It wasn’t just that it was a blink and you missed it moment, but when Farook Shamsher took to the UK Asian Music Awards stage earlier this year to collect his Lifetime Achievement Award, having to shuffle uncomfortably while an overeager presenter bored the crowd to distraction, those that did notice mostly muttered: who?
If you’re one of those people, get to the back of the room. In fact, go as far back as the birth of British Asian fusion music and look again. No, it’s not Talvin Singh. No, it’s not Nitin Sawhney. What you see up there on stage, wired to techno, laying the foundations for the sounds of the underground and revolutionising the way the industry will aspire to make music from that point onwards, is an act called Joi. The rest, as they’ve been saying ever since, is the future.  

For all the infighting and putdowns in the dance industry, you’ll be hard pressed to find a single artist that doesn’t hold Joi in the highest of reverence. It’s almost impossible to say anything about them without sounding like a sycophantic sap (after all, yours truly played the role of terrible freshie rapper in the Joi Bangla Sound System many embarrassing moons ago), but really, it’d be rude to shower them with anything but praise.
There’s a factual error in the above sentence. Joi is a band of one. Farook’s brother Haroon, whose vision shaped their image, sound, ethos and direction, suddenly died a couple of years ago. But Farook still refers to the band in plural terms. Joi carries on making music to keep Haroon’s spirit alive, rocking generations to come to their very foundations.
This is Farook’s story. It’s also Haroon’s…

It’s hard to say why we got into music. It certainly wasn’t because we saw some footsteps that we thought we should follow. Unlike today, where kids have these fantastic producers like Rishie Rich, singers like Raghav or clubs like Shaanti to give them a sense of belonging and aspiration – we just made music because there wasn’t anything else we were good at!
It’s funny looking back on it. We were playing round with samples and people around us were always saying it wasn’t proper music. Now you’ve got the likes of Madonna and Prince doing it! But we weren’t caught up with the idea of being groundbreaking – we were just out to have a laugh.
We grew up in east London and even though poverty was rife and angry young Asian men were finally standing up to the NF, we weren’t part of any gang or, particularly dissatisfied to be honest with you. We were nice boys that just wanted to party.
But we weren’t alone. A whole bunch of kids, and given our area they were mostly Bengali boys and girls, didn’t want to fight in the traditional way. As a result the Joi Bangla Youth Movement was formed. These were people that didn’t want to be delinquents, didn’t want to go to prison, didn’t feel like victims and had a shared community spirit to make some kind of difference. It didn’t matter what really, as long it didn’t mean they sat around waiting for the day they became Indian waiters or married off like all their cousins before them. The group consisted of lots of young people bursting with ideas – including the likes of Sam Zaman (State of Bengal), Deedar (State of Bengal), MC Mushtaq (Fun-da-Mental) among many others that went on to do their own things – which led to Joi Bangla Sound System, which gave Haroon and I the outlet for the music we’d been making in our bedrooms for years.
 
A lot of people call us pioneers of the rave generation, seeing as we were making electronic music in the mid-80s and Haroon was an MC, but to be frank, it wasn’t really our scene. We were making the same kind of music as Liam Howlett from the Prodigy was making in his bedroom without realising we both fell into the same genre. There were parallels I suppose. Rave was all about disaffected youth popping ecstasy pills and dancing without a care in the world with people they’d normally have fought with – and I guess the kids that were into us were on the same page. They were getting away from all the rules of bhangra daytimers – meat markets where girls got changed in the toilets and boys made the most of their cars before they had to run home. Plus it had no unity; it was normal to get grief if you were a different religion or area – but this new generation didn’t want to hide from their parents, it didn’t matter if you were Muslim, Sikh or whatever, and they didn’t do anything just because they felt they should.
There was no trend to follow. We just did what felt right. I mean we made an acid record before acid rave was invented! Taj Ma House went on to become a huge acid-warehouse hit, and even though we loved the parties, that’s not where Joi wanted to be.

It was also a time for us to split from the Joi Bangla collective because they didn’t see the merit of bringing in sitars and tablea as they were relics of the last generation, while we felt those instrumentals were crucial to our growth – and we were worrying that we’d been alienating Pakistanis and Indians by simply sticking to Bengali samples.
Then it all exploded. We were signed up by Rhythm King with S-Express and Moby on the same label; we were going to parties hosted by Malcolm McLaren – it was rock and roll!
We’ve always had this reputation for being wild party animals. I still am. Can’t stop, won’t stop. But with the hard partying, we always made sure the music came first. And it was paying off. There we were being nominated as Single of the Week by NME, playing at The Phoenix Festival, supporting Spiritualised in front of 50,000 people, dance music legends like Orbital, Andy Weatherall and KLF coming to see us play at Bass Clef. It blew the mind at times, but nothing a good dance didn’t get out of our system!

After our first album One and One is One came out, we were touring all over the world, headlining in clubs like The Viper Room on Johnny Depp’s invitation… sure, we felt like the Kings of the world.
Of course there were girls. It’s not that hard when you’re up there on stage. I suppose when they watch you rock a party they think: well, if he can turn on 5000 people, he’s got to be able to do a pretty good job on just one girl! 
But it was Haroon that got all the really hot ones. He was always the one they went for. He was better looking, more talented, just better at everything than me really…
It never bothered me. When it came to making music, partying or just hanging out, there’s no one I’d rather be with than him. Then, out of the blue, everything changed.
Haroon had gone to Bangladesh to bring back some samples for our second album. A week and a half later, he flew back. He didn’t look so good. Probably something he ate, or just caught a bug or something. He told me not to worry; we had the 10th anniversary of our label, Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records party to look forward to.
Then suudenly, he was rushed to hospital. The long haul flight led to thrombosis of the leg, kidney failure, blood clot, and, before anyone could tell the gravity of the situation, my brother was dead.

What can I say? What can anyone say? He wasn’t just a brother. I felt like I’d lost a limb. I couldn’t think beyond the 40 days of mourning. But it was our mother that gave me the strength to carry on. You have to finish his work, she said. I knew she was right. He’d hate to think something like death would get in the way of his vision not being fulfilled!
So I went back to the studio and finished what he started. The best I can do is promote his life through our music.
He wouldn’t want me to sit around moping. It’s been suggested I’ve remained single because of what happened to him but that’s nonsense. I’m single because I’m just not ready to get married yet!
And with the new album out, I’m back on the scene, touring, partying and, if a beautiful woman wants to wrap herself round me, well, Haroon would be horrified if I didn’t do something about it!

JOI TO THE WORLD
•1983: Joi Bangla was conceived
•1987: Taj Ma House becomes huge acid warehouse hit
•1988: Funky Asian, one of the first dance music raps, is released
•1989: Desert Storm is NME’s Single of the Week, calling it ‘one of the most inventive records ever made’.
•1992-95: Resident DJs at legendary Bass Clef club (which evolved into the Blue Note, home to Asian underground)
•1996: Resident at Dog Star
•1997: Signed to Peter Gabriel’s Realworld Records. The album One and One is One is released
•1999: Haroon Shamser passes away at the age of 34
•2000: We Are Three album, Haroon’s final work, is released
•2001-onwards: Farook concentrates on remixes and soundtracks for many films and programmes, including Sex & The City
2007: Joi is back with new album Without Zero. It’s awesome…