Credit: Found On Internet

At the tender age of 19-years-old, Lady Sovereign is the next UK artist being lined-up to break into the US’s notoriously hard to penetrate hip hop market.

In the last few months she's been flown backwards and forwards to New York, where she’s hung out with people such as Jay Zee, Missy Elliot, Beastie Boys, Snoop Dog and The Neptunes, who are all talking about working with her.

Not bad for a self professed hoodie wearing chav from North London. "It’s mad," she corrects me.

Louise Harman grew up on the now demolished Chalk Hill estate in Wembley, where she was thrown out of school for playing truant before taking her GCSEs.

After trying door to door sales, which she says she wasn’t too good at, she was put forward for a drama course and began to find her groove. Then she heard Ms Dynamite on the radio and began to mimic her by "sitting there with a hairbrush in front of the mirror and practicing my lyrics for hours.

“I was experimenting with the way I delivered and one day I just went 'Yow this is Lady Sovereign'. It's natural to me now because and it's there in how I speak, that rurrr.

“When I realised that I'd got my delivery right that's when I realised that everything was in place. I was like 'let me do more things' - that was the confidence I needed."

She was offered a role in a film which ended up in front of Medasyn (aka Gabriel Olegavich of Spektrum), who called her into his Hackney studio to record on his early grime track, 'The Battle'. Despite being scheduled for release on the Casual, the record never came out, but enough promos were mailed to ensure it became an underground club hit.

"They put out white labels and stuff,” Sovereign explains, “and it's out there on the internet, which is what most people do to hear it. It's one of these classic tracks. It's like the first thing I recorded and it's just weird that its still out there and people still want to listen to it."