Taking the Rap

Tim Westwood speaks pure hip-hop. Every week, the host of the Radio One rap show promises to "bang in your face" with "the hottest joints on the street". In other words, he's going to play you some achingly contemporary records. Westwood isn't easy to understand - even to confirmed listeners. Live on air, he takes a call from Swansea. "Wales is really deep on the show tonight" he says, with a knowing smile. "And I respect that." ‘Um, thanks' says the girl. ‘But will you just say ‘Hi' to Kerry from Swansea?'.

A famous rap poet once said "It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at." And that's something to hold on to - especially when you're from Lowestoft. Tim Westwood is from Lowestoft. And the son of the Bishop of Peterborough. He's a middle-aged man, and isn't exactly ‘ghetto'. Which is why the critics dismiss him as a wannabee - as the Guardian put it, "the wrong colour and the wrong class" to be messing in the cussin', fussin', mussin' world of rap.

They say he is a fake; they say he is a white man who acts black; they say he is the real-life Ali G. And, when he was shot, twice, in his Land Cruiser for refusing to pay protection money, they just laughed. It was like Westwood was getting what he deserved. "I don't understand that Ali G stuff, man" says Westwood. "If I was a bank manager, I would talk like one. But I'm not. I'm a hip-hop DJ. And I'm gonna bring that flava [flavour] to my shit."

Indeed. Westwood has been bringing flava [flavour] to his shit for 20 years. In that time, hip-hop has proved itself to be the most dominant musical form since rock ‘n' roll - and now he's a Mr Man that demands respect. He gets hot white labels before most DJs in New York, he breaks songs first, and he carries round the thickest phone book in hip-hop. Whatever the critics might think, his Radio One rap show - the only national rap show in the UK - is the first port of call for the performers who count.

He drives to his show, slow and loud - loud enough to set off car alarms. It's a hip-hop thing. After the shooting, Westwood traded in his car because he didn't like the bullet holes in the bodywork. It wasn't a good look. "Everyone was expecting me to be the typical DJ, and start driving something anonymous like a BMW 3 Series in black" he says. "No way. I've come back stronger than ever." And you couldn't get much stronger than a Yukon GMC - a customised US truck with 24" rims.

He is wearing an over-sized leather jacket (with Westwood, the jacket always comes through the door first) and over-sized jeans, slung low on his snake-thin hips. It's not the kind of outfit you would normally expect to see on someone his age. "It's hip-hop, man" he says. "There was a time when hip-hop was a youth thing. But hip-hop doesn't stop at 23 any more. Will I still be wearing the jeans at the age of 70? Without a doubt".

No-one really knows Westwood's age, although most put him on the decidedly un-hip-hop side of 40. I would put him at 42. "I always lie about it" says Westwood. "I can lie to you, if you like. Okay. I'm 17, and taking A-Levels next year." The fact that he refuses to discuss his age suggests that, despite the trousers, hip-hop really is still a youth thing. And while he should be aging gracefully, Westwood, like many men before him, has decided to stop aging altogether.

He's planning an intimate little show tonight, out of respect to those killed in the Birmingham shootings. He has decided to leave the show free of ‘gangsta' rap. So there will be no U Don't Know by Jay-Z ("one body, two body, three body, four") and no Cop Killer by Ice-T ("cop killer, I know your momma's grieving (fuck her!), cop killer, but tonight we get even!"). Like Westwood says, "It all sounds too gangsta to me right now".

When doesn't it sound ‘too gangsta'? With all its talk of guns and shootings, gangsta gives rap a bad name. But Westwood argues that the rappers are just telling their story. They are playing with metaphor. And if the rap audience can be trusted to understand Reservoir Dogs, why can't they be trusted to understand Cop Killer? The decision to leave the play-list gangsta free is about respect. He did the same after the Queen Mother died. After all, his employer is still the BBC.

For a culture with so much to say about the need for respect, hip hop can be shockingly disrespectful. And Westwood spends a lot of his time defucking (as its known in the business) hip-hop tracks so that they're fit for broadcast on the BBC. "Although we get more complaints about taking the fucks out than we do for leaving them in" he says. "And, at the time my show goes out, you can watch fucking live on tv. It seems ridiculous that you can't say the word."

Because of the violence and bad language, it's easy to dismiss rap as on the peripheries of society. But it's not. It's been around long enough now (LL Cool J has recorded ten albums, Jay-Z has recorded eight) to be classed as mainstream. Established names, like Justin Timberlake and J-Lo, want to work with rap producers. And now that LL Cool J has made the crossover with the film Deliver Us From Eva, rap stars are big news at the box office. Fat Joe even has a script in development.

