinating aspects of a computer that we can't understand the instructions, we just never get around to learning it, and we go off and do something else instead, like hitting a bit of wood.

Cosmik: (Laughing) Well, see, that's healthy! Even in the 70s, the rockers said they didn't want the technology to take over, so a lot of them pulled the cables out of the stomp boxes and plugged straight into the Marshall. I guess the beat goes on.

Tim: And everybody you meet has a different way of looking at it -- what works and doesn't work for them -- and in the end, it's an instrument, like any other instrument.

Cosmik: A natural sound. These days a lot of bands prefer the studio over a live audience. Where are you on that topic?

Tim: I think we prefer the live audience.

Cosmik: Why is that?

Tim: Because of the whole feel of the music, the whole feel of the celebration of what's possible, musically, is something better done with a load of people hanging around having a party. Short of having a live audience every time we went into the studio, which would bore those poor people shitless, it's the best way to do it. That's when the whole thing comes together.

Cosmik: Is there something to the immediacy of it? The fact that you know you can't say "cut" and go back and do it again?

Tim: Yeah, I mean it's interesting although we use a lot of sequences and stuff, every time we play live, something new creeps in there.

Cosmik: Aaaah, and sometimes you can take something great from one show and bring it to the next show?

[Pictured: Sheema Mukherjee.]

Tim: Yeah, yeah, although in the case of the new album, you get a fairly good idea of what we're doing live from the album. But on previous albums, if you came to see us live, you wondered if it was the same song half the time. On this album, a lot of this stuff is worked out live in advance. Quite a few of the songs are fairly worked out, which is quite unusual for us.

Cosmik: Had you done it this way at all?

Tim: We'd done it bit that way, but we went further this time because there's a whole live side that people really love about this band, and we really wanted to get that one over. We wanted to get the personalities of the various members involved.

Cosmik: In the past you've said you preferred doing clubs over larger venues. Do you still feel that way?

Tim: The two best things, I'd say, is either to do a really small, sweaty club or a great big festival where everybody's really in a good mood. Those are my two favorite situations to be in.

Cosmik: Are you getting both of those on this tour?

Tim: Yeah, we did the Festival of Colors in Detroit... There have been less clubs on this tour because it's summer.

Cosmik: Festival season.

Tim: Right.

Cosmik: When you play here next week you'll be playing the WOMAD festival at Marymoor Park, which is huge. What's your schedule like before and after WOMAD?

[Pictured: TUUP.]

Tim: Well we're in Minnesota tonight, then we're off to LA, then some stuff around California working up to the WOMAD show, and the next show after WOMAD is Istanbul. We've had some minor success there before, but now the track "Pomegranate." from the new album, is being played on the radio there quite a lot. After that, various shows around Europe, then off, we have some hope to play Australia. Strangely enough the one place we really aren't playing very much is Britain.

Cosmik: That's a little confusing. It'd be the easiest, logistically. Why aren't you?

Tim: Well, it's just been a run of bad luck. Every time we get offered a show in Britain, we get offered shows in Istanbul, or California, and we'd rather do that. You think "we can always play our home place," and then you realize you haven't. We've only played one show there this year, so we really ought to get back there, but it just isn't working out.

Cosmik: Some critics weren't as kind to this album as they were to previous albums. The most common negative comment I read was that this music was more repetitious. I thought, "well duh, it's trance music, it's repetitious by nature at times," yet TGU still isn't what they're describing. Do you think they're just reacting to the changes?

Tim: First of all, I haven't seen the American press yet, so I have to be careful there. But basically, all the albums are repetitious (laughs), so I don't see that as being an issue. If I listen to Rejoice, Rejoice, some of the things are set in a certain groove, and even more so on a couple of things on the album before that, Psychic Karaoke, I think there is something to this album where it's quite a different album than those other ones. It's interesting, because it's had some bad reviews that say "well they changed! What are they doing changing?" My reaction is "We've already done the other albums." There's no point in making them again; we've already done it. We've had some good reviews for the same reason. You have to accept, if you're making an album where you're moving along a little bit, that you're going to piss a few people off. Fair enough, if that's the way they think.

