Rodney, You Stonker!

"My sanity’s back on the line again/And last year I said I wouldn’t rhyme again/But I’m back for punishment, time again.”

So raps Roots on the title track to his new album Awfully Deep. Four years in the waiting and 14 tracks of exceptional quality, it’s staggering to think that it might not have been realised.
Obviously sick of the ‘What have you been doing?’ questions (particularly when they detract from his enjoyment of a chicken curry), Rodney Smith takes the humorous route:
“Rock and roll! Nothing but rock'n'roll man!”
A well-documented perfectionist, I ask Smith about his apparent love-hate relationship with music.
“Well, it’s not that I was disillusioned,” he says between mouthfuls. “But I did need a rest to get back into the mill of sitting there and hoping ‘Is it going to go into the chart? Is it? Noooo!’ It doesn’t go. I need a rest to do that.”
He resumes: “With half of what I have achieved I have exceeded my wildest dreams and I got tired of being hit over the head with the potential. [Adopting deep, mock-serious voice] ‘But you could be! But you could be! If you did this! Or if you toured with this band! Or got this remix!’ I was like, man, I just wanna get back to innocence. Just doing stuff for the heck of it."
In the years since the whirlwind of 2001’s Run Come Save Me – the gold-selling album that earned him, amongst other things, a Mercury nomination – the 32 year-old London native has been doing all kinds of things just for the sheer hell of it.
As well as recording “hundreds of doodles”, Smith tried his hand at inventing a unique kind of “sound component”.
“I got into this idea for a machine that would help change the colour of your music,” he explains. “I tried to solder some bits and pieces together but it didn’t really get anywhere. I’m not very good at electronics. And not everybody can hear or visualise sonic colour [laughs] so I don’t know how well it would do!”
Admitting his own perception of ‘sonic colour’ has faded (“It’s not as strong as it was when I was smoking a lot of weed”), Smith eventually went back to what he does best.
“Music will always be a part-time thing,” says Smith of his fresh, more moderate approach to his art. “I don’t need to be doing it so intensely but it’s just strange that my hobby has become the biggest earner in my life. I support my family through music so I’ve had to give it some to get back.”
With the arrival 21 months ago of a baby boy, Smith says that fatherhood has totally changed his lifestyle.
“It’s not the same as before,” he says of his previous ways. “Getting up and smoking a spliff first thing in the morning, not even washing and staying on the computer until 4 o’clock in the morning. Now it’s more like, the baby’s on my lap, I’m at the laptop for a little bit. I try to work from 10 to 6 and make sure I go back home.”
With the self-imposed pressure lifted, can Smith enjoy reading the press reviews of his album?
“Sometimes… When they get it totally out of context and they totally miss the frivolous humour of it all, I love it!” he laughs. “It’s all just experimentation. It’s playful. It’s the... I dunno... The sonic equivalent of toilet humour. It’s swearing in front of your grandma - you shouldn’t really do it, but it's fun!”
In one of the best songs on the album, Awfully Deep, Roots makes reference to being sent by his management to a “funny farm” – something that is based on his personal experiences of having psychiatric treatment…
“That place only makes me worse/It’s full of crooked doctors and kinky nurses/That poke you in the arse and measure your schlong/Put that tape measure down/That practice is wrong”
“I would have loved to have had some kinky nurses,” he laughs. “It’s just the paranoia of it all. It’s just my insane mind saying ‘No! They’re gonna poke things in my arse!’”
Did it feel intrusive having someone trying to analyse your mind?
“No, I felt I was above it. As out of it as I’ve been, I’ve always been above it. The medical institution’s attitude to people that admit that they’ve had a little smoke is pretty scary. They don’t even give you the benefit of doubt that you can manage and you understand your own mind and you know your limits.
“It was quite a fictitious, sensational exaggeration of the whole thing of going to the doctor with a little bit of paranoia. I’ve just poked fun at it all and said, ‘Hee hee hee! I’ve escaped! If you really knew that I’ve experimented with class A’s and this and that, you’d have locked me up forever!’ It’s a funny tune but everyone seems to hear the bit about the nurses!”

Awfully Deep is out now on Big Dada. Roots Manuva plays this year's Oxegen festival on July 9 and 10.