I believe that my musical heritage comes not specifically from my own culture. I believe I am heir to a universal form of inspiration.

Singing for my own enjoyment as a teenager, music became a form of catharsis for me. I was insular and inarticulate. Singing became my primary means of expression. Early on in my career I realised there was no-one in my genre to teach me the rules. I had to discover my own musical principles by myself. These factors have made me pragmatic, fiercely independent, and voice-led. When I write I go into a mental space where I’m not female, I’m not Asian. I am nothing but a curious mind, and for me the impulse to create often comes out of things I don’t hear. I make albums I know I can’t go out and buy.

I started my life as a singer, signed to a major record company and at sixteen had an international mainstream chart hit with the groundbreaking single ‘Ever So Lonely’. For people who remember me from Monsoon, the journey from my work with them to the trilogy of albums I made for Real World must seem like quite a leap. The beginning of the period which marked the emergence of the trilogy was indeed a time of change. I decided after recording my fifth solo album ‘Roots and Wings’ (Indipop) in 1990, to conquer the two remaining fields that I had previously been too busy as a writer and singer to tackle — live work and my business arrangements.

I decided for my first ever live concerts that I would appear alone on stage, supported only by the occasional drone. I wanted a vehicle to show off the very subtle nuances of the voice which you don’t normally hear. Fusion doesn’t just happen when you put different instruments from different cultures together, or even if you layer voices — it can happen in one voice, one mind. I also felt that solo concerts would be the fastest way to learn about the dynamics of the performer/audience relationship. I had started to get curious about that twinkle in an audience’s eyes after a great performance, and had decided to set myself the challenge of testing out my own theories about how this was achieved.

Consequently, a new catalogue of material using only solo voice and drone had to be written. Having committed to a season of festival performances around the world with WOMAD, I formed my own production company and offered an album of the new style material to WOMAD’s sister company Real World.