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After a five-year hiatus, the 2002 Mercury winner tells Killian Fox why she’s about to blow up the urban music scene all over again In October 2005, the rapper Ms Dynamite released her second album, Judgement Days . Unlike her 2002 debut, A Little Deeper , which attracted rave reviews and won the Mercury music prize, triumphing over David Bowie and the Streets, the follow-up was met with a muted response. It wasn’t a total disaster – one reviewer called it “no disgrace”; the first single went to No 25 in the UK charts, but the north London MC wasn’t satisfied. “I had a conversation with the label and said, ‘It’s not getting good reviews, I don’t feel there’s a single that’s going to save it, and I don’t want to clutch at straws. It’s not working, so let’s not waste any more money or time. Let’s just leave it there.’” It’s hard to determine which was more surprising: her appeal or the label’s decision to go along with it, although the forthrightness of the former might account for the obliging nature of the latter. “They were all right about it,” she insists. “They really were.” The label pulled the plug. Future releases and live appearances were cancelled and Ms Dynamite withdrew from the music scene without setting a date for her return. She hasn’t put out a single under her own name in half a decade. That’s not to say she disappeared completely. Shortly after the release of Judgement Day , in January 2006, she was arrested outside a central London nightclub and sentenced to 60 hours of community service for assaulting a female police officer. The following November, she had a 100mph race-track collision with the lead singer of AC/DC during the filming of Sky One reality show The Race . She ended up in hospital with head injuries, but the experience didn’t deter her from taking part in Hell’s Kitchen , the Marco Pierre White cooking boot camp, in 2009. Now, at long last, Ms Dynamite is back to doing what she does best. If you’ve been paying close attention to the urban music scene over the past 18 months, you’ll have noticed her adding her voice to a series of underground floor-shakers, including DJ Zinc’s “Wile Out”. She also appeared on “Lights on”, the second hit single from London dubstep star Katy B, one of a generation of young female MCs who cites Ms Dynamite as an influence. On 18 July, she will release a floor-shaker of her own, her first new single since 2006. Called “Neva Soft”, it augurs a darker, more adventurous new direction for the 30-year-old and hints that her long-awaited third album, which she plans to release early next year, will be something out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, she’ll be whetting our appetites at a host of music festivals this summer, including Glastonbury and Bestival. After a year and a half of playing to intimate crowds in dark, sweaty clubs, Ms Dynamite is itching to break into the mainstream once again. “Yeah I’m ready,” she tells me. “I want the new stuff to be the biggest and best that it can possibly be. Up until now, it’s been about me finding my feet again and making my space, but now…” she grins, “I’m ready to take it as far as it can go.” When she had her first big break in 2002, Ms Dynamite, whose real name is Niomi McLean-Daley, was considerably less well prepared. “If you had asked me back then what I wanted to do, I would have said I’d be a teacher. I’d never thought I could have a career in music.” We are sitting in the corner of a Spanish restaurant in north London, not far from where she grew up in Archway. When she first started giving interviews nine years ago, Dynamite would come dressed in tracksuits and peaked caps. Today, she wears an elegant salmon-pink blouse with white trousers and a long, pale pink coat. Her hair is pulled tight to the back of her head where it spills out in a dramatic afro. A string of pearls hangs down almost to her waist and she toys with it as she speaks. Her music career came about by accident, she tells me, when she was 17. “I went out to a birthday party, had a bit to drink and decided to get on the mike. I was taking the piss, just having fun, and that was that. Totally forgotten about. But then a couple of months later an old family friend who was starting a garage radio station said, ‘I heard you’re an MC.’” She went along with it and agreed to perform on his station. “When I walked off, I thought: why did you say that? You’re not an MC. You don’t even like garage music. I hated garage at the time. But that was the attitude I had back then: my mouth spoke before I thought about what I was saying.” She didn’t just convince her friend at the radio of her talents: she convinced the entire UK garage scene. The fiery energy she radiated on stage and her motormouth, ragga-influenced raps brought her to the attention of So Solid Crew, who invited her to collaborate. She featured on a massive underground hit by DJ Sticky called “Booo!”, which cracked the charts in 2001. By then, she was experimenting with a singing voice that was softer and more melodic than the harsh Jamaican patois she spat on the garage tracks. The lyrics she was writing dealt, often in a fiercely personal way, with pressing social problems – urban poverty and violence, drug addiction, absent fathers – but the soulful melodies were perfectly pitched to the mainstream. In June 2002, a major label released her debut album. Three months later, Ms Dynamite became the first-ever black female solo artist to win the Mercury music prize. “One day, I was living in a hostel, going to college and on jobseeker’s allowance,” she recalls. “The next, I was walking into my local newsagent and seeing my name and face splashed all over the papers. It was as quick as that.” One particular song captured the popular imagination, with the help of a simple introduction. “I’m Ms Dy-na-mi-TEE-ee,” she sang on the chorus, putting an emphasis on the penultimate syllable. It was irresistible. Complete strangers would approach her on the street and sing “Dy-Na-Mi-Tee” back to her. It wasn’t just the urban music kids doing it, it was their grandparents, too, and anyone else with half an ear to