'YOU KNOW WHAT I heard the other day?' asks Jentina, hip hop fan, force of nature, and pop tonic. Today, she's dressed head to toe in bubblegum pink, blinding white and jangling gold jewellery. Even before her debut single, 'Bad Ass Strippa', has hit the shops, she keeps diva time, arriving for our interview 90 minutes late. 'I heard "Jentina is a wannabe'". I thought, yes. I wanna be someone, I wanna be on the stage.'
Jentina grew up in Surrey, one of 14 children in a chaotic Romany household. 'You know Itchy & Scratchy? That's what our house was like.' They listened to a lot of music - 'travellers love country & western!' - but Jentina was especially taken with her brother's Nas and Tupac tapes.
School was abandoned at 14, in favour of sweeping barbershop floors. She saved pounds 900 and went to Miami, where she was a rollerblading waitress before being shipped home when her real age was discovered. She went off the rails. 'That part of my life is now like one of those cupboards there, locked up with a key. My brother died, life couldn't have got worse. Then I decided to behave and do something proper.'
She worked in a shop in Soho, saved up for a laptop, taught herself to programme beats. About a year and a half ago, she rapped at former M/A/R/R/S man Dave Dorrell (in the shop by chance) on her lunch break, and badgered him into letting her record the demo that got her signed to Virgin. At the N*E*R*D* aftershow party last February, she pestered Timbaland's engineer Jimmy Douglas into producing some tracks. 'By the time I got home, my jaw hurt from talking to him.'
Her music - like the O'Jays' sampling 'Bad Ass Strippa', or the synth-laden 'Mysterious' - is primarily concerned with having a good time, all the time. But her album promises a few C&W tears. 'I've never really written a song about "oh it was so hard growing up". I've never felt sorry for myself. But there's a lot of diversity on the album.'
Most starlets are instructed to enthuse about 'the music', but Jentina's love is more keenly expressed than most. 'Music notes, I wish they were alive and could run along into my hand and then I could be like [pets imaginary musical note], "you all right mate?" Because I really feel like they're my friends. Music's the only thing that makes me happy. My six dogs, and music.'
