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Slim Shady, Marshall Mathers, Eminem--whatever you want to call the dude, he's back. Back from a long relapse, showing up for life again. Ten years ago he came to London and spoke to Ben Thompson for the Daily Telegraph.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

The atmosphere of ersatz serenity that is supposed to prevail in newly-refurbished West End hotel lobbies was never going to withstand the arrival of Eminem. It's not that the 24 year-old Detroit rapper means to cause trouble. It's just that his very existence seems to divide opinion, or as he puts it himself in characteristically colorful language, "God sent me to p**s the world off".

There is nothing especially offensive about his appearance. In fact, as Eminem emerges from the hotel lift, his shining eyes and retroussé snout give him the appealing air of a newborn marsupial. His road manager politely asks the receptionist if he can sit in a quiet corner of the restaurant to do an interview. It is one minute past twelve. The restaurant is formally open but completely empty. The maitre d' is called. He looks at Eminem. He does not see the most extraordinary pop success story of 1999, a man who has come from nowhere to sell four million copies of his debut album and who could buy and sell this whole paltry establishment in the blink of a baby blue eye. He sees dyed-blond hair plastered down on a pasty white forehead. He sees tattoos.

As we are ushered hurriedly into the crowded bar, a fresh difficulty becomes apparent. Eminem--real name Marshall Bruce Mathers III--is virtually unconscious. Swaying gently from side to side--the breeze from the lobby doorway gently ruffling the artificial fibres of his sportswear--he apologizes politely for his debilitated condition. In a welcome departure from traditional euphemistic practice, someone in the Eminem camp admits that the rapper "took something he shouldn't have" in the course of the previous night's riotous appearance at a hip-hop club in King's Cross.

Such a forthright admission might seem shocking to those unfamiliar with Eminem's work, but anything less than full disclosure would have been a disappointment from the man whose lurching, syncopated signature tune "My Name Is" is probably the most outrageous litany of unfettered calumny ever to go multi-platinum. In the course of introducing the world to his demonic alter ego, Slim Shady, Eminem finds the time to rap about drunk-driving, expectoration, sexual abuse by teachers, a vicious assault on former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson-Lee, teenage suicide, reckless drug consumption and the impregnation of the Spice Girls. On a more personal note, he also accuses his mother of taking more drugs than he does (even before today's unsteady entrance, the general consensus was that this would be a considerable achievement), and of being too flat-chested to breastfeed him properly.

Even on The Jerry Springer Show--the previous high water mark of American moral turpitude--it is taboo to disrespect your mother. Small wonder that Eminem's Top Of The Pops debut earlier this year elicited enough complaints to fill a special edition of Right To Reply, and a subsequent appearance--promoting his second British single "Guilty Conscience" (a Socratic dialogue in which Eminem appears to advocate armed robbery, the seduction of a minor and the murder of an unfaithful spouse)--was broadcast only in the midnight repeat. Small wonder that American music industry bible Billboard devoted a whole page of crisis editorial to decrying his pernicious influence on the youth of today.

But the Eminem story does more than just restore the faith of those who feared that pop had lost its power to divide the generations. It is at once an unlikely romance, a strange new twist on the American Dream, and--last, but not least--an aesthetic triumph, since in swapping the self-aggrandizement that is rap's traditional stock in trade for a self-loathing whose eloquence and wit are utterly compulsive, he has not only taken an upbringing of grinding poverty and violence and made it painfully funny, but also effected the most successful translation of alienation into art since Dostoevsky imagined the murder of his landlady.

Like his similarly heavily-tattooed rap hero Tupac Shakur, Eminem's body tells a story. His wrists bear the legend "slit me." His upper arm carries a somber tribute to the beloved uncle--his grandmother's youngest child, only a few months older than he was--who was Eminem's constant companion until he killed himself at the age of 19. His stomach is inscribed with the name of his long-term girlfriend Kim, also the mother of his beloved three-year-old daughter Hailie, and the touching inscription "Rot in flames."

Presumably this spur-of-the-moment break-up gesture took a bit of explaining when they got back together a short while afterwards. "That's how I am", says Eminem cheerfully--his tour manager has bought him a coke now and the caffeine is beginning to work its magic. "If I think something, I'll say it. Maybe I'll regret it afterwards and maybe I won't." Another low point in the same turbulent relationship inspired "'97 Bonnie and Clyde," one of the most controversial songs on Eminem's album The Slim Shady LP. In it the rapper describes in gruesome detail taking his girlfriend's dead body down to the pier in the back of his car, dumping her in the water and heading for the Mexican border with their bewildered and newly motherless daughter in tow.

The chilling effect of the song's baby-talk monologue--"Dada made a nice bed for mommy at the bottom of the lake"--is enhanced by the happily gurgling contributions of Eminem's daughter on backing vocals. He had spirited her off to the studio claiming to be taking her to fast-food emporium Chuck E. Cheese. "When I went in to record that song", Eminem explains, "my daughter's mother was trying to keep her from me, and this was just a way for me to get back at her. It's better to say something like that on a record," he adds, somewhat gratuitously, "than to actually go out and do it".