what was going on in pop. “It was really good fun,” she says of those heady days, “but there was loads of pressure that I didn’t acknowledge at the time. I’m definitely the kind of person who, when the pressure is on, convinces themselves that everything’s fine. It’s only when I get out of it that I think: what the hell?” To intensify things further, she found out, just as she was about to embark on a tour of Europe and the US, that she was pregnant. The father was Dwayne Seaforth, her 22-year-old bodyguard and later her fiance. They had planned to have a baby together, she makes clear. The couple separated in 2005. Their son, Shavaar, is nearly eight now and she is clearly smitten with him. “I don’t even know what to say about him,” she tells me with an intake of breath. “He’s amazing, amazing.” Having a baby gave her a chance to reflect on how much her life had changed. “It was possibly a part of me putting the brakes on. I was ready to be a mum and I wasn’t going to let anything take away from that.” She put her career on hold, but not for long enough, she believes. “I came back and did the second album, telling myself I was ready to go back into music,” she says, “but I wasn’t. When the first single didn’t go so great, I took it as a sign that I wasn’t ready.” When she persuaded the label to let her stop promoting the album, did she have any sense of how long her hiatus from Ms Dynamite would be? “To be honest, I didn’t really have a plan. Some artists can work no matter what, and that’s great, but I’m not that kind of artist. I write from my spirit and my soul, from what I’m feeling and experiencing. And looooads” – she stretches out the word – “came out on the first album. So I didn’t think about it. I just needed to live.” She interpreted this need in a variety of ways. One was to go on a reality TV show and drive cars fast around a racetrack, regardless that she had never operated a manual gearbox before. The crash, when it came, was borne out of a 100mph collision with the flamboyant AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson. “No bones were broken,” she says, “but I had severe bruising to the left side of my brain. I lost my memory for a while. Six months later, I still couldn’t feel my fingers and toes.” She took part in The Race because she is a self-confessed adrenaline junkie. It was her love of food and cooking that lured her into Hell’s Kitchen . She let slip that she was a vegetarian who ate fish and she was duly presented with a tank full of eels, the order being to grab one and chop off its head. It was, in spite of this, a really good experience, she says: “I loved it.” An even more revelatory bundle of life experience awaited her at home. “I don’t want to get too bogged down in it, but the thing is, I haven’t taught my son a fraction of what he’s taught me. He makes me really look at myself.” Not long ago, she tried to explain to him why swearing was wrong. “But you swear in your music,” he countered. McLean-Daley likes to think of Ms Dynamite as her incandescent alter-ego, a foul-mouthed foil to shy, well-mannered Niomi, so she said: “That’s a good point but that’s Ms Dynamite swearing.” He was having none of it. “But you are Ms Dynamite,” he informed her. Was the decision to put her career on hold in order to devote time to her son related to her own upbringing? She was born in 1981 to a Jamaican father, Eyon Daley, and a Scottish mother, Heather McLean, a teacher from the Outer Hebrides. Her parents separated when Niomi was two. When she was 12, her mother was diagnosed with cancer and the responsibility for taking care of her younger siblings fell on Niomi’s shoulders. Her relationship with her mother became strained and at 15 she left home to live in a hostel. “Yeah, without a doubt,” she says, though she is quick to emphasise how difficult things were then and, by contrast, how lucky she has been with her child. “We had real ups and downs and lots of sorrowful times within my family. Our emotions were heightened, we were trying to do the best we could. “There were times when I absolutely loved taking care of my brothers and sisters. Then there were other times when I just wanted to be a teenager and it was a real responsibility and a pressure and a chore and I hated it. I remember feeling like, I can’t look after everyone and I can’t have a bit of freedom. That’s probably what it boiled down to. The freedom to be who I was and to live my life. In the end, I just decided to leave.” Was she a wild child? “Yes and no. Yes, in that I don’t ever want my son to be anything like I was. But in the scheme of things, I don’t think I was that wild. I was raised to stand up for myself and to be honest and speak up for myself and I did that at all times.” She was certainly angry though. You can feel the heat of it on the first album and even more so on the second, which famously addressed a searing protest song to the prime minister. One of the most hard-hitting tracks on Judgement Days , entitled “Father”, feels particularly close to home. “I spent 23 years trying to be the fucking man you should be/ Taking care of your responsibility/ Putting clothes on our back and shoes on our feet, no help/ But you always had your bag of weed…/ You call yourself a man, your oldest son he had to learn from his sister/ How to put a nigger’s fist up…” She doesn’t pull punches in her lyrics, but it’s hard to imagine McLean-Daley actually hitting someone in real life. One phrase that crops up repeatedly in reports of her assault on PC Caryn Marles, whom she slapped on the face after being arrested outside the Paragon Lounge nightclub in Mayfair in January 2006, is “out of character”. I ask if the incident was related to stress. She had been disappointed by the poor performance of her second album three months earlier. “I wouldn’t say it was stress,” she says carefully. “Without going into it, there are always reasons for things and different sides to stories.” In court, her solicitor claimed that she and her sister had been racially abused inside the club. When I suggest that the incident might not have been entirely unprovoked, she laughs. “I’ll leave you to write that as your opinion,