What the critics hate most is the fact that this public-school educated, middle-class white man is speaking the language of ‘the street'. But it isn't like Westwood is trying to be black. He's just trying to be ‘hip-hop'. Hip-hop isn't about being black any more. After all, the world's most influential rapper is Eminem - who is white - and he keeps it real by telling his own story. That is the story of the trailer park. The way Westwood tells it, he's ‘keeping it real' in his own way - Lowestoft style.

"I'm not gonna pretend I've used the same words all my life" says Westwood. "If there's a hot new expression, I'm gonna run with that because it's down to me to bring the flava [flavour]." And the people who laugh at Westwood's talk are the very people who end up claiming his phrases as their own. "[New York DJ] Flex and I said "I'm feelin' it" to mean we liked something. When I started at Radio One, people would laugh at me for saying that. Now, it's an industry standard."

He dances between the decks. No bodypopping - it's simple left foot, right foot stuff, punctuated by a snap of his fingers. It's like he's in his own front room, and he doesn't care who's watching. The man is a fan. Westwood is 6" 5', with big hands. He blesses them every time he handles 12-inches of vinyl. But being so tall means he's got a long way to bend down to reach the decks, and if he DJs too long, he wakes up with backache. Backache just ain't hip-hop.

Westwood started out as a box boy, carrying records for other DJs. In exchange, he would get to play a few records of his own - once he'd collected the empty glasses. First it was soul. Then it was reggae. But then came hip-hop. And Rapper's Delight by the Sugarhill Gang. "Suddenly," he says, "life made sense." He flew to New York while hip-hop was still a Bronx/Brooklyn thing. "I was the only white guy at the party" he says. "People used to think I was a policeman. I got the mandatory stares, but I never had any drama."

By 1982, he had his own slot on the pirate station LWR. "The law used to be that the DTI couldn't raid you if you were on private property" says Westwood. "So we were broadcasting from tower blocks on the North Peckham estate. We would look out the flat window and see kids breakdancing and body-popping to the records we were playing." He later moved on to Kiss FM, where he had a stake in the company, and the London commercial station Capital.

Matthew Bannister signed Westwood for Radio One in 1994. At the time, Bannister described him as "the epitome of the public service broadcaster.He's not above [listeners] or patronising to them". Signing Westwood was a triumph for the public service ethos, bringing in many listeners who wouldn't otherwise bother with the BBC - chiefly, the young, urban black population, not hugely interested in the programming of the 'old' Radio One.

Westwood started up a Street Team, with a van to leaflet and ‘spread the word'. He talks about the Team like it's an outreach programme. In his eyes, the van (which has his face painted on the side) is a ‘vehicle of empowerment'. The Street Team are given gainful employment and, in return, they keep Westwood "plugged into what's going on on the streets..Maybe these kids haven't had jobs before. So you have to make sure they are prompt, focused, that they think of the future."

But, just sometimes, Westwood likes to leave the good works behind. That's why he took the rap show to Miami, and broadcast from a 65ft limousine. "It seated 45" he says. "We put the turntables in there, and had 5,000-watt speakers blasting, and just drove it up and down the strip. We were conversating with people out on the road. We bumped into Jazzy Jeff who gave us an interview, and we had girls jumping up in the back. That was hip-hop, man."

But his favourite spot is New York. It's where he goes "to get his focus on". He is broadcasting his next show from Sylvia's soul food restaurant in Harlem, where the chicken tastes so good it makes you wanna slap your mamma. It will also give him a chance to pick up some rare grooves in Brooklyn. "A record breaking in New York will break eventually in the UK" he says. "And you've got the world's greatest DJs. New York is a real hip-hop town".

Sylvia's soul food restaurant is in the middle of Harlem's nail shops and weave salons. It's on Malcolm X Boulevard - east of Marcus Garvey park - and there's Black Consciousness everywhere you look. "It's going to be off the meter" says Westwood, while a phone company engineer puts the finishing touches to the ISDN line. It's taken him two days, so the BBC have borrowed a four-foot broadcast satellite from Reuters, just in case.

It's still cold enough for ice in the Hudson, but the neighbourhood has turned out to see Westwood's guests arrive. Hip-hop security - the walls of flesh that guard the city's hip-hop clubs - are working the door. And this door needs to be worked; whether it's Cam'ron and Nas, or Kool Moe Dee and LL Cool J, there's a lot of bad blood in the world of hip-hop. So guests have been instructed to arrive at 15-minute intervals, to keep one star (and one star's entourage) away from the next.

Ja Rule, who seems to have a beef with just about everyone, is Westwood's first guest. But he's running on hip-hop time. In other words, he's late. When he does arrive, finally, it's with his own security - and they come in numbers. As Ja Rule's PR says, "they roll ten deep". Some security firms consider rappers too high-risk. The rapper 50 Cent, for instance, has to pay off-duty police officers instead. But then so did the rapper Biggie Smalls. Fat lot of use - he was shot dead in 1997.

