Rapper Slowthai to play South Shields gig - and it'll cost just 99p to see him

Slowthai will be performing at The Trimmers Arms on Saturday, May 11, and tickets are just 99p.

The 24-year-old from Northampton - real name Tyron Frampton - is staging the cut-price tour to showcase his debut album, Nothing Great About Britain, due out on May 17 on Method Records.

“I knew what I wanted to say on the album. It’s basically my experience of growing up, of having a family that were immigrants originally, of the stories they’ve told me, of my childhood and how I’ve lived my life," he said.

"Through it, I’ve gone on a journey of explaining how everything I was chasing to make me feel good only clouded my judgement.

"And it took me going through a tonne of **** to realise that none of these things - no money, no drugs, no fake relationships - is gonna make me happy, or make me a good person.”

Ty’s wasn’t the easiest of upbringings. The oldest of three kids, he was raised almost single-handedly by his teenage mum, in a city with rapidly declining prospects.

On the album's title track he sets about dismantling the stereotypes of British culture, bating the Royals and lampooning the jingoistic bluster that has ultimately led to Brexit and a surge in nationalism.

“Tea, biscuits, the roads: everything we associate with being British isn’t British,” he cries today. “What’s so great about Britain? The fact we were an empire based off of raping and pillaging and killing, and taking other people’s culture and making it our own?”

Yet, in the closing bars, when Ty growls, “Hand on heart, I’m proud to be British,” he means it.

"It’s the people that make Britain great,” he explains. “The whole album’s about community and coming together, because your family, your community and the bonds we have as people is all that matters.”

The album’s focal point is unquestionably the autobiographical closing track. A searing account of an upbringing informed by financial struggle and adversity, Northampton’s Child finds Ty praising his mum’s tenacious spirit and selfless dedication to her family.

He crowns her as his “only Queen”, before confessing “No way I can pay you back/I just hope I can make you proud.”

“Music to me is the biggest connector of people," he says. "It don’t matter what social circle you’re from, it bonds people across divides. And that’s why I do music: to bridge the gap and bring people together."