N-Dubz: ‘We’re still young… we look good, we sexy, we here baby!’

The colourful London trio are back with a new album and a string of summer tour dates, including this weekend’s Isle of Wight Festival. They speak to Roisin O’Connor about the hedonistic days of their Noughties fame, writing relatable lyrics, and why the world needs a band like N-Dubz

’We never call it a reunion – we call it a comeback’: N-Dubz (left to right), Dappy, Tulisa and Fazer (Press image)

I can’t lie, I haven’t been an angel. I’ve been quite bad. I’ve misbehaved,” says Dappy, propping his elbows on the bed. “But hey, we’re all human. And if anyone’s read anything about us, they only need to spend two or three days with us to see our real character.” N-Dubz, the irrepressible Noughties group, are back and as boisterous as ever. Hanging out with them feels a lot like a raucous sleepover, in the moments before a parent comes up to tell everyone to shut up. The rapper and singer born Costadinos Contostavlos is sitting at the foot of the bed in his hotel room; his cousin, singer Tulisa Contostavlos, is sprawled across it while his best friend, rapper and producer Fazer (Richard Rawson), is propped up against the pillows. “Tulisa, get your dirty socks out of my face!” Dappy grumbles, prodding her feet.

Much has changed since the northwest London trio, who reunited in 2022 after an 11-year hiatus, first broke through in 2006 with their debut single, “Better Not Waste My Time”. Back then, their antics off stage generated as many headlines as they did on, from brawls at petrol stations to drug busts and a bizarre, short-lived rivalry with UK hip-hop group Blazin’ Squad. Their timekeeping, however, remains as dire as ever. Tulisa is an hour late, laden with bags and carrying her lunch in a polystyrene container. Yet it’s hard not to warm to her instantly, as the 34-year-old flops on the sofa in the lobby of their London hotel and natters happily while we wait for her bandmates.

Another half an hour goes by, and the small talk turns to sighs of exasperation. “Where are they?” Tulisa mutters, manicured fingers tapping impatiently against her leg. “Where are those little demons?”

When Dappy and Fazer do finally arrive, in a flurry of brightly coloured clothing and diamond-encrusted everything, they offer hugs, kisses and flustered apologies. “Sorry darling, producer wouldn’t let us leave the [video] shoot,” Dappy scowls, that signature woolly hat pleasingly present. Once they’ve piled into the lift and settled in the room, however, keeping them focused is another task entirely. Halfway through the conversation, as we’re discussing how they’ve managed to stay relevant for so long, Dappy stands up and announces, “I need to take a piss,” making a beeline for the en-suite bathroom and pulling the door behind him. Fazer and Tulisa continue talking, as the door slowly begins to swing back open… “DAPPY,” Tulisa screams as her cousin’s rear end comes into view. “Sorry! I was trying to hear what everyone was saying,” Dappy shouts. Pants back on, the 36-year-old rejoins his bandmates.

“We never call it a reunion – we call it a comeback,” Tulisa tells me. She did “the most amount of ass-kicking” to get everyone in the studio, “but we never lost contact, because we’re family – at Christmas, he’s coming over,” she says, jerking her head at Dappy. They all refer to N-Dubz as “an anomaly that beat the system”; Fazer feels like they’re still at the beginning of their careers. “I think the world needs a band like us,” he says. “We’ve always been too fast-moving for them to understand, though. By the time they thought they did, we’d already moved onto the next stage.”

Maybe the world didn’t understand N-Dubz, but they were the colourful, uncontrollable ball of chaos it needed. They were formed by Dappy’s father, the late musician/barber Byron Contostavlos – formerly of the band Mungo Jerry – as a sort of unorthodox after-school club. Byron was anxious to find a way to keep his niece, son and son’s best friend from straying onto the wrong path. All three had difficult childhoods: financial hardship, gang culture, violence and parental illness were all commonplace. Their sound was, and still is, a somewhat undefinable and frantic blend of hip-hop, rock, garage, R&B and pop, with melodramatic, call-and-response style lyrics that played out like a teenage soap opera. “Better Not Waste My Time” saw Dappy rapping in an Eminem-style yelp over dramatic string flourishes and a menacing synth beat. “Ouch” followed Tulisa into her house and up the stairs, “one step, two step, three step, four”, bursting in on her partner in bed with another woman.

The kids found N-Dubz first, sending the group exploding out of the underground after early airplay on the now-defunct urban station Channel U and countless downloads on the file-sharing website LimeWire. By 2007, they’d earnt a Mobo award for best newcomer and signed briefly to Polydor, who helped them score a Top 40 hit with a re-released version of their debut. Three platinum-selling albums followed, including their debut Uncle B, which paid tribute to Byron after his sudden death right as the band’s career began to take off.

On to the next stage: N-Dubz during a live concert (Getty)

The band’s back-and-forth lyrical style makes for highly quotable songs (“Name’s Shaniqua, and what?!” girls used to squawk at each other in the school playground), while their favourite theme of relationships gone wrong remains as relevant as ever. On new songs like sad banger “February”, they act out the aftermath of a toxic relationship over cold, stuttery beats that give way to an Eighties-style power guitar solo. “Play Your Part” has Tulisa remonstrating with an ex who blew it. “It’s telling him, ‘You could have been that guy, but you didn’t do what you needed to do to make it work,’” she explains. “‘Instead you’re just a twat!’”

