The excerpt below is taken from Peter Murphy's 'The Boy From County Hell' cover story, originally published in Hot Press in 2001.

Some months ago, an MTV interviewer asked Eminem what he thought heaven looked like. The question stumped him. She then asked him what he thought hell would look like. The rapper characterised it as a place populated by little replicas of himself.

I myself am hell, said Robert Lowell.

Hell is other people, argued Sartre.

Eminem would probably agree with them both. Basically, he was fucked from the get-go.

Born Marshall Bruce Mathers III on October 17, 1974, he was raised by his 17-year-old mother Debbie after his dad split for California. Marshall grew up as a welfare kid, one of the few whites in a rough neighbourhood on the east side of Detroit, constantly moving from school to school and getting bullied and beaten on a regular basis, once so badly that he suffered a brain haemorrhage and lay in a coma for nine days.

When he was nine years old, Marshall's beloved Uncle Ronnie gave him a copy of the Breakin' soundtrack, containing 'Reckless' by Ice T. The boy was smitten.

He dropped out of school at age 15. The following year he was shot at by a gang member. Uncle Ronnie killed himself when Marshall was 19 (he still has Ronnie's name tattooed on his right arm) and he also witnessed the shooting of his brother-in-law by his Uncle Todd.

By this time Mathers, or Eminem as he had begun calling himself, had already started to make a name for himself at open mic contests around Detroit, and even recorded an album called Infinite for a local label. It stiffed, and he continued supporting himself making $5 an hour as a cook, driving his workmates to distraction by rapping the ingredients of the pizzas he was making.

Then, on Christmas Day in 1995, his girlfriend Kim gave birth to a daughter, Hailie Jade. The responsibility terrified Mathers, a wake up call documented on 'Rock Bottom' from The Slim Shady LP. Recording a demo of that song late one night, Mathers got word that yet another prospective record deal had fallen through, and took more than 20 painkillers over a two hour period, but couldn't keep them down.

For a while, Eminem thought about thieving or dealing to support his family. In 1997, he took a plane to LA to compete in a Rap Olympics being held in an Inglewood club called The Proud Bird, a contest which would prove to be a turning point in the rapper's career. William Shaw provided an eyewitness account of it in his book Westsiders.

'A good rap battle is great entertainment,' he wrote. 'The rules are simple. In a formal competition like this contestants are paired off and given 30 seconds in which to improvise rhymes, then another 30 in which to reply and try and quash the insults that have just been flung. Rhymes must be spontaneous. Anyone relying too obviously on prepared words will be booed off. The idea is to put your opponent off by trashing him as coolly, as brutally and as deftly as you can. But anyone who just insults crudely, without wit, will also be booed. A panel of judges marks each round, judging who's landed the most blows, as if they were adjudicating at a boxing match.'

Eminem, the only white rapper in the competition, cut through the first couple of rounds without much trouble, enduring almost no hostility on account of his colour. In fact, when an opponent made a reference to Eminem's whiteness he was booed by the crowd. Mathers countered with:

"Everybody in this place'll miss you
If you try and turn my facial tissue
Into a racial issue . . ."

Eminem was knocked out in the final round, which made him furious, for he had been counting on the $500 prize money he was homeless, and the previous night had to break into a house in Detroit to find a place to sleep.

All the same, while he lost out on the money, the rapper did win the interest of a couple of representatives from Aftermath, the Interscope-subsidised label Dr. Dre had set up after leaving Suge Knight s Death Row enclave, weary of the violence that had dogged the company.

Dre was intrigued enough by this motormouth from Motor City to sign him up and produce three of the tracks on his major label debut, including the lead off single 'My Name Is'. The accompanying video made him the talk of the town, but crucially for a white hip hop act, Dre's patronage also gave him credibility.

The Slim Shady LP was a pretty remarkable calling card, a foul-mouthed, equal opportunities hate-in, with its author seemingly hell-bent on broaching every taboo subject left at the end of the 20th century. Possibly the standout track was '97 Bonnie And Clyde' which spoofed Will Smith's paean to father-son bonding, 'Just The Two Of Us', with Mathers assuming the character of a guy taking his young daughter on a drive to the coast in order to dump her dead mother's body in the water.

On the song's sequel, 'What's The Difference' from Dr. Dre's album 2001, the pair joked about putting sunglasses on the corpse and driving it around LA.

Eminem married his childhood sweetheart Kim in a private non-church service in St. Joseph Missouri in June 1999. By that autumn he had established himself as the most remarkable newcomer of the year, and The Slim Shady LP had surpassed the 3 million sales mark.

However, all was far from blissful. First, Mathers father, to whom he'd never spoken, began trying to contact him. Then his mother filed a $10 million lawsuit against him in Macomb Circuit Court over comments made in US magazines that alleged she was an unfit mother and drug abuser.

Deborah Mathers-Briggs claimed that she suffered forms of emotional distress including diminished self-esteem, humiliation, sleepless nights, harm to her credit rating, and even loss of her mobile home . Her attorney later reduced the claim to $2 million, which Mathers rejected.

Meanwhile Eminem kept on working, scoring another hit single with Dr. Dre in the form of 'Forgot About Dre', and then, a little over a year after Slim Shady, he released The Marshall Mathers LP.

If the previous record was The Bomb, this one was The Plague...