Lady Sovereign orders a beer and, before the waiter can demand proof of her
age, wearily slaps her passport on the table. Having just turned 21, but
still looking no older than 15 at most, the self-styled “biggest midget in
the game” knows the drill by now. This is America, after all. She looks even
younger on her passport photo, like an angry 12-year-old with a killer
stare. “That’s my spare one,” she groans. “I look thick. Oh god! This is the
funny one. I look like a kid.”
Louise Harman is hard to pin down. She arrives at our New York rendezvous two
hours late, full of giggly apologies and face-pulling stories. Bright-eyed
and animated, dressed in her trademark red adidas gear, she looks like a
cross between Missy Elliott and Vicky Pollard. Onstage or off she is forever
the trash-talking teenage trouble-maker at the back of the school bus.
“People label me as a chav,” she says. “If anything I’m a groomed chav. My
family is basically working class, never really had spectacular jobs. If
that’s a definition of chav, then I suppose I am a chav. But I’ve made
something of it.”
That’s putting it mildly. When I first meet Sovereign, she is playing to a
million-strong crowd at MTV’s prestigious New Year’s Eve party overlooking
Times Square. Impressively, she shares the bill with multi-platinum
superstars including Gwen Stefani and My Chemical Romance.
As she gurns and growls through her punky hit single Love Me or Hate Me,
Sov’s rubber-faced performance blazes from giant video screens across the
street. Notbad going for a former underground garage MC who was playing tiny
British venues less than 18 months ago.
The atmosphere at MTV is heavily corporate and controlled, but Sov still
manages to play the gobby British punk rocker. Angry at being pressganged
into a dopey piece of screen banter, she smashes a glass of champagne on the
studio floor. “I dropped it because I just felt like doing it,” she says
afterwards. “Everyone was trying to be all safe because they were on TV.”
Like Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys, she is one of a handful of young British
artists who began as internet cults but are now making waves across the
Atlantic. She spent much of last year in the US, touring and promoting her
debut album, Public Warning. Signed to the New York-based Island Def
Jam, she is effectively a domestic artist. This meant dedicating 2006 to
cracking America, and postponing the album’s UK launch until 2007.
“America’s a hard place to break,” shesays. “And me being English, and a white
female rapper, that’s like all the negatives in one place. It wasn’t like I
decided I’ve got to conquer America and then the UK and everywhere else will
love me. It was more just how it went, you know?”
Sovereign and America certainly make strange bedfellows. On the one hand, the
US media does not share Britain’s obsession with her upbringing on a
famously rough Wembley council estate. Then again, the very bolshie
Britishness that has charmed America so far may yet prove an obstacle in the
long run. The references to hoodies, Tango and Antiques Roadshow on
Sov’s hilarious and profanity-packed Public Warning are bound
to get lost in translation. Her thick Cockney-accented rapping has already
proved problematic.
“A lot of people confuse her lyrics,” admits Zak Biddu, Sov’s manager. “We had
to rerecord the chorus of Love Me or Hate Me several times. Where she
says: ‘If you love me then thank you’, people thought she was saying f***
you.”
Sov’s American adventure began in 2005, when she was plucked from relative
novelty status in the UK by the rapper and hip-hop tycoon Jay-Z. It was Rob
Stevenson, an Island Def Jam A&R man, who spotted her early single Random.
“She had that thing you always look for,” he says. “It’s impossible to
explain but you know it when you see it. She was so engaging, so fresh.”
The 19-year-old was summoned to a Pop Idol-style meeting with Jay-Z,
along with the producer L. A. Reid and Usher, the R&B star. Stevenson
recalls her panic at this summit. “As I saw the blood run out of her face I
almost threw up,” he says. “That was one of the worst music meetings I’ve
ever had. She was the first artist I had brought to Jay, so my ass was on
the line as much as hers.”
“I was intimidated by Jay,” Sov admits. “I was only in that office for less
than ten minutes, and I spat some lyrics. I really didn’t get my point
across. I honestly thought I’d f***** up. But then an hour later I got a
phone call: ‘Welcome to Def Jam’. They must have just thought I was genuine.”
In October she scored a Top 50 pop hit with Love Me or Hate Me, the
highest entry for a British artist on the Billboard rap and R&B
charts. The album sold a respectable 80,000 copies by Christmas.