It is testament to the success of Eminem's unconventional methods of diplomacy that he and Kim are now reunited and preparing to move Hailie to a new house "way out in the suburbs, away from everything." Given that he never knew his own father ("If you see my dad", he observes matter-of-factly in "My Name Is", "tell him that I slit his throat in this dream that I had"), Eminem's devotion to his progeny is heart-warming evidence of the enduring nature of family feelings. Not for nothing does this man take his name from a sweet.

"When my daughter was born", he says--and with the intensity of the memory, his deathly pallor is suffused with something very like a flush--"I was so scared I wouldn't be able to raise her and support her as a father should...Her first two Christmases we had nothing, but this last Christmas, when she turned three [Hailie was born on Christmas day, though not actually in a stable], she had so many f**king presents under the tree, she kept opening them saying 'This one's for me too?'" Eminem pauses contentedly, "My daughter wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she's got one now."

In the sort of wide-screen irony for which American show business is deservedly celebrated, The Slim Shady LP's grippingly authentic litany of blue collar woes--"I'm tired of committing so many sins...tired of using plastic silverware...tired of being white trash...tired of wearing the same damn Nike Air hat"--has earned its author unimaginable riches. When Eminem performed at this year's MTV video awards, the lavish stage set was based on the trailer park he was still formally living in a few months ago.

How he will cope with the sudden change in his fortunes remains to be seen. For the meantime, apart from the new house, he's put his money where he can't get at it--"I'm still young", he says "I don't want to do anything immature"--and professes no interest in the conspicuous consumption with which other rappers are wont to celebrate their accession to the big time. Except where his daughter is concerned, obviously. When he gets home from promotional trips, he takes Hailie to the store and tries to buy her everything she sets her eyes upon. "She says 'Daddy, you don't have to get me something everywhere we go,' but I can't stop myself from spoiling her, I don't know whether it's good or bad. I'll find out when she's a teenager."

When Eminem was a teenager, a high school bully hit him so hard he had a cerebral haemmorhage that kept him in a coma for five days. The name of that bully, D'Angelo Bailey, is just one of the innumerable fragments of personal detail that make The Slim Shady LP a jigsaw puzzle of its author's psyche. "My album," says Eminem, tiring slightly, "is so autobiographical that there shouldn't really be any more questions to answer. It's just the story of a white kid who grew up in a black neighborhood who had a pretty sh**ty life--not the worst life in the world, but still a fairly sh**ty life."

Just how sh**ty a life it actually was remains an issue of legal disputation, as Eminem's mother Debbie Mathers-Briggs has just sued him for $10 million. The defamation suit, described in an official statement by Eminem's manager and lawyer Paul Rosenberg as "the result of a lifelong strained relationship," will make the sort of legal history more usually associated with Ally McBeal, not least because one of the observations it deems actionable is Eminem's description of his mother as "lawsuit happy." "She's always been out to get me," he shakes his head sadly, "and now she knows I have money, she won't leave me alone. I know that's not a nice thing to say about your mother, but unfortunately it's true."

Before he got his record deal, Eminem worked for three years as a chef at a suburban family restaurant called Gilbert's Lodge. He was sacked for not wearing the correct work apparel shortly before Christmas of 1996. "I go back there now and pull up in a limo, just for the spite of it", he says vengefully, "hop out, go to the bar, drop a couple of hundred dollars for a tip and throw it in their faces." He assumes the sneering voice of a former workmate, "'Well, Marshall, we thought you'd be blowing up by now'... They took me for a joke, but now the joke's on them."

As with many an Eminem diatribe, there is more to this one than meets the ear. "When I go back in that restaurant, it's not to flaunt," he continues, contradicting himself. It turns out that he pops in to Gilbert's Lodge regularly, not just every once in a while like you'd imagine. "I go back to try to be cool with people and see how they're doing," he insists, "I went in there the other night to see my old manager"--he mimes extending a hand--"'What's up, how you doing?' But he couldn't look me in the eye." Eminem pauses. "It's funny," he says, sounding less convinced with every moment that passes. "It's very funny."

In some strange way, Eminem's rapid elevation from the bottom to the top of the food chain seems to have entailed losses as well as gains. To someone with the imagination to see it, there might even be a downside to the mysterious increase in attractiveness to the opposite sex which is contingent upon newfound celebrity. "That actually makes me feel kind of sick," he pauses ruefully. "Some girl will be telling me how fine I am and trying to sit on my lap and I'll be thinking, 'If I was just me and I didn't have all of this fame, you wouldn't look at me twice...you wouldn't look at me once.'"

"People wonder why my lyrics are so misogynistic and violent towards women," Eminem continues. "But my opinion of girls is not very high right now." The air of old-fashioned formality with which he says this is strangely reminiscent of Elvis Presley, and it's not since the King's halcyon days in the mid-1950s that a poor white boy has made a black musical form his own to such explosive effect. Anyone who wanted to find out what had happened to America in the intervening half century could do a lot worse than listen to "Heartbreak Hotel" and "My Name Is" back to back.

Ask Eminem what the future holds, and he'll tell you that his next album--already two-thirds complete in the notebooks he fills with his tiny, spidery handwriting--promises to be "a little more controversial." "People already think I'm the antichrist," he grins winningly, "so I'm at that point where if everyone's like 'You're an a**hole,' I'm like "I'll show you what an a**hole really is."

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