TQ's now average pop star, while his rivals were hanging out in stage school waiting to be discovered, TQ lived a secret life as a gangster. By the time  he was 13 he was juggling gun dealing with Grade A's and sunday school  attendance. But then his mum found out and moved hima way from the projects.  Dionne St. Hill spent the day with a former bad boy who's managed to convert  his gangster past into a top selling cautionary soundtrack on life in the  ghetto.

TQ is the perfect model. The English weather is showing him no love, but  he's braving the cold regarless, wrapping his huge bright yellow puffer  jacket around his ears as the wind attempts to bite them.

Hip Hop's prettiest poster boy, TQ suits the essentially baggy uniform of  gangsters and their wannabes, but his message is certainly a tighter fit. "You name it I've seen it, from robberies, to people getting shot... death,  pain, waste... I've probably seen alot more than a 23-year old shold have  seen, but I try to channel that pain into my music, that's kinda like an  outlet for me," he explains as we retreat from the cold in a warm cafe.

An instant hit when he first entered our pop world millenium, TQ's ready to deliver some soulful urban knowledge. "Alot of my songs are based on real life, I use music to communivate with people."

Motivated by the same veal that the newley converted seem powered by, TQ is  on a mission to convert people to his brand of Hip Hop. Fueled by a passion to open people's minds, he wants anyone who cares to listen to see the error of their ways. "We dont have enough artist addressing the issues, we have such an important role and we have so majhy people that listen to us and believe what we say.  They take that as the truth. If we were selling them something that was right, then we as people could make some kind of move."

Moving saved TQ's life. When he was 15 his mother found a gun in his room. Horrified that her grade A student and Sunday School attending son was a gangster she promptly got him out of Compton and into Atlanta. Unaware that her son had nothed up nearly three years on the wrong side of the tracks. "I always hung with guys that were older than me. I was like the youngest  one on the block and got wrapped up in the sutff that they were doing when I should have been playing somewhere," he explains. "I used to sell guns, that was my little hustle. They would put the guns on  me, tell me where I was supposed to take them and nobdy would suspect me. I was 13 years old, I had a bag full of guns walking down the street and nobody would know, it just looked like I had a backpack full of books."

He would have continued on that lethal road to nowhere if he hadn’t got caught out. "One of my boys came over early on a saturday morning and said 'look i need you to hide this for me'" he recalls. "I was sleeping, hooped up, grabbed it and just threw it in my room somewhere, went back to sleep, and forgot all about it. Left the house and went to the mall or sumthin. Came back and my mom had been cleaning the room and found it. After all these years where I'd had guns hidden all over the place, she finally found one and it wasn't even mine."

Despite making over 1000 pounds a week and stashing guns in his parents home, neither had a clue what their teenager was doing with his spare time.  I had a formula to deal with my parents and do what I wanted to do on the streets," he explained revealing the cunning that helped him cover his tracks. "My father, he was all about academics, so if I brought home goodgrades, he would basically keep off my back. My mom was all about church, so if I went to chruch on Sunday, she'd keep off my back. I did both of those things. I made sure I got good grades in school, made sure I went to church on sunday, but all through the week I got to do the dirty and nobody would know."

"When I look back on it now, I think man that was crazy, But it happened for a reason, you know what Im saying? All during that time I was a teenager I learnt a lot, a whole lot about how to survive, the different sides of life, the difference between good and bad. It got me believin’ that I was spared, that Im here for a reason."He passionately believes that his mothers decision to send him to Atlanta saved his life."She probably didn't know what she was doing, but it was meant to be. The timing was just perfect, she got me out of LA at a time I really needed to get out."

Like most rap moms. TQ's mom is very proud of her son. In fact depsite her sons maturity and financial independence she behaves like she wants to be the undefeated champion of motherhood. "Oh yeah, my moms takes care of me," he says proudly. "She is right close to me wherever I am. She cleans up, washes clothes, cooks. I dont know what id do without her."Of course he's not alone in his idyllic love for his mother, rappers dead or alive are most likely to be caught on camera with there mothers on their arm, than a papparazzi friendly rent-a-date."For most of them, it's because they didn't have a father in thier lives. My mother and father are together, but they wernt together when I was born. I lived with my mother for about three years before they got married.""I guess that's whhere my tight connection came from, me and her went through it, my father was in the navy and we were really struggling."

"Hands down she is my best friend. I never met a person like her, she's just got a knack for saying the right thing at the right time. She's like a wise old lady and she's not even old you know waht im saying," he says with a laugh. So what is the son of a wise women, old or otherwise still doing using the term 'bitch'."I dont want to stereotype or judge anybody, so I don’t want to say anything bad about the young women of today," he says searching for a valid arguement. "But I havn’t met a women that I can compare to my mother. Maybe I havnt spent enough time with a women to know, but with my eyes and with what I see everyday out on this road, because of this job that I do, it's like I cant see my mom doing what alot of these women who step to me do."

In a bid to affirm his ultimate belief in womankind TQ came up with ‘Superbitches’, certainly the standout track on his latest album – but for all the wrong reasons. Despite the title he insists on calling it a homage to Black women. A rallying cry in fact for women who like to be in control. “I like to go against the grain,” he says with a devilish grin, “we’ve been dealing with these subjects for a while – women against hip-hop… this bitch situation and it’s not cool.