“People got into it, then got a little scared that she was a novelty act,”
Stevenson recalls. “But MTV fell in love with her, and the visual element
changes everything. People are discovering it now on her own terms.”
But the jury is still out on whether America will crack Lady Sovereign rather
than vice versa. A collaboration with the R&B producer Pharrell Williams
in Miami last year collapsed because she was “depressed”. In November she
cut short an LA show and left the stage in tears. A chest infection was
blamed. “I love it here, apart from when I get sick,” Sov shrugs. “But s***
happens.”
The strain of hopping back and forth to London, where her mother is seriously
ill with a brain tumour, may also be taking its toll. Last year she flew her
mother out to the States, but before Christmas she cancelled a day of
interviews when her mum’s condition took a grave turn. The stroppy bravado
clearly masks a softer side.
Sovereign’s love life has certainly suffered for her career. She hasn’t been
in a “proper relationship” for four years, she says. Although she prefers to
keep her sexual orientation vague, she is something of a gay icon. According
to internet rumours, she is bisexual. Is that right? “I don’t know,” she
says uneasily. “I’m just me... I don’t like labels. Whatever tickles my
fancy, to be honest.” So does that mean men and women? “It could mean
whatever you want it to mean,” she smiles, suddenly tight-lipped. Subject
closed.
Sovereign accepts that favouring America over Britain could yet backfire at
home. Some UK pundits certainly feel that she should have launched Public
Warning a year ago, as initially scheduled, instead of postponing it
until after the US release. As the media’s fascination with “chav” culture
turns sour in the wake of Jade-gate, she may have missed her ideal launch
window.
“Maybe,” she frowns. “But things happen for a reason, that’s how I take life.
It might not have sold if I’d have put it out last year, I don’t know. I
don’t think people in the UK have any idea what I’m doing. F*** knows, man.
I just hope it does well.”
Bursting with strong tunes and quickfire lyrics, Public Warning sounds
just as fine in 2007 as it did in 2006. But perhaps Sovereign is right to be
nervous about her profile at home. So far, most of her live British shows
have been small cognoscenti affairs, while her sole UK Top Ten appearance
was a bizarre cover version of her antiwork anthem 9 to 5 by the Big
Brother survivor Preston, of the Ordinary Boys.
“I wrote the song, so I got the pennies,” she grins. “In all honesty mine was
a lot better, but their version was all right. I was just f***** off that
Radio One would play their version but they wouldn’t f****** play mine.
Radio won’t touch me with a bargepole, for some reason. They’ll play Lily
Allen and she’s a bit obnoxious.” The rise of Lily Allen appears to be a
sore point with Sov, who vaguely recalls sharing “drunken chats” with her
fellow pop princess when both were unknown clubbers. But maybe, I suggest,
Allen’s success will actually help Sovereign by opening listeners up to
gobby, lairy, cocky London girl-pop.
“Don’t say that!” she groans. “I will have my own success; I don’t need Lily
Allen. I’m not disrespecting the girl, but I heard the otherday that Lily
Allen’s supposedly got more friends on MySpace than anyone. You want to go
and see who’s got more friends on MySpace, love! I’ve got twice as many! Her
and people like Arctic Monkeys get all this recognition for establishing
themselves on the internet – I’m sorry, I was the pioneer. Five years ago I
was doing it.”
Outspoken and opinionated, Sov inevitably attracts hostile reactions. But
mainly online, she says. “I’m more gift-of-the-gab,” says the queen of
ASBO-lesbo aggro. “I don’t fight unless I’m really angry. But when I do, I’m
a maniac. Seriously, don’t f*** with Sovereign. I won’t stop until I hurt
someone.”
Only on rare occasions does it turn physical. Such as in December last year,
during a brief visit home, when she was involved in an altercation with a
gang of girls in a North London drinking den.
“I don’t know why it went off, some people just hate me,” she sighs, pulling a
Catherine Tate “Am I bovvered?” face. “They thought I was being too big for
my boots. People like taking a rip out of me, saying I’m no good. But I’m
bloody amazing, I don’t care what anyone says. I’m a genius.”
Lady Sovereign's album Public Warning is out on Monday (Island). She
plays the Scala, N1 (020-7833 2022), on Wednesday
