The long-haired boys and girls at the front thrash frantically. White arms flail about in the darkness.

Cornershop don't notice. They hardly move: fingers striking strings, feet quite still; uniformly sour-faced. Some words crash through the white noise: ... Ford Cortinas, something about... having summer fun in a beat-up Datsun. It's seductively hypnotic, the mutant issue of an unsafe sex encounter between The Velvet Underground, The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Fall.

A second's silence. Tjindar announces that the gig is dedicated to Stephen Lawrence, the black student murdered by racists in south-east London. There's no reaction. He grips the mike tightly, as the band shudders back into gear, shouting: 'Shut up shop, get on the streets and fight!' A tape breaks up the guitar noise with snatches of Punjabi and a patrician B-movie alien chanting the mantra: 'People, we finally have to fight. We don't want to but the people of Earth leave us no choice. People, we finally have to fight.'

After the gig, sitting on the steps of the Astoria's fire-escape, I discover that under the rock 'n' roll veneer Tjindar is actually a quiet, shy and unassuming. . . anarcho-situationist revolutionary?

'You shouldn't take our press release too seriously,' Tjinder says. 'When we say "Fight the Power" it can be taken literally, but I've never been one for physical violence myself. We're not anarchists or whatever it is our PR people have said.

'When we say "Power" it's simply meant to be construed as those individuals and authorities which limit the freedom of the majority. We always say if there's something out there like that, you've got to go against it.'

Cornershop's last EP, 'Lock Stock and Double Barrel', which reached number two in the NME's indie charts, has two quotes on its sleeve. The first is by Jon Savage, the Rock journalist, made in 1978, about the importance of Rock 'n' Roll as a way of challenging totalitarianism. The second is by Anne Beverly, the mother of Sid Vicious, Sex Pistol: 'You are you, you can do anything you like providing you don't hurt anybody else while doing it. You should be able to do what the f-ck you like.'

'Those two quotes are brilliant,' says Tjindar. 'They epitomize our entire attitude. We'd like to make people think about loads of issues, be it homophobia, sexism or attitudes toward the disabled. And we think people should be free to experiment and do what they like.

'Take us. We decided out of sheer boredom to pick up instruments and play. At first it was just smashing bread bins and stuff.'

Was Punk an influence? 'Not when me and Avtar were kids. In Wolverhampton, where we grew up, it seemed quite racist. We used to see punks with swastikas on their jackets.

'I used to go to the Temple quite a lot and listen to wedding and religious music. As for western music, our parents had no back catalogue and so we started from scratch. Growing up, I gradually got into the The Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, The Smiths.'

A catholic musical taste led, via General Havoc, 'a two-bit bedroom punk band', to the formation of Cornershop.

Perhaps it was the change of name, or perhaps it was getting rid of the bread bins, but the release of their first EP, 'In The Days of Ford Cortina', at the beginning of the year, made them into music-press darlings.

Tjindar isn't overfond of the media. 'There've been loads of dubious things said about us - like we're not brothers, that we don't actually play, that we're classically trained, that we just deconstruct our music into what it is. Just loads.'

But isn't this part of the Cornershop packaging scam? Baiting the media and sowing rumours? What about the band making a bonfire out of pictures of Morrissey on the steps of EMI?

'Look, we like Morrissey's music and we loved The Smiths. But we're pretty dismayed by his right-wing imagery, his flirtation, his alleged flirtation, with fascism. As for burning his photos, we never saw that as a PR scam. It was a way of pointing out what he was doing since no one else was prepared to put the boot in. We felt it a necessity that someone had to say something.'

And that brings us back to the question, what is it that Cornershop are trying to say? A lazy, hazy, delicious sound certainly. But their ideas seem confused. Are they the next big spanner in our cultural works or just media-wise con-merchants? The Jury's out. In the meantime, they are the types that Enoch Powell has nightmares about, and that, cheers Tjindar, can't be bad, can it?