'I spent years thinking I was stupid'

Official Post Date: 23 Sep 2002

Her GCSE results were the biggest surprise in Ms Dynamite's life - then she won the £20,000 Mercury music prize. Tom Horan meets her

Triumphant but amazed: 'I keep thinking I'm going to wake up tomorrow and feel like a famous person,' says 21-year-old Niomi Daley

In the gritty north London corridor that links Kentish Town to Archway, Sunday night's earthquake is not the only recent event to have caused a disturbance. A few nights earlier, another tremor rocked the normally anonymous neighbourhood when 21-year-old Niomi Daley, aka Ms Dynamite, won Britain's premier music award, the £20,000 Mercury prize. The place has been buzzing ever since.

Seeing off David Bowie and favourite The Streets, the self-effacing singer and rapper from the world of urban soul music was a surprise winner. The bookies certainly had her down as a long shot. But the judges excelled themselves that night, for her debut album, A Little Deeper, is a rich and involving snapshot of life in a modern British city - and packed with catchy tunes.

Her triumph is made all the more compelling for the fact that, in the week she won it, the street-tough Daley should have been starting an anthropology degree at the University of Sussex.

"I remember the day my GCSE results came through," says Daley, who picked up nine at high grades, followed by three good A-levels. "I marched straight over to see the teacher who was in charge of the exams. I said: 'There must be some mistake here. I can't have got all this lot.' I just never believed I had it in me. I spent years thinking I was stupid."

Daley is sitting in a cavernous photographic studio a few minutes' walk from the scene of her exam triumphs. Outside, the national press are stacked up like jumbo jets over Heathrow, waiting for their moment to meet her.

Daley went to Acland Burghley school, an imposing, Sixties-built comprehensive whose intake reflects the extreme social diversity that is typical of so many areas of London. The chancellor's wife, Sarah Brown, is a former pupil. Daley glows with a warmth and self-possession that belie the love-hate relationship that she had with education. "I wouldn't say I was the model student," she says. "But Burghley was good for my social life. It had people from all classes, religions and races. But it had a very positive effect on me. I learnt that people are people, regardless of where they come from."

It was while Daley was at school that her mother developed cancer. Though she overcame the disease, their relationship deteriorated and Daley moved out of the family home in Kentish Town and into a series of hostels. She is keen not to make a fuss about this period in her life, but it was clearly a difficult time. "At one point, I had to live on £25 a week. But people want to try and make out that my upbringing was terrible, because it makes a better story," she says. "The fact is, I've always had lots of love and support from my family."

Daley has roots in two islands that could not be more extreme opposites. Her mother, Heather McClean, a primary school teacher, comes from Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. Her father, Eyon Daley, is a plumber from Jamaica. He moved out when she was two, though she still has a good relationship with him. He went on to have four more children, as did her mother.

In a fatherless family, Daley had to take on responsibility for her brothers and sisters at an early age. As an eight year old, she would babysit while her mother took on extra jobs at night. This seems to have grounded the young singer in a domestic realpolitik that informs much of her songwriting. One of the things that makes her an unusual talent is that she tackles, head-on, the tricky subjects of teenage motherhood and absentee fathers. Yet Daley seems only now to be realising the effect that her lyrics may have.

"I think and I write," she says, twisting a thin gold chain that shows at the neck of a dove-grey Nike tracksuit. "They're the two things I do obsessively. It's as if my subconscious takes over. It's like being hypnotised.

"What comes out is raw. I'm very honest. When I wrote my album, I never thought about who would listen to it, or what the consequences of it would be."

Though her songs often dwell on questions of race and teenage gun crime, Daley's voice is a strongly moral one. In fact, there is something of the sermon in much of her best work. She advocates self-improvement through study. She promotes love and tolerance in a way not dissimilar to the American soul star Mary J Blige, who is 11 years her senior. "Black roses grow from concrete," says one line on A Little Deeper. It is heartening that for all the bad-boy posturing of So Solid Crew - with whom she has recorded - Ms Dynamite's world view has struck a chord with a much wider constituency.

"I never had a picture of the type of person I would appeal to," she says. "But I'm a young black woman who lives in the city, so I suppose, if anyone, that's who I had in mind. I get people from the countryside, I get old, rich-looking blokes - it amazes me. I was on a plane the other day and this middle-aged man in a suit in first class said: 'Are you Ms Dynamite? I love your album.' I was really taken aback.

"The social problems I talk about generally affect only a certain type of person - and they will only ever change if a different type of person hears about them. That is really exciting. It means that the people who can do something about these problems are hearing about them. If my music does nothing else, I want it to make people think."

If her directness and positive tone form a crucial part of her appeal, Daley has plenty of authenticity, that cornerstone of street culture. She has paid her dues on the underground scene, graduating through the circuit of pirate radio stations and word-of-mouth shows.

This route to stardom - in which craft and content are paramount and surface appeal of little relevance - has suited Daley. She is wary of the overtly sexual approach that so many young women in music end up taking.

"I always felt ugly as a teenager," she says. "I felt fat. I was bigger than all the boys in my school. I felt like a giant. So I became a tomboy, the class clown, full of practical jokes. And even though I'm over that now, I still don't like all that hair and make-up business."

In the light of her tomboy period, and the way her father abandoned her mother, Daley is a little wary of relationships, she says. In one song on A Little Deeper, she tells, in a rather arch and languorous song-cum-rap, the story of a man she yearned for, who ignored her for years and then phoned constantly when her debut single was so hot it was fetching £100 a copy.

"There was no anger," she says. "It was just my cheeky way of letting him know that I knew what was going on. If it takes material success and other people's opinions to make you like me, then I definitely don't want to be with you. Mind you, by then, I didn't fancy him anyway."

She pauses and pulls out a packet of Benson & Hedges. "I'm a strong-headed and stubborn woman when it comes to relationships. This is my standard," she says. She raises one hand flat, at about head height. Her nails are a manicurist's fantasy: straight, unadorned and about an inch and a half long.

"This is what I'll settle for. If you are not here, or above it, then" She gives a wave. Her smile illuminates the studio.

At next week's prestigious MOBO (music of black origin) Awards, which celebrate jazz, hip hop, reggae and R&B, Daley is nominated in six categories. It's not out of the question that she will win the lot. But the fact that she is performing at the event at London Arena seems to concern her more.

"I can't believe I'm going," she says. "It always looks so brilliant on the telly. I keep thinking I'm going to wake up tomorrow and feel like a famous person. Tomorrow, I'm going to feel like this amazing artist that people tell me I am. But I never do. And I think it's a good thing."