Roots Manuva: A Poetic Pallette

It's difficult to imagine anyone less sensitive than the 50 Cents of this world, so it's still refreshing to meet a genuinely thin-skinned rapper. Tupac may have famously apologised to this mother, but Roots Manuva goes one step further: he's out and out petrified of her. "My Mum says my music's an acquired taste," he says in his deep South London baritone. "She doesn't like my vulgar metaphors and tells me I use the patois wrong."

If the truth be told, Roots barely swears. Give or take the odd frig, he's genteel compared to most potty-mouthed rappers. "I put on a family show man, I want to wake people up, get 'em to consider the metaphysical." His Pentecostal Christian parents; born in a Caribbean town called Banana Hole, loom large in his lyrics. He raps about speaking tongues, crafty spliffs on tower block roofs and the insecurities that come from leaving behind a rigid belief system. But he's always sanguine, never bitter: "I always tried to project this image of a goody-two-shoes but then I'd be upstairs on the sex line." Using regret and self-depreciation, he paints in a palette that poets, not rappers, would recognize.

This approach has obviously brought him success and the money gains that come with it. He started out flogging his records from a suitcase, armed with a waterpistol and pretending to hold people up. Money is no impediment to creativity though: "It gives me more scope for self-indulgence." Although he's keen to point out he's not some high-rollin', bling-bling flossing megastar. "I hope people that listen to me will realize that it's not all about thousand pound shoes, designer labels and gold necklaces. Although," he adds in a typically meek, almost apologetic tone, "sometimes I'm a bit guilty of that myself."

He claims that his role is now as an artist. "I'm not one of those dudes that paints pretty pictures of water jugs or apples. I'd fill a room full of pickled gonads, if you know what I mean." But it's pretty hard to ever know what he means, so buried in poetic.arcane language are his ideas. All this sense of incoherence and confusion is apt, he claims. "I try to play the role of the guy on the corner with the Super T shouting at passersby. Barbershop conversations inspire me you know?" He compares the way he shapes, hones and alters his lyrics to the process of sorting out the EQ on a drum machine. A twiddle here, a twiddle there and you've got it sounding perfect. More troubled now by "the big bad man with the pay cheque," his poetry has lost none of its bite and humour, nor its sense of outrage.

Roots still moves in the same circles, keen to point out that he's not mixing with Jay Z. The label that signed him, Big Dada, started off as a collaboration between Ninja Tunes and hip hop journalist Will Ashon. He is keen to continue the collaborative approach that marked his early years grafting at the bottom of the UK hip-hop scene which barely existed. Now he plays with heavyweights like Coldcut and Leftfield, and is impressed by improvisers The Bays. "I wanted to go on stage with them," he says before bashfully admitting, "But I got too drunk and had to be taken home." He claims to have shaken off the paranoia and psychosis that lingered around his cannabis taking days, penitent for his wayward times. "I'm cool now, fresh. I just wanna keep on shape shifting dialect."