(continued)

How would the record be different if you'd worked with Timbaland as planned?

It probably would have been much more mainstream. My initial idea was for me and Timbaland to go on a journey, but by the time we got together, I'd been on a journey of my own. For example, the beat for "Down River" is by Morganix, a social worker from Sydney who did the track as part of a social outreach program with Aborigine kids. It's amazing. I played it for Timbaland back in August and, um, um ... he did a similar beat for Snoop's "Get a Light." It comes from that song. That's why I was also like, "You know what? It's cool and everything, but I'm kinda having my own ideas and my own sounds." I had no reason to keep working with anyone in America—it would only be for their names. I had to do something different, something that only I could do. The journey of getting to work with Timbaland was more important to me than actually coming out with the song. I mean, I cried on the plane, just like, "Wow, I'm going to work with Timbaland." It was like a dream, being respected and taken note of by somebody like him.

What about Sri Lanka these days?
Sri Lankan politics is the most fucked up piece of shit that I've ever come across. Twenty-five years into it, it's still fucked up! I don't think the Tigers know what's going on any more or less than the government does. It's the most ignorant shit you can think of. As far as I'm concerned, it's driven by money. It's led by families; it's power gone crazy. The way they think now is so brutal and disgusting. In the town where I'm from, Jaffna, 500,000 people have been systematically starved to death because the government has shut down import and export and sends one week of food every eight weeks. People are slowly dying.

It's not a country most Americans know a lot about.
It's really hard to define it all in a typical simplistic manner, in the way that America always does. That's why I made the record the way I did. I'm a civilian from a country that you don't like, that you've declared a hot spot, so I just wanted to say, "It's not as easy as that, it's way more complicated. You can't whitewash the planet into good and evil, into terrorists and non-terrorists." Ten years from now, that will ensure chaos.

Have you felt pressure to be less outspoken?
It's a double-edged sword, always. I don't feel lucky that I can't get into the U.S. I guess that's what happens when you choose to say something other than, "My humps, my humps, my humps." Yeah, if you have something to say, you pay the price, but it's an interesting lesson for us all. When I talk about politics, I talk about them as a daughter of somebody who was persecuted because of them. My experience with the government was discovering things like, because of them, maybe my cousin was killed. My aunt was in a refugee camp. My uncle was arrested for selling magazines. These are the stories I heard growing up. I'd hear how my neighbors got tortured to death, my cousin was hung upside down on a van and beaten. So I was always vexed about politics, and then suddenly you watch the news in London and hear that your freedom is being taken away there as well. Not just that I couldn't get on the Tube because bin Laden was going to bomb us, but having to, like, justify all these sodding two-hour airport security checks, and being treated different. I call that shit. It's useless. London is a beautiful, multicultural place, and after the 7/7 bombings it became ruled by unspoken prejudice.

Speaking of which, why do you think the British press has been so slow to warm up to you?
Starting out, I was stepping into a real old boys' club, and it was in nobody's interest to help someone like me make it. I was expecting there to be loads of weirdos and misfits in the music biz in the UK, but there aren't. Everyone is packaged up. If you flip through NME, everyone in there is still exactly the same formula: four-piece band, same hairstyle, same clothes, same stories, same songs, same guitars. It's the same shit that was happening 10 and 20 years ago—just a more watered-down version of Brit pop or punk or electronic music that's not exactly New Order. But culturally, you're not going to know who is important for 20 years, anyway. They're so quick to put Klaxons on the cover, when Klaxons are practically wearing the same clothes as me now! It's just more presentable and digestible because it's a white band. But I don't have to prove anything anymore. I am what I am, you know what I mean?

This article is from the September issue of Radar magazine. Click here to get a risk-free issue.

Photographs by MIAUK.com, NickyDigital.com

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