Photography: Francisco Serrano

Bishi doesn't feel out of place sipping a cocktail by the rooftop pool of Shoreditch House, but she could just as easily blend in on the back of the night bus stepping over the greasy box of a half eaten Dixy's fried chicken and a beer stained copy of yesterday's Metro. She would look as comfortable in a busy street market in Hammersmith as in a Straw Dogs-style country pub, in a casino in Monaco or a bed-sit in Camden. If there is such a thing as a multicultural society – and it's certainly not the 'vibrant' or 'colourful' 'diversity' sold to us by the likes of the Arts Council – it is here: between bhangra beats and hip hop, between Vietnamese and French cuisine. Often this meeting point is antagonistic or confused, but in Bishi's hands it's gracefully worked into the closest thing to a true London sound.

Nights at the Circus, her long overdue debut album, is like a record of the contradictions that define Bishi. It can be intimate and melodic, evoking the tenderness of English folk, only to bash you on the head with a dance number full of electronic bleeps and beats. Fantasy and glamour rub like a couture hem against vomit puddles on the floor. A sitar is wielded axe-style, forced to produce alien sounds. For Bishi, none of these oppositions need resolving, because in music they can simply coexist.

"Being a second generation Indian in London I am a walking contradiction. Art and music and culture helped me through that because it made me understand that you don't have to choose, you can make your own culture."

Bishi will be familiar to anyone with an interest in London nightlife as the mythological hostess of the Kashpoint club, where such self-determination was taken to the extreme, most notably in sartorial combinations of the teapot and dayglo PVC variety. In her incarnation as a songstress, it is this insistence on forging your own identity from a mess of conflicting pieces that she has taken with her from her clubland experiences:

"The London alternative scene that I came out of has become so established now. It was very naïve, it was very local and not at all about celebrity and getting into the pages of glossies.

"I think that there still is an underground, but the concept of what it means changed. DIY used to mean 'alternative', but now everyone's just doing it for themselves. The club scene today is more about just having your picture taken. If you're going to run a club, you should try to say something – even Studio 54 was about sexual liberation and disco. In the industry people still think 'Asian' is a niche market. Even if it doesn't mean anything to me, being in a board meeting makes you understand that a lot of people still think like that."

Sadly, she's not wrong. Despite the many attempts to market 'Hindi indie' and other variations on the theme over the years, London's music scene remains surprisingly segregated. If the rise of electronic music in the Nineties suggested that the faceless, raceless DJ, mixing all manner of beats and ethnic grooves, would replace the stereotypical white male of rock 'n' roll, the return of guitar music over the past few years has reinforced this hegemonic image. Lethal Bizzle recently complained that he is never invited to play shows with another hip hop artists, and this tokenism is apparent to anyone who frequents the indie clubs that have inherited Kashpoint.

"But London is old and it has a long tradition of waves of people taking over," counters Bishi. "I actually feel like the problem now is that everything is so politically correct and people are stepping on each other's toes. There needs to be an honest discussion about it. In general, Western people still have a very colonial view of India. They don't even understand that it's a subcontinent, and that its language and culture change from place to place. I grew up in London, but I never felt alien or foreign in India. People are always talking about going back to your roots but I was never away from whatever my roots are. At the same time, the Indians in India don't really get the avant-garde and still think American pop culture is brilliant. I've had to find a third way between Englishness and being Indian, and for me that is what it means to create".

www.myspace.com/bishimusic