When I Was Born For The Seventh Time is one of those “place” records.  You know: when you hear it, you can place yourself precisely where you were in your life (who/what/where you were doing.)  Not so much that it “brings you back” – which is a tired old nostalgic trope – but that when you hear it now brings you back to the context of when you first listened to it.  Sometimes it doesn’t work well; there are certain contexts I decidedly don’t want to revisit.  But for great records like this, you kind of get to be in two places at once.

I’d gotten it within a couple years of its 1997 release.  Brimful Of Asha was the monster hit, and the gateway into this intoxicating brew of hip hop scratching, straight out rock, Floyd-era synthesizers, and sitars, sitars, sitars.  It found its way into steady rotation in my car for quite a while, then dropped back to one I’d revisit every once in a while.

The odd thing was the place wouldn’t happen until about six years ago.  I was at Bar San Paolo in Siena with my wife and the little TV over the bar was playing music videos.  (only in Italy.)  And the video for the Norman Cook (Fat Boy Slim) remix of Brimful of Asha came on, and I pretty much stopped what I was doing for three minutes and fifty seven seconds.

So, here I am in Italy getting pulled into a version of one of my favorite songs that I’d (inexplicably) never heard before, as happy as the girl in the video listening to her 45s.  The thing about the Cook remix is that it doesn’t deconstruct the song (like so many others) to “show off”.  It takes it into a more exuberant orbit as the original, yes, but it still makes you want to listen to the original.  Lots of other remixes shout “look how clever I am” in an attempt to “better” the original.  This doesn’t.  (You can find it on the highly recommended greatest hits comp Why Try Harder.)  I seem to remember reading a couple of years ago that Cornershop leader Tjinder Singh kind of hated this after a while because it was the version more people listened to, but he needn’t worry.

And a week later, I’m pulling When I Was Born back out and rediscovering it.  This is one of those discs that are great front-to-back, even the little interstitial numbers like “Butter The Soul.”  There are, legit, six great songs on here beyond Brimful.  The track that brings it all home (literally) is the closer, a cover/deconstruction of Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown.)  It’s easy/lazy/dangerous to cover a Lennon/McCartney song and try to put your “spin” on it.  But Cornershop – in their own way – reclaim this as their own, Indian music.