Singer-composer Adnan Sami is planning a new album that would feature a big international star.

"It's a project I am very excited about, an album of world music. We are talking to an international star to partner in the album," says Sami, a Pakistani native raised in Britain but who now lives in Mumbai.

He refused to say which star he was negotiating with.

In Bollywood, Sami's new playback projects are director Ram Gopal Varma's "Naach" and Madhur Bhandarkar's "Page Three".

"'Naach' has turned out to be quite an out of the ordinary experience," Sami said. "The songs have that special feel about them and it was a delight singing for the film."

The new film that he has composed music for is "Lucky", starring Salman Khan. "Working with Salman again is a wacko experience, great fun."

Born in Britain, Sami started to learn the piano at five. "There was a piano at home and I was banned from touching it. But I tinkered with it anyway.

"Then one day, my father was playing the piano and he was making a mistake on a note and I pointed it out. That's when he realised that I was very interested in the instrument."

It was during a recording in Stockholm that Sami's ultra-fast piano fingers were noticed. "I was doing a live recording and after sometime they noticed that their cameras couldn't get my finger movement.

"It was all a blur. My fingers were moving faster that 24 frames per second which is the TV camera speed. Since then, Sami has often been called the fastest keyboard player in the world and the US magazine Keyboard described him as the "Keyboard discovery of the 90s".

"Speed is not something I specifically aimed for. I mean you cannot tell yourself 'I'm going to play faster than this'. It's not a marathon.

"It just came naturally," said Sami who has received a Special Unicef Award, United Nations Peace Medal and MTV's Breakthrough Artiste of the Year award in 2001.

He has made some of the most popular albums and music videos in India in the last couple of years but wants to venture far wider.

"My favourite artistes are Seal and the old Dire Straits, George Michael, and I adore Kishore Kumar, Madan Mohan, S.D. and R.D. Burman - so I have very diverse taste and I want to work with all forms and genres of music.

"If I showed you my CD collection, you would think I'm very confused. But I want to do soul and pop and spiritual - everything."