Bass instinct

She blagged her way into one of Britain's hippest, toughest dance scenes and now she's got an album to show for it. Former Taranaki farmgirl MC Tali talks to REBECCA BARRY about becoming a drum'n'bass diva.

New Zealander Natalia Scott lives in Bristol, just down the road from the grim cliches of urban English life: junkies, prostitutes, the odd homeless man begging for change.

To MC Tali, as she is better known, parts of her turf are "[expletive] hideous. But they're also "diverse, gritty, creative and inspirational".

She wouldn't dream of moving out.

This is where Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky pioneered trip-hop, Fat Boy Slim popularised big beat and Mercury Music Prize-winner Roni Size started twisting jazz, dub and Motown into drum'n'bass.

Three years ago, Scott had little idea she would become a unique fixture on the Bristol scene, performing among the likes of MCs Dynamite and Chickaboo, and producers Suv and Krust.

Now, you can hear it in the way she misses her rs and ts in "saw' of", the way she ends sentences with "know wha' I mean?" and how she douses her conversation with ghetto vernacular: "This shit is firing, man."

Indeed it is. Drum'n'bass fans will already be familiar with her story, in which she went from being a virtually unknown, white female MC to an integral member of Full Cycle, one of the most revered drum'n'bass labels in the world. She has since toured the globe three times, put out six singles and released an album produced by Size himself.

"I went to the British Music Awards and met Andre from Outkast, the Black Eyed Peas, Sugababes," she says. "And I saw Naomi Campbell and Gwen Stefani. It was insane."

Scott grew up in rural Taranaki where she learned classical piano and singing and wrote poetry. In 1996 she moved to Christchurch where she excelled in high-school English and planned to go to performing arts school or become a teacher. Then the bug took hold. She still remembers the first time she heard Maintain by Krust at a drum'n'bass party, and was awed by the frenetic beats, the powerful bass and the way it lent itself to her soft, sugary vocals and tough, choppy lyrics.

In between time spent studying for two degrees and a teaching diploma, she teamed up with drum'n'bass promotions company Scientific, helped to run a drum'n'bass radio show and started bringing internationals to New Zealand.

"There were moments in my life when it felt so hectic and so fast-paced that the only music I could write was drum'n'bass tunes," she says.

A messy break-up with her long-term boyfriend was one of them.

"The music was definitely getting in the way but not in a good way," she says. "I'd lost a lot of independence and a lot of free spiritedness which I am by nature. It was a really lonely, reflective time in my life where I worked out who my friends were. On top of that I'd got to the point where I'd done all I really could in New Zealand."

She moved to Melbourne, "fell in love with someone who made me feel I could do anything", and spent the next six months establishing herself on the scene.

One night she went to a Roni Size gig, worked her way into the VIP area, and approached the man himself.

"I can't 100 per cent remember what I said - I was drunk and stoned, I'm sure.

"But it was something along the lines of, I think I've got what your label needs."

Then she busted a rhyme to prove her point.

"He was like, 'No way! No way!' Whaat?! Whaat?! You need to go and get on the mic, man.' I was like, 'No no no no no, I can't, this is too much'."

By the end of the night, he'd not only convinced her to join him on stage but to pack her bags and move to England. Three months later she was in London.

"It did my [expletive] head in. I hated it. People are just clambering over each other to get somewhere and it's really depressing. You can go to a club and people stand outside and they'll be insulted by the bouncers and told that they're shit and they'll still stand there, so desperate to get in, to be seen, to be noticed.

"I'm so much more relaxed than that, I hate that attitude. And every time I came to Bristol I could breathe again. The people were so nice, the scenes were wicked, everyone was having a good time. Then when Roni said, 'Move to Bristol', I was like, '[expletive] it, I'm moving to Bristol'."

She recorded an album with Size and his Full Cycle crew taking care of the production, and was nicknamed One-Take Tali for her ability to freestyle straight onto record. (It was a virtue, but one that also meant she had to relearn her own tracks. When High Hopes dropped at a party one night, she suddenly realised she had no idea how it went.) With the genre more mainstream now than ever, Lyric on My Lip could have been a drum'n'bass album for the pop world. Her press release describes some tracks, which have received substantial radio support in Britain, as infectious urban pop. Scott begs to differ.

"It ain't no pop take on shit. I hate pop music. We never set out to make anything for radio or the charts, we just wanted to make tunes. There were some nasty, hard tunes on there that I didn't want to go on it because I didn't think they told enough of the story, you know? I'm a really emotional person and I like to be really descriptive in what I write. You can't be that descriptive over just drum'n'bass. One day we'd be like, 'Let's make a soul tune'. Another day Roni would say, 'I need a blazing floor tune to take to Miami'."

And while hers are typical of the genre - "Blazin' a lyrical trail through ya mind ... " - it was Roni who convinced her to record Soul Star, in which she "big-ups" New Zealand, name-checking Kiwi drum'n'bass bands, Shapeshifter and Concord Dawn. She also spouts "Born on the west of the North" on the single that documents her rise. The aim was to produce a Tali album, not a classic Bristol-sounding Roni Size release.

"I didn't think it would be appropriate but Roni was like, 'Tal, I've told you 100 times. You wanna do a soul tune, do it. You wanna do a slow tune, do it. You wanna shout out to your home crew, do it."

Her words of advice to aspiring MCs? "You'd better be prepared and you'd better have the goods coz if you ain't got it, don't even bother trying."

She has only met two other women MCs, and "one is a hardcore lesbian who sounds like a man and smokes weed the whole time she's on the mic".

"I honestly believe I've come further and done more in drum'n'bass as an MC than most big-name MCs, y'know wot I mean? No one is doing what I'm doing. No one has done what I've done."

* MC Tali's Lyric on My Lip is out now. She plays Fu Bar Thursday, April 8, after midnight.