Cosmik: I dunno, I think it's ludicrous to say this is repetitious, as if this is a negative, when it's trance music. The repetition isn't at the surface level of the music, and besides, it's the mantra. It's what drives home what's great about this music

Tim: Well, there was a time when we listened to music that tended to be one groove with just a few things over the top of it, and we took that influence and moved along from it. You take a song we do now, like "Bhimpalasi Warriors," where you just take one groove, work on that groove, and do variations on that groove, and that is the sort of stuff we listened to.

Cosmik: And that's one of the songs that float me off the farthest. Mantra. Do you avoid reading criticism in general?

Tim: We don't make a big effort to read it, and we don't make a big effort not to read it. The worst thing is to be ignored, and bad reviews don't bother me at all, really.

Cosmik: At least it's out there.

Tim: Exactly. We did have a really amazing review in Scotland a while back where they described a track from the last album as a "drum and bass track from the first album." When the first album came out in 1991, the "drum and bass" didn't exist, and the track isn't drum and bass by any stretch of the imagination, AND it's on the fourth album, and they made up the title as well. (Laughs.) And they're only doing this because they don't think anyone reading the paper gives a toss. Those things annoy me. If anyone listens to the record doesn't like it and says so, I don't mind that because at least they listened and gave their honest opinion.

Cosmik: In any case they're criticizing the band that led all the others. Does it feel odd to you, having basically created a sub-genre, to look around and see that the best of the ones that followed have been falling away? TranceMission is gone, which breaks my heart, and I haven't heard from Fundamental in a long while. Are you surprised that there's not many doing what you're doing now, at least anywhere near your level?

Tim: I think Fundamental have got a new album come out soon. It's finished. It exists. Their last album didn't do much at all, and they certainly didn't appear to be doing very much, but then I saw them last year in November or December and they were fucking excellent. But I think you have to have a purpose. A lot of bands started up because of the new excitement of combining all the sounds. Once you've done that, then you have to go further forwards. For a lot of people, the point was made at the time, and having made the point there was no reason to continue, and they went on to do different things under different names.

Cosmik: Do you ever feel, with all those genres of music becoming a new genre through you, a responsibility for where that genre goes from here?

Tim: No, because if we sit around and analyze it too much we'd tie ourselves in knots and wouldn't be able to move ahead. I think that's one of the reasons we're still going. There's a lot of stuff that we and the people at Nation Records did in the early 90s where we could have said "right, there you go, the job's done," and walked away to do something else. We keep doing this because we love it and we still enjoy it, and because there's something sort of precious happening that we're very proud of. If one day we woke up and that wasn't happening, then we wouldn't do it. If, on the other hand, it was a question of wondering too much about the genre we're doing or why we're doing it, I think we'd have to get ourselves out of that mind set as quickly as possible by whatever means we could think of. Every time you get stuck, there's no point trying to bust through it, you've just got to take another direction. Find another way around it.

Cosmik: I guess in the end your job is to make the sounds and mine is to define it.

Tim: Yeah, well that's what we'd tell journalists in the beginning when they'd come up with "how do you describe your music," we'd say "we're not paid to do that. YOU'RE paid to do that." People are very welcome to describe it any way they want, but it's our job not to think about that. I have no objection to other people defining it, I just don't want to do it myself. If you start to do that, then you start worrying about "is the listener listening to the track the right way?" Well, the listener can listen to the track any way they like. Whatever they hear, whatever they get out of it is theirs, it's not ours.

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Cosmik Debris Magazine would like to thank Versa Manos of Gorgeous PR for making this interview and the mind-altering experience at the WOMAD festival possible. Without her clever, casual way of pulling strings, neither would have come off. Thank you, Versa.

(C) 2001 - DJ Johnson