The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

We’ll admit that this is probably not the first paper to pick up if you wanted the low-down on fresh new Jamaican music. The real dancehall news just doesn’t fall on the editor’s desk with any regularity and the scenes go on largely behind our hunched backs. However, one of its finest female artists just cut a stunning track that should (and we hope will) cross way over into the wider market.

London-based Warrior Queen - beat that name for a distaff microphone mauler - has been hot property for years, working with huge soundsystems and producers here and in Jamaica. She’s even featured on the Children of Men film soundtrack. However, having now been compiled on An England Story from London’s superb Soul Jazz label, bigger things yet should happen for her.

‘Things Change’, her ripping ode to shifting social tides and “tings gettin’ kinda ’ard” in London, is her most accessible work we’ve heard and rides one of the catchiest tracks (riddims, if you must) in many a year, courtesy of Britain’s Heatwave collective. The jumping piano motif - expertly sliced from the intro of the magnificent ‘Losing You’ by long-lost seventies soul act, Courtial - illuminates the very air as the beat pumps like a back-alley knee-trembler, Warrior Queen chopping lyrics out like a regal butcher.

Born Annette Henry “under the clock in the centre of Kingston”, the woman also known as Wendy Culture spent her childhood in the Clarendon parish in the country.

“I wrote my first lyrics [about a flood] when I was 12,” she says. “I used to chant on my uncle’s soundsystem at his record store.” He’d play the version flip-sides of crisp new singles and Annette would plug in a microphone and scorch it. “It would draw massive crowds of passers-by, who would stop to listen,” she beams. “It was like Reggae Sunsplash!”

Though educated in one of Kingston’s finest schools and bearing hopes of a career in medicine, music got the better of her and before long she would find herself plying her talent around Kingston’s outskirts, hooking up with such reggae luminaries as the Pablo Sound System. She may be a sweet little gal off-stage, but wild performances behind the mic quickly earned her the Warrior Queen title and won her many a deejay competition.

For someone we should know more about, she’s also been recording for a long time. “In the late eighties I recorded my first release, entitled ‘Outrageous’, at Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong studios,” she states like it ain’t no thing. Like I said, we don’t report much of this stuff but when it’s as awesome as ‘Things Change’, it’s news.