He is dressed in a black pinstriped suit with billowing trousers held up by

He is dressed in a black pinstriped suit with billowing trousers, held up by pink braces, a marked transformation from his last, vilified stage appearance, in a dress at the Reading Festival in 1999. “There is not one act that has been groomed by the mainstream,” he says.If nothing else, the ceremony will give long overdue recognition to the artists who are spreading the sound of young Britain around the globe but go almost unrecognised in the land they call home.. They relate to it in the same way they do to hip hop and dancehall.”The first UK Asian Music Awards will take place next Wednesday in London – nearly a decade after the launch of the Music of Black Origin (Mobo) awards. Moiz Vas, who is co-ordinating the event, said it would be a “celebration” of the real sound of British Asian youth culture. “It’s really good to bring everyone together to listen to bhangra. After years of being the only white face at clubs, Strippel is delighted by the music’s growing appeal. “If you are white or black in Britain, the chances are that you have heard Asian music either in a shop or coming out of a car,” he says.

Strippel is the sole white member of Panjabi Hit Squad, a four-strong crew who travel to northern India to record the work of musicians and vocalists and mix the sounds with hip-hop and dancehall beats.The Hit Squad, who have a show on 1-Xtra, grew up together in Hounslow, west London, and helped to set up some of the first Asian club nights in London’s West End. Backstage at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Mark Strippel, 29, (aka DJ Markie Mark) says the current strength of British Asian music is down to years of groundwork. Juggy, delighted by the reaction to his Punjabi lyrics, says: “The generation we are in now has all been brought up together We all do the same things. We all watch the same programmes and eat the same food.”The Essex show is part of a university tour by the BBC digital radio station 1-Xtra that demonstrates the growing appeal of this music to all ethnic backgrounds. Earlier the same week, a mainly-white crowd at the University of Essex had responded with no less enthusiasm.

The crowd is predominantly Asian but far from exclusively so.When the Rishi Rich Project come on stage, just before 1am, the crowd is clinging to every vantage point and the music induces a mass of waving arms that recalls the multi-limbed Hindu god of dance, Shiva. The modern Asian sound is spawning clubs in San Francisco and Sydney, Durban and Dubai – but Britain is the only place making the music.Coaches have come to Ministry of Sound from universities across the South-east, delivering an audience that is a marketing executive’s dream: young, street-savvy, stylish and well educated. Singh is already negotiating to take this very British mix of R&B, bhangra and dancehall to America. It runs: “Now the Asian scene is the place to be/ Ever since Goodness Gracious Me graced the scene/ What with Missy, Truth Hurtz and Redman having a taste/ We’ve even got the Kumars dancing with Gareth Gates.”Rishi later makes his way across London to the Ministry of Sound nightclub, where queues stretch far into the distance for a club night called Desi, organised by Mandeep Singh and his company Bump and Grind.