Rule greets Westwood with a hug - the preferred hip-hop greeting - and Westwood can't disguise the smile. He's decided to wear his Puff Daddy designer leather jacket for tonight's show. Rule is wearing velour. It's a hip-hop thing but, mercifully, a hip-hop thing that Westwood doesn't buy into. "Velour is only good for Jimmy Saville" he says. "And fat people". As Rule's velour entourage set about Sylvia's all-you-can-eat buffet, you can see what the man means.

The rapper Fat Joe arrives at Sylvia's wearing $1million of diamonds and red gold. Very hip-hop. Fat Joe is huge in the world of rap. Literally. He's the only rapper bigger than his security. "The necklace ain't insured" he says. "Come get it." He loves Westwood. "That's my man" he says. "He's about breaking records. And representing real hip-hop." Like Rule says, "Tim keeps that street flava." It's music to the ears of the boy from Lowestoft.

Westwood's broadcast style is high-energy, like hip-hop itself. He has an array of sound-effects - a siren, a machine-gun - and uses them to punctuate speech. It's a bit hospital radio, but he smiles and gets away with it. But when he asks Ja Rule about the press coverage of feuds in hip-hop, the mood changes. "We're all black men" says Rule. "And the divide and conquer thing has been going on since slavery. It's like ‘Get all the jigs fighting'." It's awkward. For a minute, Westwood looks like a tourist.

Like the time he performed at the Notting Hill Carnival, and said he wanted to see more of his "big black brothers" in the crowd. "That's not how it happened" says Westwood. "People were getting crushed. Some women had come with pushchairs, and I was trying to move them from the front. I could see people getting mad intense so, as a joke, I went ‘And all the white people to the back'. Everyone laughed. I'm white. My mother's white. I'm not dissing white people."

But sometimes he overcompensates. Call it white, middle-class guilt - it's everywhere. Of Westwood's guests, Keith Murray, Freeway and Capone have all been in prison. And he seems a little too approving of those who have been ‘state property'. He sends big-ups to "soldiers on lockdown", and reads out their street names. We'll never know if Nolly is a pimp or a pusher. Or whether he attacked a pensioner with a screwdriver. Either way, Westwood sends him "much love".

"People come up and say ‘Tim, I did my whole journey through the system with you'. They want to embrace me. On the [prison] landings on Friday and Saturday night, everyone turns up their radio full volume to listen to Westwood. The way it echoes around the place, I hear it's crazy in there. It's a party. People drink what they've made up out of yeast. And smoke whatever's been smuggled in. I'm not supporting it, but that's how it goes down."

He likes to sound cool. Which is why he makes jokes about cannabis on air. If he's not pretending to light up a joint on air, he's offering to get his guests a stash from his Yukon in the car park. The fact of the matter is that Westwood doesn't smoke cannabis - not any more. Worse than that, he's convinced that it prevents young adults from dealing with their frustrations. Westwood is a fraud. His only defence? "You've got to be in step with what people are doing".

Westwood knows that he's in show business. He knows this he is all about entertainment. And his on-mic persona is just a character. "I'm just being appropriate to the environment" he says. "If you're kicking it on the corner with your boys, you might be swearing a little bit. You might be drinking or smoking. You'll have your trousers hanging low. But not if you're with your mother. And you might pull your trousers up a little bit tighter. But you're still the same person."

He claims that, however low his trousers may get, his mother and his sister will still love him. Even his father, the Bishop of Peterborough - acquaintance of Lady Thatcher and sometime contributor to 'Thought For The Day' - was understanding about the trousers. "But people should remember that my Dad started out as a curate in Hull" he says. "Which is Hull, you know what I mean? I'm not disrespecting Hull, but it's not Hampstead. I was born in Lowestoft. And I'm not disrespecting Lowestoft, but that's a poor little fishing town.

"People think I grew up in the bishop's palace. But I had left home by the time my Dad became Bishop of Peterborough." And he only went to public school for a year. He worked on the accent when he was at comprehensive. "If you're going to school with black people, and you're going to school with Asian people, it's obvious you'll absorb that" says Westwood. "The Ali G stuff is funny, but at whose expense? The young white people going to mixed race schools. I don't think that's cool."

It's the morning after the night before. And first to Health King - a juice bar off Time Square - for a godless concoction of kale, cucumber and broccoli to start the day. In Westwood's London juice bar they call it Tim's Green Stuff ("for people who have been bad to their bodies"). But they can't get the recipe quite right. "Too much cucumber, UK!" says Westwood. To use a DJ term, it's all in the mix. A friend turned him on to vitamin drinks - "and he looks younger every time I see him, man."

