I’d sleep until late afternoon, then watch crappy chat shows One day I thought, ‘This has gotta stop. Why am I the only one not doing something positive?’ Music saved me It’s my backbone, man. It brought me to life.”Shystie was already MCing, having started at 17. She did three singles, then she left the underground.’ “Such achievements were not even a daydream when Shystie was 18, living with her family in the sleepy north-London suburb of Edmonton, to where they had just moved.

Drifting between dull jobs in Tesco and telesales, she felt trapped “I was just bumming it. I don’t want to lose the respect of the grime scene where I came from, with fans saying, ‘Oh, she’s sold out. I didn’t want it to sound like Dizzee’s, or whoever’s the hottest whatever Where they took the right, I took the left. Where some people might have gone wrong, I’m using that to my advantage.

Because some artists in the UK have left gaps, they’ve left doors open where they should have closed them Ms Dynamite’s a nice lady, but I’m not like her. And those styles blend with styles imported from neighbouring countries – Cuba, Colombia, and Dominica – to create, not Tex-Mex, but a wonderfully variegated thing we should perhaps dub Mex-Mix. “Because I’m being compared a lot to Ms Dynamite,” she explains, “I didn’t want my album to sound like hers, or Jamelia’s, or Lisa Maffia’s I studied guys’ albums as well. But she is at her best when she lets her imagination roam free from that world, on tracks such as “Questions”, which wittily shoots down assumptions about her in the style of a daytime talk show.Shystie’s music contains touches of gospel, soul, electro and even opera. Following the achievements of artists as diverse as Dizzee Rascal and Ms Dynamite, the 21-year-old Shystie (aka Chanelle Scott) is the first star of grime, the new underground dance genre descended from UK garage, to sign directly to a major label; she is also the first female British MC to have success (Ms Dynamite is really a singer).

Her quicksilver, hectoring rapping has qualified her to compete in New York this summer for the title of fastest rapper in the world.
Shystie made her name with “I Love You”, last year’s cheeky white-label response to Dizzee’s female put-down “I Luv You”; her new single, “One Wish”, is a tribute to life on estates such as the one in Hackney, east London, where she grew up. The debut album by Shystie, Diamond in the Dirt, is the latest landmark in the onward march of black British music into the mainstream. “Fix me up with your sweet dose/ now I’m feeling like a ghost,” proclaims the singer David McTavish Superb.. Great tremolo guitar vibrates you down the track and on to never-never-forever-land.10 VACUUM CLEANER Tintern Abbey (1967)From the outset, this is a jewel of a track. The guitar solo sweeps in on a wave of phaze and settles on an elongated feedback wall.