Aynzli Jones

Aynzli Jones is a Hammersmith-born, Kingston-raised 25-year-old MC who is signed to a major label on the basis of a dazzling ragga flow, an ability to write pop-smart hooks and a facility with rhyme that is second to none (Bar-Nun, a rapper from Brooklyn). So far the ones that stand out are "MySpace" and "my face", and "cancer" and "romancer". His boom-bap attack, however, is, drawing on Jamaican patois, a staccato UK hip-hop flavour and good old-fashioned singing.

His friends call him Superflex, and he's earning a reputation for his hard-hitting lyrics, six-minute freestyles and having a nickname like Superflex. When he was six, his mother left Hammersmith for Kingston, Jamaica, although surely Kingston, London would have been quicker. He immersed himself in the city's soundclash culture, writing bars and freestyling on the street, not a punishable offence in Jamaica, or indeed any of the other islands. By the age of 16, he'd been in the studio with Bounty Killer, Elephant Man and Barrington Levy. We can only imagine. He returned to London to study sound engineering and soon was combining dancehall toasting and funk and rap rhythms for paying audiences, including a support slot with Ziggy, easily the second greatest of all the Marleys.

Jonesey, as nobody will ever call him, was signed by Mercury on the strength of his MySpace demos, Frenz and Had Enuff, and went into the studio to record his debut LP with Squeak E Clean (producer for ODB and the Pharcyde) and Salaam Remi, the hip-hop legend responsible for recordings by Amy Winehouse, Fugees, Nas and Miss Dynamite. He worked with techno slaphead Moby on his single Alice. It appeared on Aynzli's 2008 debut album, which he worked on with Chemical Brothers and Roots Manuva knob-twiddler Steve Dub, no relation to Colin Reggae.