Westwood likes to lead a healthy life. One of the reasons he's leaving his flat on the Fulham Palace Road is that the area doesn't have a Pret A Manger. His place is decorated with lots of graffiti, including lettering by 3d [who went on to form Massive Attack]. But it's just too small. "If MTV Cribs [a lifestyle programme] come round, it will be a short visit. ‘Here's the bedroom, here's the kitchen, good-bye'." It's just a place for him to lay his head, and store his records.

The flat's only distinguishing feature is the steel security door. Westwood fitted it after the shooting. He still remembers the day - he was driving home after a day DJing in Brixton's Brockwell Park, when two attackers, wearing multicoloured helmets, pulled alongside his car. One started shooting from four-feet away. "The first bullet went into my arm and span out of me. The second went through the seat, missing my spine by inches. I feel blessed by God to survive."

Westwood looks pained when he thinks about the sneering reports in the papers. "I thought it would make page two of the South London Press," he says. "Or the music section of the Voice. But, to be really honest with you, I got a lot of love off the street because people really thought what happened to me was wrong. It wasn't like I had done anything." Apart from refuse to pay protection money. That's why people are convinced Westwood was targetted. But he doesn't like to discuss it. And the two gunmen still haven't been caught.

After the shooting, Westwood escaped to Amsterdam - and then New York. It was while he was away that his father died. It's something that, clearly, Westwood still has to come to terms with. "We were very close. We used to speak two or three times a week. It's not like he had introduced me to his Radio 4 contacts - or given me a couple of grand to go buy some records. He had respect for me because I made it on my own. And I had enormous respect for him."

In retrospect, the death of Westwood's father has overshadowed the shooting. "So overshadowed" he says. "It was a terrible period for my father. There were journalists knocking on his door. And there was tension between us because he wanted me to get out of the hip-hop game. Now I know I should have gone home as opposed to going to New York. To be honest, if I hadn't got shot I'm sure my father would still be alive today. I feel that strongly."

The shooting didn't make Westwood listen to rap any differently. But it did change the way he lived his life. "I went crazy" he says. "I remember one time in New York I had gone without sleep for 48 hours. It was 4am, I was smoking a blunt [a cannabis joint], drinking a Long Island Ice Tea, looking fucked up, and I caught the eye of [New York DJ] Flex. I thought ‘This guy is going to take me for a clown'. I didn't want to be a clown in this game so I gave up drink and drugs. I'm here for hip-hop."

And that hasn't changed. Westwood's favourite place in New York is Beat Street Records in Brooklyn - a block-and-a-half of hip-hop. Westwood is a member of Mr Excitement's Record Pool, which means he gets the latest US rarities Fed-Exed to London every fortnight. But he still likes to shop. Today he's looking for remixes, rarities and bootlegs, but comes away with a book about the Shower Posse, the Jamaican gang known for ‘showering' their enemies with bullets.

On his way back to the hotel, Westwood feels the need to indulge his adidas habit. His trainer of choice is the Air Force One. "It's the hip-hop classic shoe, man" he says. "The way Timberland is the hip-hop classic boot." And Westwood likes to do it right. While he's waiting for the assistant to fetch his Air Force Ones, he pulls distractedly at a rack of basketball shirts. But he won't be buying one. "I'm not 18, man" he says. It's the first clue Westwood has ever given about his age.

He wears his new trainers to Cheetah, an uptown hip-hop club. There's no dress code, even though Cheetah is a paid-in-full kinda place. It's very bling bling - like a rap video on MTV. As we make for the VIP area, the only white faces in the place, Westwood whispers "If you see anyone in red, it's totally gang related. The bloods have taken over New York." I'm wearing red. I wish he'd told me before we left the hotel.

Westwood sits in the roped area. It's waitress-service only - and $500 minimum per table. He orders a bucket of Moet before disappearing to the pit to check out the DJ's record boxes. It's a hard habit to break. The DJ in Cheetah gets the biggest cheer of the night for playing Chi Chi Man by T.O.K. It is a hugely successful dancefloor track that talks about setting light to homosexuals.

From dem a par inna chi chi man car
Blaze di fire mek we bun dem!!!! (Bun dem!!!!)
From dem a drink inna chi chi man bar
Blaze di fire mek we dun dem!!!! (Dun dem!!!!)

Westwood likes to play Chi Chi Man when he DJ-s a party. He's keeping up with what the street want. "Keeping it real" is important in hip-hop, but it's not easy when - like Ja Rule - you own ten cars and four houses. So rap stars fake it. And that's all Westwood is doing. By bigging up ‘soldiers on lock-down', and pretending to smoke dope, he is making out he's badder than he really is. No-one questions Westwood's commitment to hip-hop, but he comes across like a pimp with a health plan. Westwood needs to grow old with the music. Is Radio 2 still looking for presenters?