Listen to Natty

You could be forgiven for thinking Marley’s ghost had got up, stood up once more. Natty is small and slight, with dreadlocks and self-determining facial hair. As with Bob Marley, his white European father’s genes are expressed in fine features and light-brown skin. His music is a kind of soulful reggae, with an upbeat but sometimes melancholy vibe. He is even a keen footballer. When he opens his mouth to speak, however, a warm, voluble and unmistakably north London voice comes out. “My accent is Holloway Road, y’knaa?” he says, to demonstrate. “A bit cockney, a bit middle-class, a bit Jamaican.” Hold on: since when did musicians admit to being even partly middle-class?

Natty, 24, is friendly and open, with a confidence not dented by the label bidding war that he provoked. That said, he was not impressed by the language some of the execs used to cajole him: “They’re talking all this bullshit about, ‘We’re going to make you a star’ — they actually say that stuff. One guy said, ‘Have you ever imagined yourself on a billboard?’ ” He laughs incredulously.

His box-fresh, sports-casual appearance is the result, he admits, of a recent influx of smart togs. “I’ll try not to get corrupted too much,” he says, “but who’s going to say no to free clothes?”

It turns out reggae is one of several styles that mingle in his songs. He is indifferent to genre and has had an expedient association with the indie fraternity, supporting Adele, Kate Nash and Hard-Fi. The British reggae scene at present is an archival affair, mainly involving sporadic victory laps by visiting greats of yesteryear, such as Horace Andy and (Natty’s idol) Lee Scratch Perry, both of whom he has supported.

“I did a few indie venues at the start because there’s no other venues,” he explains. There is another reason: he has strong connections with the scene because he worked as a studio engineer for many months before crossing the divide into musicianship, notably on Razorlight’s debut album.

It was valuable experience. Though Natty was a teenage bedroom beat-maker, and put out a hip-hop-style mix tape as his calling card early this year, his songs are free of production trickery and re-create realistically the sound of his band playing. And, although he also produced the album, his studio expertise seems not to have led him to meddle. “Well, you see, it taught me what not to do,” he says. “I’ve worked with quite a few producers where I’d see the life get slowly taken out of the music.”

Songwise, Natty accepts the Marley comparison — “Well, Marley and Fela,” he says, referring to Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat pioneer, “in the way they mixed up the message with a groove you could just get into, but when you get home, you’ll play it again and this time you’ll have a proper listen.”

His lyrics are sharply focused. Although he categorises the album as "a mix of conscious lyrics, a couple of love songs and grooves that sound like we're having a good time", he also admits: "There are issues I want to talk about."

Natty was caught up in both the bus bomb on July 7, 2005 and the shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes by the police at Stockwell Tube station. His feeling that something profound has changed in London is one of those “issues”. He has collaborated with the producer and composer Nitin Sawhney on a melancholy track called Days of Fire for Sawhney’s new album, London Undersound, due in October, and a sense of sadness about the capital city also imbues Natty’s debut single.

That song, Cold Town, has provoked some extreme reactions from those who have taken lines such as "No blacks, no Irish, please" out of context. "When I wrote it, it was a tense environment," he recalls. "It was just at the time when it was still hard for Asian people getting on trains with bags, and the hoodie culture was starting to gather steam. All this stuff was on my mind; that's why I wrote it. I got hate mail — some guy threatened to kill me. He said, 'I don't like the way you're representing Englishmen. If I see you, it won't be in a cold town; it will be in a cold box.' "

In another song, the line “Gonna burn down this place and take you all down with me” is similarly open to misconstruction. “I was putting myself into the position of, if I was captured as a slave and people were trying to take me away from my home, that’s what I would say. I also wanted to show the situation now and say, ‘Arewe in the slavery aftershow? And why don’t some people want to see it?’ Look at the state of Africa now. And I’m not just talking about Africa — all you see in the news is violence and black youths. The street culture, which comes from, for want of a better word, black culture, for some reason devalues life.”

Badness is a running theme in Natty’s songs. “That whole thing of ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, cool, I’m just buying a strap \, y’kna’. I’ve seen a 12-year-old walk into some other guy’s house and try to sell him an Uzi. People are talking about it, but not in the right way. What did colonialism and slavery do to black people? We’re living now in a mind-set where we’re not treated as second-class, but we treat ourselves as second-class. It’s cool to have your hood up; it’s cool to be strapped; it’s cool to have a gun. The fact that you’ve killed someone, that’s a cool thing. It’s cool to almost be killed.”

Natty admits he was not always “on the straight and narrow” as a youngster, but he underwent a change in his thinking: “When I was about 17, it all changed, and I stopped trying to be the baddest man. I started growing dreadlocks, because dreadlocks come from Africa and they keep me in touch with where I’m from.”

This is a reggae musician whose songs are peppered with “I an’ I”s, and often seem to be sung in a Caribbean accent that he insists is merely the patois of his London stomping ground; whose name derives from his teenage friends’ amusement at the almighty telling-off he received from his mother when he ruined her copy of Marley’s Natty Dread album; but whose mix tape made everyone expect an urban or a dub artist — one who had learnt Cubase in his bedroom, then blagged his way into a studio engineer’s career, then blagged his way into producing his own debut album. The parts seem slightly out of kilter, but the whole is as smart as you like.

The album Man Like I is out on July 21 on Atlantic/Vibes & Pressure

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