Profile: Ms Dynamite

She made her first million only a year after her debut, took the pop industry by storm and won a string of top music honours. Last week at the Brit awards Ms Dynamite was crowned the country’s hottest music star.

To an older generation the name might sound alarming, with connotations of foul-mouthed rap music and Eminem-style screeching. But Niomi McLean-Daley (Ms Dynamite’s real name) offers a message that every parent would welcome.

In her lyrics, the 21-year-old singer has questioned gun culture and street crime, calling on young blacks to aim for more than a superficial gangsta lifestyle. Her songs, delivered in an emotive and richly textured voice, also tackle teenage motherhood and absentee fathers.

What makes Ms Dynamite so potent is an authenticity that draws on her fractured family background in north London and her surmounting of insecurity and depression to find the high moral ground — surprising qualifications for winning the Brit awards for best female solo artist and best urban act.

According to George Ergatoudis, music manager for 1Xtra, the BBC’s radio station for black music: “She’s more connected with the honesty of modern street life. The American female rappers are all talking about the same issues that obsess male rappers: sex, money and fashion. They might make good music, but in terms of lyrics Ms Dynamite wins hands down.”

Unlike the overtly sexual posturing of Britney Spears or rap stars such as Foxy Brown and Missy Elliott, McLean-Daley’s outfits proclaim that it is unnecessary to expose every inch of flesh to get ahead. Recognition and glamour, she declared, could not compare with the “satisfaction of seeing kids smile or feel more positive about themselves”.

In a BBC2 Newsnight interview two months ago she signalled a desire to enter politics, pouring scorn on Tony Blair’s government and accusing it of being out of touch. “The connotations that come with the word politics are basically middle-class rich white men who don’t care a damn what young people think,” she said.

This must have come as a blow to Alastair Campbell, who revealed only the day before that he had transferred his allegiance from Britney Spears — whose concerts he attended regularly — to Ms Dynamite.

But if McLean-Daley had been in danger of acquiring a Goody Two-Shoes image, she lost the chance last month when it was revealed that she was four months’ pregnant.

The father is Dwayne Seaforth, known as Dazzler, the star’s 22-year-old minder, who shares her home in north London and is, like her, the child of a mixed-race marriage.

The singer was blamed by her lover’s former girlfriend, Sanshica Carew, with whom he had a child, for the break-up of their relationship.

McLean-Daley caused some confusion in her acceptance speech at Thursday’s Brit awards when she thanked “my husband”, suggesting they had married secretly. Her record company hurried to deny this, explaining that it was “just a turn of phrase” and “an endearment”.

It was not the only surprise she had in store. She was originally billed to perform a duet with the soul singer Craig David, but reportedly backed out because “the stage isn’t big enough for both of us”. Instead, she was seen on video with George Michael, singing an anti-war version of Michael’s song Faith.

This made less impact than her appearance at the anti-war protest in Hyde Park last weekend. Following the Rev Jesse Jackson on the podium, she read a poem reminding the crowd of previous US debacles in Vietnam, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

It may not have been music to Tony Blair’s ears (“Mr Prime Minister, you are just a prime minister, you are not God,” she sang), but it marked McLean-Daley as unusual among today’s pop artists, who have little appetite for protest compared with their predecessors.

Such grandstanding was not the destiny she once seemed cut out for, nor the one she had in mind. She was born in West Sussex, the eldest in an extended family of 10 children. Her Scottish mother, Heather McLean, was a primary school teacher from Benbecula in the Scottish Western Isles. She was two when her father, Eyon Daley, a plumber from Jamaica, left home; the repercussions seem to have influenced much of her song-writing.

Denying stories that her father abandoned the family, she said: “He never walked out and shut the door on us. He always kept in touch.”

When her parents’ marriage disintegrated she moved with her mother and brother to Archway in north London, near her grandmother’s house.

It was the distance that kept her father away, she said, not lack of love. She added: “It must have been difficult to bring up two tiny children, especially when the adults had fallen out of love.”

Her teachers noted a love of performing at Brookfield primary, where she appeared in school plays and developed a passion for music and dancing. She also enjoyed Acland Burghley school, a 1960s-built comprehensive in Kentish Town where the intake reflected the area’s ethnic diversity. Sarah Brown, the chancellor’s wife, is a former pupil.

Things changed when McLean-Daley was 13 and was suddenly forced to grow up fast. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer, so she had to take charge of her younger brother Kingslee and half-sister Annabelle. The experience turned her into a rebel and led to a falling-out when her mother was given a clean bill of health two years later.

“I was there 100% of the time for my mum when she was ill,” she said. “But when she recovered, something in me just went. It was about me going from childhood into womanhood, but still being treated like a child. There was a huge battle of wills.”

At school she felt ugly and fat, larger than most boys. She became a tomboy, “a class clown, full of practical jokes”.

At 15 she left home to stay with her grandmother. The following year she moved into the first of two hostels, living on £25 a week. Depressed and suicidal, she stopped going out and kept the curtains closed. “All I ever used to do was smoke and drink, smoke and drink.”

But two priorities instilled by her parents kept her focused — selfrespect and the need for education. Her hostel room was spotless and at school she got nine GCSE and three A-level passes, fuelling her ambition to become a teacher or a social worker.

She began to acquire a reputation as a gifted young Mc after DJs at Raw FM, a pirate radio station, offered her a first break. In 2001 she met the underground garage producer Richard “Sticky” Forbes and within months they had recorded her single, Booo!. A polemic against violence in clubs, this ironically became an instant hit in London’s garage clubs and a pirate radio anthem, going to No 12 in the charts.

In the testosterone-driven world of hip-hop, where females are often relegated to demeaning roles, McLean-Daley was somehow confronting the rules and prospering. After a bidding war, won by Polydor, she faced a dilemma: fame or reading social anthropology at Sussex University. Fame won.

Her acclaimed first album, A Little Deeper, attracted an astonishing six nominations for the Mobo awards for black artists, winning three. Then last September McLean-Daley became the first black woman to win the coveted £20,000 Mercury music prize for best album of the year, beating David Bowie. In barely a year she had risen to the top.

By December she seemed to be stunned by her rapid rise. A little breathlessly she recounted: “I’ve released three singles, an album, met lots of my heroes and even made a record with Robbie Williams.

“He phoned me while I was in the studio and said ‘It’s Robbie,’ and I asked, ‘Robbie who? I don’t know any Robbies.’ Then he said he was Robbie Williams. I never thought someone like Robbie would just, like, ring me.”

This effusiveness seems at odds with reports that Williams’s advances were spurned when the two met at the MTV Europe awards in Barcelona the previous month.

McLean-Daley has made no secret of the fact she was delighted to be pregnant. Polydor executives, however, are said to be upset that her impending motherhood has forced the cancellation of a promotional tour of America.

But Ms Dynamite burns with a slow fuse and few critics doubt that her impact in the US will be any the less for being delayed.