While I was on a late night mercy-mission drive to the all-night supermarket to pick up some painkillers for the Mrs I was listening to the Bobby Friction & Nihal show on Radio 1 (one of the replacements for John Peel) and got to thinking about Asian music.

In Crawley we have about 10% of our population coming from what is called the black and minority ethnic communities. In our case, the largest proportion of the BME population is from the Indian sub-continent. I don’t know the numbers, but it must be at least 5% of the population.

Given those numbers, why is there next to no Asian music in the town’s HMV and Virgin music shops? Whenever I go to any Asian parties they always have plenty of Bhangra and Bollywood music to play, but there is no way they would have bought that in HMV. There is probably a greater selection of African music than Asian in our shops, and that is only because it has some popularity with white liberals like myself.

Some of the stuff I hear on Radio 1 sounds OK to me. I might buy it if I saw it, but I am not likely to see it for sale anywhere except a very specialist shop.

On the face of it, if Asians make up (say) 5% of our population, shouldn’t we expect 5% of the CDs in our shop to be Asian? I’n not just saying that from a politically-correct perspective but thinking that there must be a demand, and therefore a potential of profit for the record shops.

Do they (HMV and Virgin) think that the rest of us will feel intimidated or alienated by a few racks of foreign stuff with titles we can’t read, much less understand? Or do they think that a lot of the Asians would not be tempted in?

When I lived in Lewisham I once ventured upstairs in the old Our Price, which was devoted to rap and dance. I was the only white person there and felt a bit out of place (especially since I was looking for something very specific I had heard in an Amsterdam club but didn’t know the title or artist so had to sing it to the counter staff. I have nearly finished blushing 15 years later). is that how some Asians would feel in Virgin?

Maybe we are not really as integrated as we like to think, but the segregation is in areas so everyday that we don’t even think about them.