Roots Manuva: A Poetic Pallette (PRINT ONLY - SHORT)

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. 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. 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."

The label that signed him, Big Dada, started off as a collaboration between Ninja Tunes and hip hop journalist Will Ashton, and Roots is eager to continue the collaborative approach that marked his early years grafting at the bottom of the UK hip-hop scene. His says that his role is that of an artist, steering away from pretty paintings of twee subjects like water jugs and 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, with a twiddle here and there until it's 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.