Niomi Daley, known to you as Ms Dynamite, is not an easy lady to pin down. She has twice cancelled this interview, claiming last minute family difficulties.
Shortly after bailing for the second time, the Londoner appeared on Later With Jools Holland, rapping with something like abandon while her band threw down swathes of grimy hip hop.
With her monster high-heels and curled lips, she looked stereotypically diva-ish. One imagined strops, tirades, smashed backstage crockery and felt a tremor of sympathy for her retinue.
Therefore it comes as mildly surprising that Daley turns out be a complete sweetheart. She apologises for our earlier difficulties, listens attentively to my questions and, when the phone line goes mysteriously dead, insists that the record company call me back.
“I’m not trying to preach, ‘yknow,” she says of her agit-prop lyrics. “I just talk about the world the way I see it. I don’t want people to think I’m this humourless singer, moaning about everything.”
She is peeved at what she believes is an unwillingness to take her seriously as a hip-hop figure. As Ms Dynamite, she has been likened to Bob Marley (she covered 'Freedom Song' at Live8) and the protest-rapper Lauryn Hill of the Fugees (a singer fixated with Marley).
But these are dry, dusty comparisons for a 24-year-old rapper from the inner city and Daley worries that her confrontational lyrics have obscured her talents as a singer and performer. Her songs, she says, aren’t even that political, once you scratch the surface.
“I just see it as writing songs about how I feel,” she explains. “A lot of them come from conversations I’ve had with my mum or my brother about things I might have seen on the news.”
Ms Dynamite’s second album, Judgement Days is, musically and lyrically, far more sophisticated than her 2002 debut, A Little Deeper, which sold 500,000 copies and, to the surprise of everyone (not least Daley) won the Mercury Music Prize.
The new record mixes sunny hip-hop beats with darker forays into ‘grime’, a brutish London riff on the rap form. The result is a LP that is accessible yet emotionally complex . You could play Judgement Days at a party, but also listen to it, on your own, in a darkened room.
The three year gap between albums was due to Daley’s decision to have a baby, with her boyfriend Dwayne Seaforth. Her record company, which had expected a sequel to A Little Deeper within 18 months was, putting it mildly, nonplussed.
“I think a few jaws dropped,” she says of her announcement. “No one came right out and said, ‘You’re crazy,’ but I knew that’s what they were thinking.”
Seaforth had his doubts too.
“He didn’t want to be responsible for putting a halt on my career.
I was, like, ‘Is that the only reason, because if it is, forget it, we’re having a baby.’ I knew it was what I wanted to do. Once he could see that I was completely sure, he was cool.”
On Judgement Days, she attempts to address some of the hurt and anger she feels towards her own parents.
Vitriol drips from the record, which sometimes cuts so close it become painful to listen to. The album’s most searing track is ‘Father’, a slow, stinging diatribe against her dad, a Jamaican plumber who walked out on her mother, a school teacher from Scotland, when Daley was a toddler.
“It wasn’t a hard song to write. But I think it would be very hard to perform in front of other people, because I would have to go through all of those emotions again,” she states.
Abandonment plunged her mother of a precipice. She couldn’t cope with a family and Daley largely reared herself and her brother, Kingsley. Several years later, her mother developed cancer and become a virtual recluse.
On recovering, her mother seemed to hate Daley for her independence. They rowed and said things they later regretted.
“She was, like, ‘You’re not doing this, you’re not doing that.’ I said, ‘Hold on a second. I’ve been doing everything for the past two years and now you’re telling me I’m not responsible enough to have any freedom?' That was where we clashed. The older I got the more I thought I knew it all and the more frightened my mum got.”
Life turned so bleak that Daley moved out, living first with her grandmother and then in a hostel. Aged 16, she began to drink and to cut her arms. Instead of kicking out at the world, she lashed out at herself. Yet Daley never really spun off the rails. Between bouts of boozing and self-harm, she put herself through school, achieving her GCSEs and a-levels.
“I wanted to defy people’s expectations. Everyone thought I was losing it. That I’d end up homeless, without qualifications. I wanted to show them I was stronger than that, smarter than that.”
She denies that tracks such as ‘Father’ are vindictive. Daley says she was raised to talk straight and that her father, with whom she has resumed contact, understands why she had to write the song.
“Everyone’s entitled to make mistakes and being a parent has given me new insight. The bottom line is that it happened and I’ve always been taught – from my dad more than anyone – that however you feel you speak out. That’s why I am the way I am.”