With the MOBO award for best British newcomer in the bag and a lauded début album, Estelle's currency is high. And all this without taking her clothes off. She talks to Jim Carroll
Estelle Swaray is juggling phones as she walks into Berlin airport to catch her flight. It's been like this all day, she says. If she's not in a radio studio talking to a DJ about her new album and telling him to play some tracks, she's on one of the many phones which are ringing around her. There's a MOBO appearance later in the week to consider (she went home from that ceremony clutching the Best UK Newcomer gong) so there's calls about that. And, naturally, there are journalists with dictaphones to deal with too.
But when you're hot, you're hot. Estelle's emergence with the autobiographical 1980 earlier this year was one of the entrances of the year. The 18th Day proves that this was no fluke. An album drilled through with ambition and sass, it's hip-hop delivered with large dollops of funk and soul. Indeed, Go Gone, for instance, could work its way into a northern soul way of life with its romping, pumping, punchy groove, while new single Free floats on a fantastic clattering backbeat.
It's a smart album, and that's before you even start to consider what Estelle is banging on about. Judged against the procession of female UK rappers who have come this way of late (your Ms Dynamites and Shysties), Estelle stands tall. Unlike them, there's no underground garage past lurking in the shadows, no empty champagne bottles to step over, no badly-dressed posse to push your way through. When Estelle talks about the music that got her into this game, the names thrown out are Mary J. Blige and Ella Fitzgerald. "The way Ella Fitzgerald would tackle a song," she says, "that's what got me. Man, you'd have goose pimples every time you heard her. Her songs were classical and so romantic; even the sad ones were graceful and warm. A friend's mum had her on tape and I took it and never gave it back."
It wasn't only Fitzgerald on the stereo when Estelle was growing up in south-west London, in a crowded house with various branches of her extended family. There was a lot of hip-hop too, with her "bad boy uncle who was in and out of prison a lot" playing her old-school heroes like Kool G Rap and Big Daddy Kane.
It was certainly a lively upbringing, she says. If it wasn't her mother trying to keep her on the straight and narrow and pushing her out the door to go to church each week, there was her father building reggae speakers in the front-room. What she raps about in 1980, it seems, was just the tip of the iceberg.
Naturally, music came a-calling, but not before a notion to study law went out the window after two weeks' work experience in a legal office: "I talk too much and I know how to shut people up and I was interested in helping people, so I considered law, but those two weeks in that office changed my mind." Instead, "I did loads of jobs. Every job I did kind of helped my music and where I was going." She worked in record shops and as a journalist for the Darkerthanblue website. "Yeah, I've done what you guys do. I've reviewed albums, interviewed people, gone to gigs. It was brilliant."
For Estelle, journalism was her finishing school in the ways and wiles of the music industry. "Every time I met someone, I was picking their brains and getting ideas and hints for what would come later - and, of course, pestering everyone for a support slot. I didn't really see breaking into the industry as a big problem, I just worked out what I had to do and went for it."
By night, she practised what she preached onstage at London clubs like the Lyrical Lounge and Scratch. An appearance alongside Roots Manuva and Rodney P set tongues wagging about her talents, and Estelle's days as a hack were coming to a close.
Still, the first couple of record companies who came her way were sent packing. "They were idiots," she laughs. "They thought that I would sign with whoever offered me the largest amount of money. I had learned enough about the industry by that stage to know that to do that would be a mistake. I wanted to hold out for what looked right to me. Actually no, I wanted to demand what was right for me!"
Such run-ins with music industry middle-management forged Estelle's growing dislike for stereotypes, an attitude fortified when one label tried to get her to join their latest nascent girl band (Estelle was to be the short, cute black one). When it comes to her image, don't expect her to be prancing about like such undressed rappers as Lil Kim or Foxy Brown.
"Listen, if I tried something like that, man, you know walking around on a stage in bra and knickers, I'd get a look from my mum and that would be followed by a pinch or a punch." She laughs. "We're British, we're far more coy about that sort of thing. Actually, we're wack when it comes to things like that. It's not how I grew up and it's not me."
No, what you get with Estelle is the real deal, a rapper who really does know the score. The girl who grew up talking too much now has an audience willing to listen and they can't get enough of her. Estelle may need to get some more mobile phones.
The 18th Day is released on October 22nd.
