If this is the moment that Derek Asafo — aka Sway — crosses over, you can hardly blame him for exercising a little caution. For any British hip-hop and R&B aspirant on the cusp of mainstream acceptance, there’s nothing so easily mislaid as the core following that thrust you there in the first place.

Where Sway is concerned, there’s even more reason to be careful. Since bagging the Best Hip-Hop gong at last year’s Mobos, the producer/MC born in London to a Ghanaian mother says he has been barely able to leave his house for the industry chequebooks waved in front of him.

It doesn’t take much time in the company of this debut album to work out what the majors see in him. Wherever the randomiser stops you’re never more than five minutes away from a potential hit single. Up to Speed is a whip-smart series of regional shout-outs dispensed over locomotive beats and a sly steal from Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain. Sick World takes as its subject matter the depraved imagination of the 21st-century child and leavens it with a chorus that should, in time, cling barnacle-like to the national psyche.

Needless to say, Sway’s own imagination is no slouch. Last year, when Kanye West set out to conflate his own patter with a succession of soaring orchestral soul breaks, he enlisted the arranger Jon Brion to help him out. By sparer means Sway manages to hit similar peaks on the heart-on-sleeve soliloquising of Month in the Summer.

He’s laugh-out-loud funny, too — always the best way to make a serious point. Hence on Hype Boys, when drawing a line in the sand between his own interior world and that of the gangsta: “These rappers couldn’t see me coming/Even if they were vaginas with spectacles.”

And, almost uniquely in the field of hip-hop, his skits never fail to raise a smile, in particular the “ad” for the new album by Sway’s Ghanaian alter ego, MC Charlie Boy.

Deftly navigating syncopating snares and Bernard Herr- mann chords, Download sees Sway tearing into the double standards of artists who rely on file-sharing to spread their music only to get indignant about its illegality when they have secured a deal. Coming a week after Arctic Monkeys smashed sales records with an album of widely available songs, Sway’s own contribution to the debate isn’t just timely. It’s a tacit nod of acknowledgement to the fans who voted him ahead of 50 Cent and the Game for that Mobo — in spite of the fact that no music had been made commercially available at the time. Indeed, it’s hard to see what Sway might gain by yielding to corporate overtures at this point. Having come this far under his own steam, there’s no reason why This is my Demo shouldn’t take him all the way.

Dcypha

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