It is October 12th Friday night, in Cambridge's Corn Exchange. 9pm. Approximately five days ago Britain and her Allies started their air-borne defensive against Afghanistan, instigating, with bombs, packets of peanut butter and a lot of media-frenzied moral outrage, the now infamous War Against Terrorism. The world is Officially Post-September 11. And it will never be the same, hurtling as it is towards a New World Order explicitly defined by cultural segregation, fear and more paranoia than the average dope-smoker might suffer in a lifetime. Right now, the world, to many people, feels a little fucked-up.

Globalism's fucked up, capitalism's fucked up. And the West's ultimate sedative, its materialist intoxicant - the glorious soma found in consumerist culture simply doesn't feel enough anymore. Not enough to alleviate the inexplicable feeling that if we continue our passive acceptance of our leader's boys-with-toys reaction to any threat to Western imperialism it is ultimately us who have fucked up, too.

And Nitin Sawnhey is hardly about to let us forget this.

If a simmering anxiety underlines our collective consciousness, exacerbated by the recent announcement of war, this anxiety is exactly what his performance sets about addressing. The richly eclectic textures and haunting vocals that define Mercury-Prize nominated Beyond Skin and the recently released Prophesy, combined with haunting samples and sounds collected from around the world made them word-of-mouth hits with a huge cross-section of society. And that cross-section is out in force tonight. The Cambridge-bourgeoisie, eccentric, middle-aged and so tastefully middle-class; the giggling Asian babes, aglitter with bindis, bangles and Top Shop combats; the coffee-table couples, morphed together to relive those sofa-sharing, intimate moments. Ravers, students, hippy-girls and canehead-boys. My mum. All here for Nitin Sawhney action. And not one, I'll bet, leaves disappointed.

In the flesh, Nitin's sound is every bit as organically vibrant, inspired, and poignant as it is in your living room. Beautifully crafted, imbibed with jazz, funk, tabla beats and flamenco, this is music to make your soul quiver. Tina Grace [vocalist on Letting Go], with Aid Not Bombs scrawled across her white T Shirt, lends the tune fresh passion, investing the music with an emotional immediacy to rival Beth Orton or PJ Harvey. Poeticising the sounds and lyrics are startling frame-to-beat visuals that leave the audience rooted to the floor, spell-bound and memerised. Live footage from Afghanistan, combined with holocaust mushroom clouds, smiling African kids and images lifted from around the world lend the music an edge that allows people to emotionally connect on issues in a collective way. Rarely seen in musical performance, this is connecting to people, voices, faces, cultures in a time when fear and paranoia increasingly are polarizing us all. And the effect is profound. 'Nitin's music', says Mark, of Yeast Films, 'has a 'political' edge to it that's political in a humanitarian way and an image can really help communicate the point being made'. And the point being made, it seems, is wake up and smell the bombshells.

Nitin himself appears at the side of the stage with his piano, offset against the rest of his brilliantly talented collective - a gesture suggesting the modesty, kindness and general all-round-nice-bloke reputation he's generated amongst those he's met. And he's met a lot of people - Nelson Mandela, for a start. Paul Mcartney, Sinead O Conner, Sting. Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, Brazilians, Indians. The whole shebang.

Nitin has previously pioneered Goodness Gracious Me, been a member of the hit funk band JTQ, and has now made five albums to date. Multi-talented, nice, rather handsome. What more could an interviewer ask for?

I've very interested in what you think of the current world situation, particularly with regards to events surrounding the September 11th attacks?

Well, there's loads. I hate politicians. I hate anybody who's after power who manipulates people's ignorance, or people's lack of information. When I say ignorance I mean that people are not delivering information and they should be delivering information. It's given to us with a slant which is about enforcing people's power bases. People manipulate tragedy to twist the emotions of the public to back more hatred, more aggression, more spending on defence projects, and defend military action. It's just bullshit. At the moment all it's doing is making a bad situation fucking dreadful. It was a terrible thing that happened but what are they teaching children? The idea is basically that if someone hits you from behind you turn round and you beat the shit out of every single person behind you regardless of who they are - if you suspect that the person is of one race or origin you beat up the entire lot of them. Bush himself is a convicted criminal, was given a fifteen year prison sentence for cocaine dealing, though his brother Geoff commuted the sentence to one year and it was changed to work for the disadvantaged. There's a book by Terry Reed called Compromise that goes through in detail the situation - George Bush and his brother being caught buying cocaine by the kilo which at the time would have incurred a thirty year prison sentence.

This is a very little known fact.

Little known, but interesting. His Dad was the director of the CIA during the time that people like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were on the pay roll. That was fine - as long as Bin Laden was killing Russians and he wasn't affecting America. It's disgusting. Bush was an alcoholic at one point, has a stance against abortion though has got at least one girl pregnant who was 'advised' to abort, has a disgustingly sleazy background and shouldn't even technically be president of America. But he is. The guy is a lunatic. I'm thinking 'these are the people we are supposed to trust and believe in terms of what they're going around saying??' They have a history of demonising everyone from the Middle East anyway. I don't support any acts of terrosrism or violence in the name of religion, but what I believe in is contextualising the incident. 40,000 people died in Turkey last year in an earthquake, 50,000 died in India this year. Both facts little reported in the media. Then you get 10,000 white people - I mean yeah, it was tragic, but at the same time put it in fucking context. Everyone's life is equally valid. Those people on the border now between Pakistan and Afghanistan are not invalid human beings but the lack of coverage makes it feel this way. I'm shocked at what is going on. I'm completely shocked, I'm walking around in a total state of shock all the time. It's unbelievable bullshit what's coming out right now. Noam Chomsky actually said that America was guilty of wholesale terrorism: in other words it has a habit of recruiting, arming and creating terrorists abroad and then turning around and berating those people. You look at what's going on in India, Turkey, Pakistan - there are millions all over the world that absolutely hate America right now.

