“I would say that less than 5 per cent of the audiences at their gigs are Asian,” says Simon Scott, who runs Tandoori Space, a record store in Leeds dedicated to the British Asian music scene.FOR THE youth that make up brown Britain, the emergence of such stars is welcome. Black Star Liner was the company formed by the Afro-American leader Marcus Garvey to repatriate blacks to Africa BSL, too, have a primarily white following. Pop pundits say the Next Big Asian Thing will be Black Star Liner (BSL). Signed to Warner Brothers and widely touted by the same organs – Melody Maker and the NME – who first feted Cornershop, BSL should make it to the CD shelves this year.Providing evidence that ethnic minorities exist outside of London, BSL hails from Leeds Like Cornershop, the band’s name is provocative. Last year Warner Brothers signed an unheard-of teenage Asian singer called Amar – whose work is limited to a Hindi version of a Whitney Houston song – for a multimillion-pound deal.Other likely stars include the rap-and-rock collective of Asian Dub Foundation and the dance sounds of Shri and Badmarsh.

But it has entered the language,” says Gupta.It is this ability to leapfrog the cultural divide that has interested big business, keen to develop untapped markets. Anil Gupta, the producer of Goodness Gracious Me, says: “I can take the mickey out of the traditional Asian family because I lived it. It is done from a position of security, not in a nasty or aggressive way.”The success for both Cornershop and Goodness Gracious Me seems to be that neither have to cut their cultural cloth in order to be sold to a white British audience “It is like the phrase ‘Eat my chudees’ [underpants] No white British person will understand it. But look closer and you find a dope-smoking iconoclast with a penchant for rock and hip- hop.

After all, forming a punky, funky band is not exactly the career path Singh’s parents expected. Until last year – five years after Singh founded Cornershop – his mother and father believed he worked for a record company What do they think? “Not at lot It is a bit like Neil Diamond in The Jazz Singer. It will take time.”Singh is far from the image of the traditional Asian The band’s name deliberately plays on astereotype. “We wanted to take on the negative connotation of Asian people.

I think Cornershop is a whole lot more positive.”The myth of Asians as depoliticised, middle-class family types has always been misleading. As long ago as the Seventies Asian women workers were striking at Grunwick, and a few years later their sons and daughters were rioting on the streets of Southall.THE ABILITY to subvert prejudice is an integral part of this “2nd Generation” culture. Bought up in Wolverhampton, he attended the gudwara – Sikh temple – as a child, studied business information technology at Preston Polytechnic, and then worked for a “business computing thing” in Cheltenham.This could easily be portrayed as standard Asian values: respect for your culture, a good education, professional career. Unlike the children and grandchildren of West Indian immigrants, the progeny of Asian families have not jolted the nation’s cultural consciousness. Now all that is changing.As well as Cornershop there has been the success of Goodness Gracious Me, a British-Asian comedy on BBC television, and the arrival of nightclubs such as London’s Anokha, which mixes dance music with the sounds of the sub-continent and has attracted the likes of David Bowie and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.The new sub-culture has even generated its own press. Imran Khan, editor- in-chief of 2nd Generation – a magazine dedicated to black British style – anticipated the Zeitgeist.