Nitin Sawhney: My Week In Media

Last week I read ...

On Monday there was a small piece in The Independent about Jean Charles de Menezes. The Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Alan Given said that directly after the shooting there was a sense that the incident was comparable to the shooting of a bank robber. Talk about twisting the knife. Then he went on to say Scotland Yard was anxious and tense on the morning of the shooting and that there was relief at the news. For him still to be saying stuff like that is shocking.

I was really fascinated by the case of Shabina Begum, right, and particularly in what Thomas Sutcliffe said in The Independent. He equated her insistence on wearing the jilbab with his son's right to display six inches of underwear above a dangling waistband. He was being cavalier and quite humorous but there is a lot of anti-Muslim feeling in the current climate and stories like this feed into the atmosphere of paranoia. I feel very nervous about decisions like this getting a lot of media attention. In The Times's film supplement Screen there was an interview with Spike Lee about his new film The Inside Man. He seems much more interested in issues of class now than he ever was before and he openly expresses a regret of how his earlier films don't deal with gender issues and are probably quite misogynistic in parts. When I was young I really admired Spike Lee. I don't think he's made a great film for a long time but it's interesting how his perspective has developed.

Last week I watched ...

The Culture Show on BBC2 covered the Bernard Herrmann gig that was on at the Barbican. He was one of my favourite film composers and I went to the gig - it was very exciting to see the scores performed from Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and Taxi Driver. The Culture Show gave me another perspective on the rehearsal process, particularly interesting for me because I'm doing a gig at the Barbican as well with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Last week I listened to ...

Bobby and Nihal [on the BBC Asian Network and Radio 1], as I often do. They keep alive the fact that there is an Asian music scene in this country.

Nitin Sawhney has won the BBC's Boundary Crossing Award for World Music.

He will receive it and perform at Brixton Academy on 7 April