Giving it some stick

She raps, she sings, she puts out attitude and now she's up for a raft of music awards. Hold on to your hat, says Graeme Virtue, here comes Ms Dynamite YOU might be getting increasingly weary of reading witty predictions in the press along the lines of "Ms Dynamite is about to explode!" but puff your chest and man it up, there's going to be plenty more where that came from in the next month or so. Twenty-one-year-old Ms Dynamite - Niomi McLean-Daley to her mum - has not only made it onto the shortlist for the Panasonic Mercury Music Prize - announced on Tuesday - but has also reeled in an impressive haul of six nominations for the Music Of Black Origin (MOBO) Awards.

Since they were established in 1996, the MOBOs have grown in stature, in tandem with hip hop and R&B (and more recently, urban genres such as garage and 2 step) infecting the mainstream of popular culture. With her six nods (including best album and best UK act), Ms Dynamite has equalled the previous record for nominations set by Craig David last year, but though there are superficial similarities between the MC-turned-singer and the would-be loverman, they're really worlds apart.

Okay, both guested on underground garage hits before securing major label backing as solo artists, but David has about as much street edge as a school jumper from Marks & Spencers. For all his talk on Seven Days of "making love by Wednesday/And on Thursday and Friday and Saturday," he's the most sexually unthreatening pop celebrity since Chris Martin from Coldplay started hollering about the stars. And he's also scarpered across the Atlantic to concentrate on "breaking" America, so he might as well be dead as far as we're concerned.

Ms Dynamite, on the other hand, is a fierce, independent-minded little firecracker irrevocably influenced by the urgent London underground, an emerging artist who - despite careful image handling by her record company Polydor - still seems deliriously off-message when it comes to promotion.

Discussing her current hit Dy-Na-Mi-Tee on Radio One recently, she casually mentioned she wasn't a big fan of the lightweight track. "It's still one of my worst songs," she said. "I don't like it. I don't know what it is. It's not even that I don't like it now, it's just that perhaps it's not showing the side of me that I wanna continue to show. I think I sound like a child - 'inny-minny- minny.'"

The thing is, she's a gifted and intelligent MC - scattering machine-gun rhymes with a passion and skill rarely seen in this country - but her Mercury-nominated album, A Little Deeper, sees her doing a lot more singing than rapping. Which she doesn't even like doing. "There are songs on the album where I just press fast-forward because I can't bear to hear how I sound," she moans.

Producer Salaam Remi - who's worked with The Fugees, D'Angelo and Shabba Ranks - is credited with encouraging her to exercise her vocal chords during album recording sessions in New York, but it's hard to shake the suspicion the record company had a hand in the recalibration too.

It's easier to promote a hooting diva in the pop marketplace, and while it's all very well Dynamite dropping some blistering rhymes now and then, you really require a vocal hook to get on mainstream radio. Hell, even Eminem - whom Ms Dynamite supported at his London gigs earlier this year - did a spot of singing on his last album.

To her credit, Dynamite might have allowed her image to be massaged by the marketeer suits to a certain degree, but she sticks to her guns when it comes to lyrics. Despite coming up from an urban scene not exactly famous for its forward-thinking attitude towards women, she isn't afraid to take pot-shots at the grotesque consumerism and bling-bling bragging beloved of garage oiks like Oxide & Neutrino. On her debut single It Takes More, she lilted: "Now who gives a damn/About the ice [diamonds] on your hands?/If it's not too complex/Tell me how many Africans died/For the baguettes [gems] on your Rolex?"

There's some Scot in Dynamite. Her mother came from the Hebridean island of Benbecula, but the young star was raised in Kentish Town, north London. She had to learn responsibility from an early age - the eldest of 10 children, her Jamaican father left the family when she was very young. At 15, it become too much and she left home to live in a hostel. Looking back, she identifies it as a period of depression, where she spent her spare time smoking and drinking. "But there are two things I always did, religiously," she recently recalled. "Go to school and tidy up."

This attitude meant she achieved 10 GCSEs and passed three A- Levels (English literature, art and media studies). Offered a place at Sussex University to read social anthropology, she passed on the chance, preferring to approach the subject from a different angle - her burgeoning MC career. After rhyming at raves for (pounds) 25 a throw, Dynamite found a place for her talents on one of London's multitude of pirate radio stations, Freak FM. Respected garage scenester DJ Sticky heard her distinctive voice and asked her to guest on a track called Booo! which cracked the top 20 when it was released. That brought her to the attention of Polydor and the rest is history. But what about her combative nom de plume? It was coined by a friend, apparently.

"As Niomi, I'm quite reserved and more of an observer, whereas Ms Dynamite is more confrontational," she explained, when MTV R&B man Trevor Nelson asked about her handle. "She allows me to be brave in a way that Niomi wouldn't necessarily be. It's me at my most aggressive, expressive, angry, intense, passionate she lets me get away with murder."

The squares at the Mercury Music Prize made things sound a bit puffed-up and pompous when they described Ms Dynamite as "an urgent and exciting new voice that heralds an important moment in British music". We say: light the fuse and stand well back.

The single Dy-Na-Mi-Tee is out now on Polydor. Ms Dynamite will perform at the Mercury Music Prize ceremony on September 17. The Mobo Awards take place on October 1 www.msdynamite.co.uk www.mercurymusicprize.com www.mobo.net Ms Dynamite'snominations for the 2002 MOBO Awards:

Best UK Act Best R&B Act Best Newcomer Best Album Best Single Best Video the complete list of nominees for the Panasonic Mercury Music Prize announced on Tuesday:

Ms Dynamite A Little Deeper Doves The Last Broadcast David Bowie Heathen Beverley Knight Who I Am Roots Manuva Run Come Save Me The Coral The Coral The Electric Soft Parade Holes In The Walls Guy Barker Soundtrack The Streets Original Pirate Material Gemma Hayes Night On My Side The Bees Sunshine Hit Me Joanna MacGregor Play

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