“The lyrics are very textbook, as in, you can text them, so it’s like how you’d argue with someone over text,” Dappy chimes in. He’s most engaged when the conversation is about the music, perhaps wary of questions about his chequered personal life, which includes being convicted of battery in 2007 and two counts of assault the following year. “That’s the core of N-Dubz, so you can always relate, as a man and a woman talking,” he continues, hastening to add, “Or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman.”

Dappy is regularly pegged as the troublemaker of the group. You might recall his hyperactive guest appearance on a now-infamous 2007 episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks (host Simon Amstell told him off for talking to the audience), or the time he sent threatening texts to a listener who called N-Dubz “losers” and Dappy “a little boy in a silly hat” during an interview with Chris Moyles. Today, though, the rapper and singer takes longer to speak up, seemingly content for Tulisa and Fazer to take the lead. They’re still on a high from the success of their arena shows last year, and the release of their first album in 13 years, Timeless.

Having sold out those arena shows in three minutes flat, they’re eager to tour again. This summer, they’re playing outdoor shows including this weekend’s Isle of Wight Festival, Dreamland in Margate, and Gunnersbury Park in London. “I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, because the old tours, it was very much like rock star vibes every night, starting with a shot of JD like ‘Wheyy,’” Tulisa recalls. “Now I’m just too old to do that, my body can’t hack it! So I was like, how am I going to handle this if I’m not getting smashed every night?”

All three of them have an admirably pragmatic stance on wealth and fame. “It’s quite mentally challenging to be famous from a young, young age and get to your thirties and still be going,” Dappy says. He tends to caveat a sincere comment with something that lightens the mood, in this case hollering: “But we’re still young… we look good, we sexy, we here baby!”

We’ve always been too fast-moving for them to understand, though. By the time they thought they did, we’d already moved onto the next stage

Fazer

You wonder whether things might have been easier had their uncle been around to guide them. As it was, their notoriety only grew along with their fame. By the time they’d announced their hiatus to pursue solo projects, Tulisa, Dappy and Fazer were still relatively clueless about what a “normal” adulthood entailed. “I ended up having a kind of midlife crisis,” Tulisa says. “I didn’t know how to pay my rent, my bills… I didn’t even know how much a pint of milk was. It was like I had to learn how to take control of my life, and start from the beginning.”

In other ways, though, Tulisa managed to assert herself as a mature, empowered woman at a time when slut-shaming and misogyny were rife. The way she had handled a sex tape leaked by her ex-boyfriend, MC Ultra (Justin Edwards), was widely hailed as a feminist triumph. First, Tulisa shared her own five-minute video calmly explaining how she had nothing to be ashamed of, and condemning him for his actions. Later, she stood outside the High Court and celebrated winning a formal apology from Edwards. “His actions were to spite me, make money and ruin my career,” she told reporters. “He has succeeded in none of these things. I stand here today a stronger, wiser young woman.”

“When you’re that young, you live your mistakes in the spotlight,” Tulisa says now. She’s glad things have changed, sort of. “People can’t get away with half the things they used to do. Some of the things I’ve experienced as a woman and the way people have gone for us…” She shudders. “I see the same stuff happening now and people are horrified, they’re like, ‘Oh this poor girl…’ and I was like, ‘Hang on a minute, you were all happy and laughing at me 10 years ago! But I am glad people don’t have to go through what I did.”

Tulisa: ‘When you’re that young, you live your mistakes in the spotlight’ (Press image)

They seem more concerned by how their fame affected the people around them. Friends would come to their shows and struggle to deal with the comedowns that followed. It must have been harder, the band seem to think, to witness the briefest glimpse of money, fame and adulation, before returning to normality knowing it’s never going to be yours. “It’s like an addiction,” Fazer says. “We’d go on another tour and they’d not wanna come because afterwards…” he trails off. “It changes you,” Dappy agrees. “The human body, in my opinion, is not designed to go through this: make music, and then go out night after night to hundreds of thousands of people, and you get paid for it… in high quantity, let’s say, right?” Tulisa interjects: “You bloody love touring.”

“I miss my family when I’m away,” Dappy says. Does he have kids? He pauses, and I wonder if he’s counting. “I’ve got a few,” he says finally. Fazer, whose own long-term partner just gave birth to twins, cackles. Tulisa, currently single, calls herself a “lone wolf” before swiping at her cousin as he tries to pick dirt off her socks again: “F*** off, Dappy.”

Antics aside, there’s something very moving about this trio who have, despite all the obstacles thrown at them, survived. And they’ve never stopped supporting one another. “We’re actually very nice people,” Tulisa says, smiling. “Believe it or not!”

N-Dubz play the Isle of Wight Festival main stage on Saturday as part of their summer tour. ‘Timeless’ is released on 4 August