“Would I call my mother a bitch? Of course not. So why am I going to call another Black woman a bitch? ‘With that in mind I decided to take the term and flip it around and call ‘em ‘Superbitches’. I did it because peopel will look at a label like that and make their judgement without even listening to the words. They’ll hear the song and they won’t listen to nothing about what the song is about, because all they’ll do is the word ‘Superbitch’. Now ten or 20 plays down the line when they finally listen to the lyrics (if they get that far) they’ll be ‘damn, I talked all this stuff about this guy and his record disrespecting women and he’s basically talking about the woman he wants to marry’, he says remarkably seriously.

‘No, I’m not gonna say ‘listen superbitch I wanna marry you,’ he replies to my instant enquiry, “but what I will say is I want my wife to be a superbitch.A superbitch is a woman that takes care of her man, her children, her home and herself. That’s my little definition of what a superbitch is.”Flay I know, but this seems to be the extent of TQ’s effort to explain his need to call women female dogs – super or otherwise. “I gotta keep it real, he continues, “there are things about ya’ll that we don’t have in our lives. We gotta have ya’ll. I wouldn’t cry in front of my boys but I will in front of my girl. As much as I don’t want to admit it, cos you guys are alwats male bashing we need you,” he laughs.

However crudely TQ insists he’s attempting to heal a nation battling with gender, race and class issues. The sicties and the early seventies nurtured vocal Black heroes we could embrace. Their thoughts, their actions and their music indicated a desperate yet sincere need to create change. These artists, community leaders, church goers and city dwellers created an environment where Black power existed and blossomed despite government backed attempts to destroy the concept and the conceptualists. Music art and culture had a political force rarely seen now. We’ve entered a new millennium yet many artists seem content to dwell in the political, cultural and ecolutionary dark ages as long as the royalties and merchandise checks keep rollin’ in.

“People don’t really seem to have a lot to fight for these days. When you talk about Black leaders you look at Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and people like that. There’s was a whole gang of people together fighting for the same reason. Our problem especially in the States is togetherness, we don’t have it no more and it’s going to take something like hip-hop which is the closest thing we can all relate to what was going on back then, to bring us together, because so many people in our generation listen to it and love it. I mean people who love hip-hop really do love hip-hop, you know what I’m saying’? Hip-hop heads and hip-hop fans are real fanatics.

Conspiracy theorists and musical commentators theorise the plethora of socially damaging music being produced for such an insatiable audience is a manifestation of big brother’s plan to keep Black people in the ghetto – divided and ruled.

“Yeah, yeah”, he grees, Ï feel like there’s always an underlying cause for everything. That sterotype about Black men, especially in America is built on that. NWA thang – your worst nightmare, It’s not about glorifying what goes in the ghetto; it’s about saying look, look at me. Why am I this way? There’s something wrong. You know what I’m saying. Take two Black babies, put one of them in Beverly Hills, put the other one in Compton, they’re going to come out two different ways. It’s based on environment.”

With his poster boy good looks, smart attitude and predilection for analysis, TQ is the antithesis of White America’s good idea of a hood dweller. Enlightened, empowered and community conscious, he’s determined to use his position to inspire change.

“Most of the people you see as artists right now, was broke before they became artists. So a lot of it has to do with trying to survive. I can take that into account, but for some people they’ve had that success, they’ve made it, now it’s time to do something else, try something new.”

A cross between Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg, TQ’s speaking voice is deep and drawling. Coated in southern spice, he has that kinda sexy unhurried way of communicating that keeps ladies hanging onto his every word (and everything else that may be hanging).

“I’m not gonna lie and say I haven’t been with a fan, of course I have, but right now, my life has kinda got to the point where are lot of the things I have seen, I don’t necessarily have to see again. Seen it, done it, ,got some very interesting video-tapes,” he says with a laugh. “Whether it was a pleasurable experience or not. I’m just growing further and further apart from the whole celebrity thang. It’s so fake anyway, yeah it’s nice to say you gotta all of these women in the hotel lobby for you, but they’re not really after you, they’re after who they see on TV. So that means next year if I’m not on TV I’m back in the same hotel, they’re not gonna be there.

“When I was in to that I’d get my boys to choose me a girl sometimes, a lot of the time we’d go back to my hotel room, but we wouldn’t have sex. We’d sleep, I fall asleep a lot,” he laughs. “But everybody you meet on the road backstage or at a show is not necessarily a groupie, just because a girl wants to hang out with you that night doesn’t mean she’s a groupie, even if ya’ll have sex doesn’t mean she’s necessarily a groupie either. I’ve met some nice people on the road that I still keep in contact with, that I never did nothing with. Everybody ain’t bad.

Smarter than the average pop star, TQ knows how to keep a grip of his expanding finances – he keeps it in the family.

“As far as my money and stuff goed, my father is my business manager,” he explains as he attempts to bite into the hardest chocolate brownie that was ever made. “He’s an accountant, so I was blessed to have a father that was already in that line of business. He’s not gonna steal anthing from me. The people that hang with me now are the same people that I hung with before, so they really don’t have any reason to change on me now,” he says as he finally admits defeat and puts the brich feigning as a sweet treat to one side.

“I think it’s a lot easier to deal with iy that way, than if I was out making a lot of new friends.”

Eager to be a father and create a family of his own, his backdrop of pain inspires a life that has something more.

“If I can make it, any damn body can make it. It was a mess, I was a nutcase. I had no reason for doing all the stuff I was doing. “I wanna try and stop people making the same mistakes I did.”