Not enough hip-hop mentions Safeway trolleys, nutters with ginger beards and Sega Megadrives. For that reason we should cherish Lady Sovereign, who managed to take such arcane references and turn them into US gold dust. It helps that her beats follow the standard American pop rap model. You have to admire the sheer absurdity of it all.

REVIEW: 2007-03-26

She’s as potty-mouthed as Peaches and boasts the Streets smarts of Mike Skinner – she is Lady Sovereign and on Public Warning she’s chavin’ it large.

REVIEW: 2007-02-12

With a growing media profile, a Basement Jaxx remix and a subject matter tuned into the cultural zeitgeist, you’d be hard pushed to see how Lady Sovereign’s ‘Hoodie’ could be anything but a rip-roaring success. Yet something’s not quite right. It certainly rattles along at an invigorating pace and is blessed with some choice one liners but maybe it’s the fact that the melody isn’t strong enough to compete with everything else that’s going on. In comparison to Sov’s big production, C-Mone’s track sounds like it was recorded on a lap-top in her bedroom but is the more effective of the two. With a lyric that takes in the famine in Sudan, gun culture and old age pensioners struggling to pay council tax, C-Mone could have it in her to give M.I.A. a run for the Brit-hop crown.

REVIEW: 2005-11-30

With a growing media profile, a Basement Jaxx remix and a subject matter tuned into the cultural zeitgeist, you’d be hard pushed to see how Lady Sovereign’s ‘Hoodie’ could be anything but a rip-roaring success. Yet something’s not quite right. It certainly rattles along at an invigorating pace and is blessed with some choice one liners but maybe it’s the fact that the melody isn’t strong enough to compete with everything else that’s going on. In comparison to Sov’s big production, C-Mone’s track sounds like it was recorded on a lap-top in her bedroom but is the more effective of the two. With a lyric that takes in the famine in Sudan, gun culture and old age pensioners struggling to pay council tax, C-Mone could have it in her to give M.I.A. a run for the Brit-hop crown.

REVIEW: 2005-11-25

Ah, Lady Sovereign. Do you remember Julie Burchill’s god-awful documentary on ‘Chavs’? Well, centre stage was Lady Sovereign. Burchill described her as “the voice of an emerging youth culture”.

REVIEW: 2005-07-15