The big eye candy mountain

One of the greatest pleasures in life comes from watching an artist realising their potential, unlocking the key to their creativity and making the music of their lives. At the moment you’d be hard pressed to find an act finding this muse as clearly as Mis-Teeq with their second album, Eye Candy. Not only has the album been receiving universal praise, it has also come from a variety of quarters – from the already on-side dance and pop press to the NME, the monthlies and the broadsheets. In short, Mis-Teeq are achieving that most elusive commercial holy grail – crossing over.

As one third of the trio, Alesha Dixon has every right to be feeling more than a little pleased. “Any artist wants to expand and go to bigger heights,” she says. “If we can crossover and reach more people from different areas or different countries, then we’re doing something right”.

Does she think that in some quarters they had been viewed as solely a pop act?

“At the end of the day, we see ourselves as an urban girl group doing music that we enjoy and if you like it, you like it and if you don’t, you don’t. That’s our attitude. The minute you release a track and it goes in the top ten you become a pop act but we’ve always had an urban edge and that’s the most important thing”.

What then are people hearing with this album that they weren’t with ‘Licking On Both Sides’?
“We’ve experimented a little bit more. We never got to do ballads before, we never got to do reggae or British hip-hop. There’s a lot less garage on the album, we’ve definitely moved forward. We still love garage music but we tend to go with what we’re feeling at the time and R&B is hot at the moment so the album is more dominated by that. We took six months out, had a look at what had happened to us and got our heads together”.

With its heady mixture of styles, Eye Candy is like a crystallisation of the new found confidence in the British black music scene, a scene that is moving out of the clubs and off the streets to dominate the charts, a state of play that Alesha is happy to acknowledge.

“I’m a big fan of Big Brovaz, I’m glad to see them coming through,” she says. “They’re doing really well all around the world. There’s another girl group called Tommy – they’re feisty, very urban, they’re keeping it real. I’m a big fan of Dynamite. I’ve known her for a long time, before she started making music, she’s still the same person to be with. I also think that Craig David still has one of the most beautiful voices I’ve heard and I don’t think that he gets the credit he maybe deserves. If it wasn’t for Craig a lot of doors wouldn’t have been opened for artists like ourselves. At the end of the day we’ve got a lot of respect for him”.

Perhaps the best thing is that, instead of producing a conveyer belt of identikit boy and girl bands, the scene has given us a variety of outfits, all with their own little twist.

“That’s the thing I love most about urban music,” Alesha agrees. “It’s not music that has been squeezed out of a machine, like pop bubblegum, its music that you feel. I’m not going home at night and going, ‘oh don’t put my album on, I can’t stand it’. I’m proud of our album, we’ve done what we feel is right, we chose the producers, we co-wrote every track on the album. I couldn’t imagine being in a pop group, being told what to do and given a bunch of songs to sing that I can’t stand.”

It’s this kind of attitude that makes Eye Candy such an invigorating listen and marks Mis-Teeq out from being just another wannabe girl group living in the shadow of their US counterparts. Not that that influence isn’t there, as Alesha explains.

“There weren’t any British urban acts for us to look up to, so of course if you’re into R&B you’re going to look Stateside. Being such a huge country they do do it extremely well and you can’t help but be inspired by that. There’s nothing wrong with that”.

“In the past though”, she continues, “a lot of urban acts have felt that they’ve had to compromise their music because we are dominated by pop music in the UK and people have watered down their music. What’s so good now at the moment is that people are starting to do what’s their own and not feeling that they have to compromise to sell albums”.

Despite all of this, the one genre that has yet to break out into the mainstream has been hip-hop. Could it be that in the UK – and as is probably the case here too – rap fans are just unable to get past their fixation with all things American? Alesha sees the problem more at the business end.

“There’s a lot of talent there and the only way it can be filtered through is through the labels. The record companies need to start taking risks, you don’t get anywhere by sitting on the fence. Where we’re going wrong is that the companies with the money are quick to sign an act off a reality TV show because they’re lazy, all the hard work’s done. With an urban or hip-hop act you have to graft, you have to work hard to earn respect and it only seems to be the independent labels who are prepared to do that and they don’t really have the funding”.

Whether or not these acts achieve major status, we surely are now entering a period where they need to start addressing the growing problem of violence and gun culture on the nation’s streets. I start to mention the recent incident at a gig by So Solid’s Lisa Mafia, but find myself pulled up short by a suddenly agitated Alesha. Although I try to explain that the interest here is in how artists respond to the situation by finding their own voice, as Ms Dynamite has done, she’s still more than a little put out. “Everyone to their own. Dynamite is unique in her own way and so is every other act. Everybody is responsible for their own behaviour. You need to stop stereotyping. To me this incident with Lisa Mafia – so what if she was down there performing, so what?! There’s shootings going on in clubs all the time and it was happening long before garage music. I’m not saying that music doesn’t spur emotions in people but you need to start looking in the homes because that’s where the problem is”.

It’s not hard to see why Alesha feels so riled, even when this is far from a case of pointing accusatory finger. On the surface, the pop stylings of ‘One Night Stand’ and ‘Scandalous’ may be light years away from the grim realities of city life but, like it or not, by being part of the UK garage scene they are also part of the community that is being targeted by those looking for an easy scapegoat. It surely strikes on a personal level too, with the under siege So Solid Crew’s Harvey just happening to be her fiancé. Ultimately, though, FHM or Smash Hits aren’t going to ask these types of questions and Alesha does have some real insight into the subject.

“So Solid Crew have had a hard time but tonight they’ve got a gig down in Hackney, they’re doing a Solid Love show to tie in with the gun amnesty and the DISARM campaign. It’s a positive step and I’m glad someone even gave them the venue to do that because they probably wouldn’t have been able to do it a few months ago. I think it’s calmed down a lot now and people have started to open their eyes. You’re right, what you give out is what you give back and if you’re righting conscious, positive lyrics than it’s going to flood through. If one person makes a mistake”, she adds tellingly, “then everybody within that scene should take responsibility. We all as artists have a responsibility to the public. Music is there for people to express themselves and do something with their lives”.

Put down your weapon

The DISARM! Campaign has been established to combat gun crime in the UK by funding projects that discourage young people from getting involved in violent crime and promoting charities to help victims. Believing that music and popular culture are among the most powerful means for getting the anti-gun message across, the organisation teamed up with the Mean Fiddler at the end of April to present a series of shows across the UK capital that coincided with the end of a month long firearms amnesty. Artists included So Soild Crew (who have also thrown their weight behind the Peace On The Streets campaign), Keith Sweat & Lynden David Hall, Mica Paris & Omar, Misty In Roots, the Dreem Team, US metal band Enslaved and rising garage names Heartless Crew. Speaking at the launch, the latter’s Fonti said that he wanted to help discourage "young people from becoming involved in what is a destructive and devastating form of violent crime. If we can help to get even one gun off the street then we will have achieved something". 20,000 weapons were handed in to police across the country during the amnesty, with calls to extend it coming both from community groups and MPs.