No guns, no drugs, no bling

But never mind the scars; where is Sway’s bling? We meet one morning above an organically correct café in Camden Town in North London and he is dressed in a black, hooded tracksuit that I would call anonymous did not the word “Sway” feature in discreet letters above its right breast. “My bling,” he answers, “is in my studio. I don’t mean literally. I mean it is in my music. Don’t need a big chain. What for? Five years ago people used to wear jewellery and that as a mark of success, but now everybody knows you can wear a big chain and you might live in a council flat and don’t have anything in your fridge.”

Three-and-a-half thousand miles away, the Roc-A-Fella empire sighs and totters a little. If it has lost Sway, it may have lost the future of hip-hop. 50 Cent may have been shot nine times and have a movie coming out ominously called Get Rich or Die Tryin’, but readers voted Sway, not him, Best Hip Hop artist at the Mobo Awards in September. The bullet-ridden American can shift a million copies of his CDs in a week while Sway’s two albums, This is My Promo volumes 1 and 2, have sold only about 10,000 each, but the Londoner’s fans need actively to seek them out at his gigs and through independent record shops.

His new album out next month, This Is My Demo, is his most professional yet but half of it has still been recorded in a friend’s bedroom. It is a little sad, in a way, that after having for long taunted the big recording companies on a website called www.signsway.com, he will almost certainly sign to a major label for his next one. In the precious meantime, he remains “The Next Big Thing”, according, at least, to The Sunday Times Magazine’s Next Big Thing page.

Normally I listen to rap music only for professional reasons or under duress (say at 2am courtesy of a passing car), but This Is My Demo is an utter joy even to my old ears. The music behind the rap beat is often Motown gorgeous — I hope they will release a single of Back For You — but what really distinguishes the album is the wit and, indeed, wisdom of the lyrics, often sung in the persona of someone a lot less smart than Sway himself. The black music press is conducting a debate as to whether his music is “urban”, “grime” or “underground”, but he might be better considered a comedy rapper, although the sudden switches of tone in his songs can quickly wipe the grin off your face. “Youths use weapons to step up on these high streets,” he chants punningly on a track called Products. “Equals violence. Then comes the violins. Then comes the sirens. Then comes the silence.”

Derek Andrew Safo was born in Crouch End in London in 1982. His mother is a Ghanaian called Beatrice who had broken her journey back to Africa from Amsterdam where she had been travelling. In one song he thanks her for not aborting him. He won’t tell me who his biological father is and says he met him only once, when he introduced himself to him as someone else. Most of his first three years were spent with his mother’s family in Ghana, where his grandfather was a successful businessman. Beatrice returned to Britain, met the man who would become Derek’s stepfather, and claimed her son for North London. He does not remember much about coming back, except that he was pretty unhappy about it.

Beatrice found work as a classroom assistant while her son went to the local primary and comprehensive and developed a fondness for Michael Jackson songs. By 9 he was rapping, by 13 making up beats on his computer. At 16 he began winning “MC battles” at local hip-hop clubs. Having discovered he could win crowds over with his humour, his own music, performed with ten friends in a group called One, became wittier.

At Westminster College he studied sound recording, much to the disappointment of his parents, who saw no reason why an academic child should not be thinking of university and a profession. He did go to Metropolitan University, but for only for a week, just long enough to get a student loan. Sway, as he was now known, believed he would be better off serving an apprenticeship in hip-hop. One had by now split up, but, in 2002 Sway’s persistence got his first single, On My Own, played on the BBC’s digital radio station 1Xtra.

If Derek Safo’s alter ego is Sway Desafo, Sway’s alter ego is someone he calls “Little Derek”. Little Derek is a modest figure, “the rapper the people talk to”, but who has “never had a lot”. Vulnerability, I say, is as rare as roosters’ eggs in hip-hop. “All right,” he says, accepting that the point needs answering. “My strength is that I’m able to reveal all my weaknesses without actually looking weak, if that makes any sense. Once I’ve laid all my cards on the table people can’t really mess with me. They know what to expect. I’m just me, Sway. I haven’t built up some façade where I’m some crazy gangster.”

Since he doesn’t carry guns, he can see no reason why he should sing about them. There is, however, violence on the new album, notably in a song called Pretty Ugly Husband, a satire on domestic violence. I ask if he has had personal experience of it. “I have experienced it. I’ve been in domestic violence situations, whether that be me arguing with a girlfriend who’s tried to hit me, you know, or my mum and dad arguing. They used to argue a lot and shout really loud and my mind used to go racing. What if it became more than shouting? What if the anger that’s coming out will turn physical?”