It's sounds like recent events have literally simply pushed you into a further state of 'Oh my God'.

Completely. I mean, this album I made - Prophesy - was very much about trying to find balance in the world, trying to meet people … I was already pissed off with the notion of 'the developed world' being economical, technological; based on power and political domination. Now I've met truly developed people - Aborigines in Australia, Native Americans, Nelson Mandela, for example - people I think are very balanced in their outlook. Just this year I've been right across the world and everywhere I go I'm reminded of the fact that there is no history of any indigenous culture that's now dominated by white people that's given any value. I mean, when white people went to Australia they had a policy of 'no one is on this land, this land is free, shoot the fuckers'.

They've become increasingly more right wing in Australia recently, haven't they?

Yeah, totally. I mean John Powel and Paul Udder are just evil. Paul Udder has got a twin port folio on immigration and asylum. The UN has actually pulled the muck on issues such as reconciliation and social justice, and their asylum - where they were putting people in American-run security prisons where no one could get in or out for months. Five years later the stories are coming out - kids going mad, people committing suicide because of the horrors they witnessed there in those fucking Nazi camps. It's incredible what's going on in the world at the moment and the only way out is to focus on education in schools to try and promote the notion of balance, spread the idea that everyone, regardless of nationality, is equally valid. People at the moment, instead of using techniques to understand other people's cultures, traditions and backgrounds are manipulating people's insecurities to make them more hateful.

How do you stop yourself getting completely drained by all of this?

Creativity. Music. I've just written a piece of music for an orchestra that's called Neural Circuit and the idea of it is being in a giant brain. The orchestra becomes the brain and when you're in the auditorium you're surrounded by certain members of the orchestra who are also in the audience. I've got a guy out there with a sampler that's playing back recent news items about Osama Bin Laden and Bush declaring America under attack. As the piece goes along and it connects up and all the different fragments of it kind of build up the idea is to make you realise that you are part of that collective consciousness of the neural circuit. In other words you are responsive to hearing that information and you have responsibility as an individual to a collective consciousness. So you can't escape that. You can't be passive in the way you take in information, you have to have an opinion on what you are hearing. It's using that as an analogy for what's going on in world society. Because they're counting on our passivity, our lack of understanding of what happened, and they're trying to brainwash us with all kinds of techniques to make us think that we're living in 'the real world'. Virtual reality is created for us by a power made lunatic. That's the way I look at it. I hear Tony Blair, Bush, going on about New World Order while all of our civil liberties are gradually eroded in the name of extinguishing world-wide terrorism. And what are they actually doing? They're bombing civilians which just demonstrates how they have no precision over where the bombs go. With one hand their randomly hitting people, and the other they're handing out fucking peanut butter to people who are starving to death.

It's like children in a playground, really.

Or a fucking sandpit. This is what they're all like. Scared shitless that John Foreign is going to come and take over their land. There's a very funny, but very black cartoon with George Bush turning around and going 'I'm going to bomb abroad!' I was in LA watching the news before it all kicked off and was amazed by the lack of international news - it's all shootings, celebrities and the fucking stock exchange. The rest of the world becomes irrelevent. And now one man is being demonised probably because he probably fucked over a deal with the CIA. I mean Bush's Dad was director of the CIA, he set Osama Bin Laden up, he created him. It's clearly a personal vendetta what's going on right now. It's a family thing. Why, within seconds, was Osama Bin Laden targetted as the only possibility? They did that before with the Oklahoma bombings and it turned out to be this right-wing white guy. It's all very dodgy.

I read in an interview you did recently that you don't like to be seen as a spokesperson. I guess that's because as soon as you turn into a figurehead the whole passivity thing kicks in and people stop thinking for themselves.

Exactly, that's my whole point. That's what the album's about. If it provokes thought, that's great, if people walk away from it with a conclusion they think they've been given, that's bullshit because I'm not giving anyone any conclusions. Also, I don't want to patronise people in the same way that politicians do. There are enough men in the world using religion and politics to promote hierarchies of power.

What is it that created this need for domination in the West - well, not just the West actually - and the rest of the world?

Paranoia. It boils down to insecurity. If yoga and meditation was taught in schools across the world there'd be a lot less hatred and aggression and there'd be a deeper respect for yourself. You learn to respect people and understand people for who they are, not trying to make them into people that they aren't because of your own insecurity. That's what leads to prejudice, judegementalism, and morality. The whole morality that Blair and Bush are seizing on is an attempt to polarise people between good and evil - who the fuck gave them the right to stand at the top of a self-created hierarchy and tell people what's right and what's wrong?

Words by Ruth Collins