Pioneers have it tough. They get to forage through uncharted territory, have to put down pathways for others to follow, clear the way for the next wave of explorers, and, if they're lucky, someone names a school or a village hall after them. Most of them, though, disappear into history's pages, existing only as half-remembered fragments of campfire tales or archaic folk songs.
Transglobal Underground are pioneers. Before Talvin Singh won the Mercury Prize, before Anokha put the fusion of Asian music and dance beats into the pages of the style press, and back when nights like Megadog were championing a sort of world music/dance fusion for the benefit of three thousand crusties, TU were at the vanguard of Nation Records' forays into some choppy and uncharted waters.
Since then everything has changed. Nation is no more, a label too far ahead of its time to properly capitalise on its invention; and Transglobal's audience tonight is a mixed Shoreditch bunch of fashionable types with expensive trainers and pricier haircuts.
The performance, though, retains a swashbuckling sense of irrepressible forward motion and restless exploration. The seven musicians - black, white and Asian, male and female - play everything from keyboards to a sitar, a drum kit to a sampler. Everyone, it seems, has something percussive that they use at one point of the set or another.
Together they build an intricately layered yet formidably simple sound, different rhythmic elements supporting linear melodies usually carried by the sitar, then embellished by vocals that veer from a soaring female voice through rap and on to the patter of a Mikey Dread-style reggae DJ.
It's a sound with a history that harks back to The Beatles discovering Indian music and John Lennon writing 'Tomorrow Never Knows', and it has had a pervasive influence that informed the late-'90s work of, among many others, the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers.
Much of the set is based on the band's new album, 'Yes Boss Food Corner' - somewhat astonishingly, their sixth - released next month on hip hop producer The Automator's Ark21 imprint. So while the band's one brush with fame, the irresistible 'Templehead', is trotted out in an almost 'Unplugged' version as an encore, such is the force and the poise of what has preceded it that you're never left longing for its appearance.
"I leave the 20th century with no regrets," proclaims shaven-headed Isaac Hayes lookalike Tuup, and who can blame him? His band go from strength to strength, and perhaps their inventive, funky and wonderfully progressive music will reach a wider audience in this millennium than it did in the last.
