Roots Manuva

Have you been out to Australia before? I've been three times. The very first time I came out here was for the Big Day Out and Vibes on a Summer's Day. The second time we did Parklife.

So you know your Australian festivals, then. It strikes me that those would be good gig: the crowd's there for a good time, there's already quite a vibe by the time you take the stage - is that true? Yeah, I think so - festival audiences are much more simple, they spend a lot of money and they know what they want; they're serious musical humans. [laughs]

From where do you draw your influences? I want to try and do something original - to be the author of some twisted, sonic journey - just to try and step out of the standard, self-conscious "me me me I want to be famous" rhetoric. With visual media everyone gets the chance to say their piece - everyone's ten minutes of fame has been extended now - I've always said that the ordinary people are the true superstars - nurses, doctors, teachers.

Do you think your music celebrates ordinariness? I'm trying to!

So your music is influenced by normality - do you have a particular type of person in mind when you're producing music? I always toy with idea of making the kind of - for want of a better word - urban music that housewives or grandmothers could find something in. There's so many layers and so many instruments that we pillage from gospel to country and western to jazz. I have a fantasy of being that kind of artist that reaches everyone, not necessarily just hard core hip hop heads or hard core reggaes, but for everyone, regardless of age, background and religious persuasion. 

You have an interesting creative side that way which also involves a sense of humour - as in the video for 'Buff Nuff' where you are the ice cream man. Yeah, it's just about having a laugh. It's just the subtext or kind of tracing the nuance of the musicality of a set piece that the music to me sounded something like a crazy ice cream man would play.

A lot of these interviews tend to read too much into the person behind the music rather than just enjoying it. There is a space for that, but I think that the academic or intellectual context actually comes from the observer or the audience. I'm just trying to get from A to B and accidentally land in a place that starts off a conversation - I think that is true to being a vessel of some kind of honest thought and thinking.

I'm not sure I understood any of that! It's cool.

Roots Manuva headlines Days Like This at Moore Park on Sun 10 Jan

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