It is the kind of responsible campaign you expect from the Zimmer frame end of the stage but coming from one with as much cred in the hood as Knight, it is a controversial stand indeed.
The London crowd cheered this sexy, strutting, mini-skirted diva at her recent Somerset House gig, chanting, “the sister’s wicked”. When I interviewed So Solid Crew, the “gangsta” rappers, they opined that, as far as bitches go, Knight was top dog. But in the ghetto they might be surprised: it turns out that sister Beverley is a well-brought-up middle-class gal with a degree in theology who, by her own admission, sat in the front row at school wearing “Deirdre Barlow glasses”. Perhaps that is why she holds decidedly forthright opinions.
The night before we met she had seen Madonna play London. “It is time she stopped working on those muscles,” chuckles Knight, 31. “Paradoxically, they make her look older. What will happen when gravity kicks in?” She is equally frank about Amy Winehouse, who has tried to launch a warbling career by savaging competitors: “She should shush and let her music talk — if she can.”
You quickly realise that Knight — who can count David Bowie, Prince and, inevitably, Nelson Mandela as fans — is a shrewd judge (her friendship with Victoria Beckham notwithstanding). She recalls singing for world leaders at the G8 summit in St Petersburg, and being invited to dinner by President Putin on his yacht: “I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to be with the most powerful men in the world.” On board she was struck by Tony Blair’s faux intimacy: “It was (cue: huge smile), ‘Bev, hi, how’s the album going?’.”
Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, was “terribly German: his lips smiled but his eyes didn’t”. Only Putin impressed: “He seemed nervous of me because I looked into his eyes and he hopped from foot to foot. I like the way he seemed a bit sinister — like Darth Vader.”
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You can see why she might have made even the former KGB man nervous. Her huge lovely eyes do bore into you from behind red-streaked hair. Today she wears an elegant bottle-green dress. “From Topshop,” she beams. Don’t tell Victoria, I suggest. “Oh, it’s all right, my scarf is designer.”
We discuss the music sweeping the dance halls which prompted her to sashay out of the recording studio and into the Newsnight studio. Her stand is timely; a team of senior policemen are locked away studying the lyrics of the Jamaican ragga artist Beenie Man, to decide whether he can be prosecuted for inciting violence. If the rozzers can penetrate his Jamaican patois — questionable — they will be treated to lines such as “hang lesbians with a long piece of rope”.
Beenie Man is infamous for his homophobic lyrics.
“I don’t believe in blanket censorship,” Knight explains, “but if you are an artist making statements that are hateful and wrong, accept the consequences: if you are big enough to say it, be big enough to take it. Don’t be surprised if people say, ‘I am going to hit you where it hurts: in the pocket’.” Several extreme rappers have recently had their touring contracts ripped up.
“There is a huge schism between arguing against an ideology and absolutist statements against things that are accidents of birth: being gay is like being left-handed; you are born that way but it manifests itself later. It is not an abomination.”
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Knight feels passionately about this after the death through Aids of her best friend, a young black man. “He had a beaming, Eddie Murphy megawatt smile,” she recalls fondly. “The first time he approached me at a club he said he wanted my number. I said, ‘Yeah, I bet you do, sugar’, but he said, ‘No, I want you to perform at a gay pride festival’.”
She finds it ironic that blacks, for centuries the victims of prejudice, should be among the most prejudiced towards another minority: “It is terribly hard being a black gay man. There are a lot of them but they have to be very quiet about it.”
It is all the more painful because, as she honestly admits, the root of this homophobia could be the Pentecostal church where she learnt to sing; but, she argues, just as fundamentalists misconstrue the Koran, so Beenie Man and co misread the Bible. It springs, she thinks, from that cliché beloved of Christian fundamentalists, “Hate the sin but love the sinner”.
“A lot of artists have taken that Old Testament scripture and given it a twist.” She can quote the part of the Bible where it warns against lying with a man, but says that fundamentalists forget the entreaty from Jesus in the New Testament to love one another.
But the Bible, like the Koran, has enough ranting to satisfy all tastes. You might argue that nasty bigots are being just as Christian as nice liberals such as Knight. However, were Beenie Man to argue it out with Knight, I know who I would back. “If you are going to use the Bible you should know it properly.” And she certainly does. “I was taken to church almost as soon as I was born.” Even as a toddler she itched to join her mother and sister — also fine singers — in the choir: “Church was the hub of my social life.” She is more questioning about her faith now “but I still have half a toenail in the church. You never totally escape”.
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Her own upbringing was comfortable — mama was a nurse, father a successful builder from Jamaica — in a four-bed semi in one of Wolverhampton’s better quarters. “We were the only black people in our street and these two old ladies either side didn’t like us. They would say, ‘Ooh, the blacks will take over now’ and ‘How can they afford it?’ even though my father was the hardest-working man I knew. The area was staunchly Conservative, Enoch Powell’s old seat. Nick Budgen had taken it on, who I knew but didn’t like: he ran with Powell’s legacy.”
Primary school was “superb” and although she was one of only six blacks among 400 pupils, “I would skip to school in my uniform and that unified us: race was rarely an issue.” Later she was called “Sambo”: her maths teacher once sent her out of the class because the racial taunts were such a distraction. “I look back on it philosophically,” she smiles. “That was the early 1980s and Britain was in turmoil.”
At secondary school, as she began to stand out for academic, musical and sporting achievement, she was taunted occasionally — but for her Coronation Street-style glasses, not her colour.
However, she was horrified at university in blue-stockinged Cheltenham where she regularly encountered racism. “Having been this popular girl at school I arrived and had four men wind down their car window, call me a black slag, spit at me, then drive off.
I was stunned. After the happy, blissful life of my first 19 years, I suddenly saw how ugly racial prejudice could be.”
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She and her mixed-race boyfriend were turned down as tenants because, she thinks, of her colour: “I was often called ‘wog’. Lord Taylor (who is black) stood for the Conservatives and although the town was staunchly Tory it voted Liberal Democrat en masse.”
She would have left college but for the camaraderie of her fellow students. Even before she graduated in 1995, Knight was spotted playing a rare gig, was signed to a record company and quickly released a debut album, The B-Funk. Soon she was top of the charts with hits such as Who I Am, but not before overcoming family scepticism: “I was very aware of my mother’s Christian sensibilities. She would rather I was singing for the Lord. But my parents were incredibly supportive and said, ‘You must follow your own path’.”
Occasionally this has meant running down a high street from 30 girl fans and having to lock herself in a public lavatory. She is wryly amused rather than intoxicated by fame. Still, Knight — who now lives in one of the better streets of Highgate, north London, with her boyfriend — is not entirely joking when she says: “The plan is to take over the world. I would love to be Tina Turner, aged 65, still with great legs, singing at the new Wembley stadium.”
However, to her credit she recognises that for many blacks such dreams are fantasy. At least whites who crave stardom have plenty of plan Bs: “The problem is the lack of black role models: not big stars, but ordinary successful people in the community.” She quotes a television programme on problem black males in which a boy said: “It’s either drugs or guns, innit.”
“That tells me there is nobody to inspire him. My brother is a social worker and he says the problem is the lack of a strong father figure.”
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As for her crusade against Beenie Man et al, she, with customary intelligence, calls for measured debate: “The history of rock has been to shock. Nobody asked shock rockers if they would care to be a more positive role model.” And as well as asking some of these black artists “why those with such talent have to resort to statements of absolute hate”, we should, she points out, also ask the record companies to stop using violence like sex to market and glamorise their stars.
Surely it can only be time before her crony Tony invites her onto one of his taskforces. For the sister has something much more valuable than mere soul: she has a fine brain.