He would place himself in front of his mother and his father, as he calls his stepfather, would back off. “Being from an African background, they are very into physical discipline, you know. So although I never got beaten up or anything crazy like that, there was always the threat of being hit by my father.” He and his mother have just returned from Christmas in Ghana. I wonder how big a part Africa plays in his make-up. “I’d say it’s about 40 per cent. It’s hidden a lot of the time because of my whole Western influences but the angles that I take to stories, the way I tell them, in more of a humorous way and the rhythm, is very similar to African people, particularly West African people telling stories.”

But while his methods may be African, his targets are British. His song Flo Fashion is a skit on the materialism of Western youth that ends up with the narrator’s credit cards becoming impotent. Sick World, which revisits a London adolescence of horror movies and porn, mocks every kid’s wish to be “bigger than Peter Andre” or “a pair of lips kissing on Beyoncé”. But Sway’s point of difference is not only his snooty take on street culture but the subjects he does not address. Partying is one of them. He drinks only rarely — a self-denial that may have its origins in his step-father’s Islam (although Sway has rejected both it and his mother’s Christianity). The nearest he has got to singing about inebriation is a number called Pepsi, a parody of J-Kwon’s Tipsy. Although, personally, he would legalise cannabis, he does not take drugs either, joking that they should be on sale at Sainsbury’s where people would be too embarrassed to buy them. Nor are there any anti-police songs, largely because he has had few dealings with them, a fact that surprised a copper who stopped him the other day. “He checked up on the blower and he was like, ‘Good on you, mate.’ Not to say that I’ve never deserved to be in trouble, but I just wasn’t stupid.”

Did he ever carry a knife? “Everybody carries a weapon at some point and it’s mainly for protection. I never, ever carried anything to go out there and stab people. Then they introduced this rule that if you were carrying a knife you’d get two years in jail. I thought, ‘You’re not catching me with a knife.’ I’d beat someone up before I’d carry a knife.”

Sway, then, is not an angel. It is hard to see how, growing up in the mean streets as he did, that he could be. An uncle was stabbed to death. He saw close friends “decay” into criminality. “You have to understand,” he explains, “when you’re raised in a council flat environment and you’re looking out the window and all you can see is bricks, your mentality’s trapped. It’s closed. You begin to think that you represent the bricks.”

One of the charming things about Sway is that he will answer a question honestly, but this, of course, does not make all his answers charming. I ask, for instance, what he thinks of the misogyny of so much rap music, a materialistic approach to sex encapsulated in a video last year in which a rapper called Nelly swiped a credit card between a dancer’s thonged buttocks.

“You know what? There’s a lot of women within the community of hip-hop that don’t mind that, who provoke this kind of thing. What can you do? If you’re sitting and six women come up to you and they’re showing you their tits and that, you can’t respect them. How can you? Or a woman’s blatantly sleeping with you because she knows who you are. How the hell can you respect that? You can’t. No matter how much you think of the female race and all that, if it wasn’t there to be exploited we couldn’t exploit it?”

I wouldn’t want to parse some of that too carefully. Dismayingly, Sway also shares his generation’s cocky ignorance of politics. He was recently invited to a reception at 11 Downing Street and introduced to the Chancellor but he “just went off on one” and Sway doesn’t remember a word he said. (Now we know the Chancellor’s views about reclaiming Britishness from the far right, my guess is he was fixating on the Union Jack neckerchief Sway usually wears, and “going off” on that.) Will he vote for him? “Yeah, I’d vote for Gordon.” Not David Cameron? “Who’s he?”

I have been led to meet Sway by a friend, whose son, Al Shuckburgh, is one of his producers, the composer, in fact, of some of the best melodies on the new album. What I could not fathom at first was what “Shux”, a white public schoolboy whose grandfather, Sir David Wilcocks, is one of Britain’s foremost classical conductors, could possibly have in common with Sway. Even Sway admits he was wary when they were introduced five years ago, although he intuited that it might be valuable to have someone in One who could actually play an instrument (Sway’s idea of composition is to hum a tune into his mobile phone.)

Was he suspicious of “Shux” because he was white, I ask. “No, because he lived so far away in West London,” he says. “We thought we was a North London movement. Colour didn’t come into it. Colour don’t really come into it in London.”

It is an odd thought but given, also, that its main market is now white, it looks as if hip-hop is becoming a force for multi-ethnic cohesion. The question is what values it coheres around. Sway, still living in a housing association flat, still determined to get out of the business after his fifth album, still his own sly, subversive, unsigned thing, may be our best hope.

Sway’s single, Little Derek, was released yesterday. This Is My Demo is out on February 6.