AKON wanders into his penthouse hotel suite in Central London. “Hustling all day, every day,” reads the slogan on his T-shirt, although it is partly obscured by a huge swinging pendant. Made out of diamond-encrusted (“iced out”) platinum, it spells Akon Konvict, the name of his record label, with a pair of arms crossed and shackled at the wrists.

The singer from Atlanta, Georgia, (who never gives his age) wears a similarly iced-out platinum watch on his left wrist and a matching platinum “handcuff” on his right wrist. Later, when he eventually smiles, a diamond sparkles from a front tooth. His eyes, however, remain watchful. “There was a magazine went and showed all my jewellery and put the prices next to it, and ever since then I’ve had to hire extra security,” he says.

Does he carry a gun? “I have to. Every city I have one set up for me. I’m a target now. There’s gonna be a lot of jealous people that’s trying to rob me. It comes with the territory. You got to be prepared for every situation. Last trip I was here we were making a video at a place called Peckham and there was a shoot-out. Some people came at us with guns. They claimed they were shooting as a salute.”

No wonder Akon called his album Trouble. It seems to follow the man around. Mind you, he has not had any great difficulty in persuading the world to listen to his music. The album has been at or near the top of the chart for the past month, while his single Lonely is currently at No 1 for the second week. The song, which uses a bizarre, speeded-up sample of the 1950s crooner Bobby Vinton, has had a polarising effect on listeners. Did he make the voice sound like a chipmunk so that it would appeal to children?

“I was making music as a hobby at the time I made this album. There was no intention of putting it out. So I pretty much could do what I wanted to do. I’d go through experiences in my life and I’d write music about them. So, me and my girl broke up, I wrote about it, and speeding the voice up just made it sound like the voice was crying. It gave it that emotion. Later, when it came out, it became a novelty.”

Although the singer, whose full name is Aliaune Akon Thiam, was born in St Louis, he lived in Senegal until the age of seven, before moving with his Senegalese family to New Jersey. His love of music came from his father, the jazz percussionist Mor Thiam. Akon’s African roots come to the surface on tracks such as Ghetto and Pot of Gold.

“It is more international the way I’m expressing it,” he says. “You can put it on an R&B shelf or you can put it on a World Music shelf. I know I’m African, and I would never forget to represent that to the fullest.”

And yet Akon is first and foremost an American who is often categorised as a hip-hop artist and who has been aggressively marketed by his record company as if he were a rapper. “The lyrics are pretty much influenced by hip-hop,” he explains. “I sing about what rappers rap about. But I do not consider my genre to be rap.”

Of all the life experiences that have contributed to Akon’s development, perhaps the most significant was a three-year spell in prison, his punishment for being the ringleader of a car-theft operation. “We used to have a whole bunch of exotic cars: Porsches, Lamborghinis, Mercedes, BMWs. We would steal them from the lot, reregister them and put them back out on the street. That’s all it was. It was really like robbing from the rich to give to the poor. I just wanted to be rich. I didn’t care how I got it. But I kept it non-violent . . . where possible.”

While Akon remains unrepentant about his crimes, he is curiously grateful for the time he spent behind bars. “It really changed my whole life around,” he says. “I thought it was a blessing for me to be locked up. If I hadn’t I probably would have ended up dead. It felt like 300 years, not three. But I learnt so much.”

While in prison he wrote Locked Up, the song that would ultimately set him on the road to global success. “There was no message. I just wrote it because I was locked up and I had to get this feeling out. But so many people could relate to that song. Maybe they weren’t physically locked up in jail, but they were locked up in some other way, whether it be in a relationship or a job or whatever.”

A more tangible legacy of Akon’s life of crime was the three recording studios that he owns in Los Angeles, where he was able to produce and record his songs to a professional standard “as a hobby”, independently of any record company involvement.

“That was my investment from the car ‘business’,” Akon says. “That’s the one thing I’ve got to show for it after it was all over and done. I didn’t spend nothing making the album. It was all done before I even signed my record deal. So everything that’s coming in now, it’s all profit.”

Akon is adamant that he does not endorse the gangster lifestyle. A deeply religious man, he has never drunk alcohol or smoked, let alone taken or sold drugs, and with three young sons of his own he is acutely aware of the way in which popular performers attract hero-worship. Gangsta, one of the most powerful tracks on his album, repudiates the use of violent imagery in music as a way of appealing to youngsters.

“A lot of rappers glorify the gangster life and they never even walked that road. You got kids looking up to these people, trying to act the way they are. And if you’re a rapper out there exploiting it, promoting it, then I’m coming after you. It’s not something you want to encourage kids to do.”

Akon’s album Trouble is available on Universal

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