The extraordinary story of a unique label devoted to releasing music by Iraq war veterans. By Carl Wilkinson. Photographs by Jamie-James Medina.

Sgt John Dobbins, Fort Stewart, Georgia.

Many soldiers take acoustic guitars to Iraq, but in the heat and humidity the wood soon splits. Because of their solid bodies, electric guitars are less susceptible to the weather. ‘I built it piece by piece when I wasn’t out on missions,’ explains Dobbins, who has the calm air and physical presence of a man twice his age. ‘I look at other guitars in the store and they’re all shiny, but I like mine better because I built it myself.’ To solve the amplification problem he bought an Eighties Fender amp and an effects peddle.

During his first deployment, Dobbins had become fast friends with another soldier, Kenny Rojas, with whom he shared a passion for playing the guitar. Rojas would often come to his quarters to borrow his old acoustic guitar or talk music and Dobbins would work on his playing, emulating his heroes, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Clapton his black-and-white Fender is based on one he once saw Clapton play on a music DVD.

Today, with Dobbins gently strumming his guitar in his small flat outside Savannah, Georgia, where he lives with his wife, a former retail manager from New York, and their two labradors, which must be locked in cages in the kitchen before we enter (one has a tendency to pee everywhere in excitement), the war seems very far away. But the memories are still painful.

‘We were getting run ragged,’ Dobbins had explained earlier as we sat in a shabby sandwich joint outside the gates of Fort Stewart, a vast military base an hour’s drive from Savannah. The remnants of tropical storm Fay were playing out in bursts of heavy rain which lashed the parking lot where he had parked his customised Mustang (white and black, like his guitar) while inside a soldier played a videogame, shooting zombies in the corner. Over the counter hung a sign offering a Soldier Sub packed with meat and cheese and 10 per cent off for all military personnel in uniform. Dobbins had ignored his sandwich, his small grey eyes locked on a point somewhere in the middle distance as he recalled the night his friend Rojas had died.

‘We’d been getting two to three hours sleep a night,’ he said, ‘and one night in October 2005 when we were supposed to have the night off I took some sleeping pills. Before I went to bed I felt drunk because the medicine was taking over and I went to sleep. But three hours later they came and shook me awake because they needed a Humvee driver.’

After protesting that he was in no fit state to drive, Dobbins was ordered into his vehicle, donned his night-vision goggles and roared out of the compound, the third in a convoy en route to intercept some high-value targets. As he left he recalls one of the medics joking, ‘Don’t hit anything tonight, Dobbins!’ A short time later, the rear nearside wheel dropped into a pothole detonating a double stack of landmines. The armoured vehicle erupted in a blinding flash of white light and the next thing Dobbins knew he was waking on the roadside with bruising to 90 per cent of his body, one ear damaged and the Humvee in flames beside him.

‘My whole body was numb. I got up and limped towards the Humvee. A colleague was circling with blood dripping from his face. I shouted but he didn’t react and I really thought I was a ghost. I thought I was dead.’ In the mangled wreckage lay the body of his best friend. ‘I didn’t know there was anyone back there. He wasn’t meant to be there.’ They were both rushed back to the base and Dobbins remembers fighting off the doctors who were trying to give him morphine, desperate to know of Rojas’s fate. ‘I guess he died slightly after midnight.’

With his friend gone and the memories still raw, Dobbins picked up his guitar and started playing, releasing his emotions, grieving. At that time he thought about something his godmother had said when he was in his teens and struggling to cope with problems in his family: ‘People need music; it helps you get through your day.’

‘I’m still going to see a therapist,’ he tells me quietly, ’still trying to deal with it. And I just play. Music’s a big release for me; I just pick up a guitar and start playing. If I’m angry or sad I just feel better playing guitar.’

Conflict is no stranger to creative endeavour. The First World War produced great poetry, the Spanish Civil War great literature, and in Iraq a vast number of young soldiers - brought up on videogames, free music downloads, YouTube and dubbed Generation Kill by Rolling Stone magazine - are turning to music as a way of making sense of their war. Everyone has an iPod or CD player and laptops and video cameras are common. Humvees are routinely jerry-rigged with tinny speakers and even sub-woofers, zip-tied to the ceiling, which pump out rock music as units charge into battle. And because you now don’t need expensive equipment or a professional studio to record music, these soldiers, armed with just a microphone and a copy of home-recording software such as GarageBand, can produce a song in the combat zone and email it home.

When he returned from his own tour of duty in Iraq in January 2006, Sean Gilfillan - who lost seven of his friends and comrades - was shocked at what he calls ‘the disconnect between civilians and returning members of the military.’

‘If you didn’t want to know about the war in Iraq,’ says Gilfillan, who was part of the first occupying force to enter Baghdad after the fall of the city in 2003, ‘you could ignore it. Only 9 per cent of the US population has any experience of serving in the military. The other 91 per cent have no idea.’ In an attempt to bridge this gap and humanise the soldiers, Gilfillan decided to set up a label to put out music made by members of the US armed forces as a tribute to their fallen comrades and to reach out to the general population.

To The Fallen Records was founded in January 2007 by Gilfillan and business partner Sidney DeMello and takes its name from the large tattoo Gilfillan had etched across his back to honour his friends who had died. The label offers a conduit of expression for young men and women whose voices are never normally heard in an attempt to expunge the stereotype of the typical American soldier.

Sean Gilfillan's tattoo honouring his fallen comrades

The pair acquired ‘debt up to our eyeballs’ to get their project off the ground, explains Gilfillan, and are now looking for a second round of venture capital and a pairing with a major label to help expand and get the music out to more people. ‘We’re a non-profit organisation in everything but name,’ he says. ‘We feel that the American public is ready to hear from these talented musicians, but we need a major label partner to make that happen.’

There is certainly a vast pool of talent keen to embrace the label. The fledgling imprint now has a database of 1,500 military artists (unusually, the label is not just about releasing the best music, but providing a platform for all soldiers who want advice or guidance with their music) and has worked with more than 50 performers to put out three compilation albums - Hip-Hop Vol 1 , Rock Vol 1 (on which Dobbins’s song, ‘Tribute to the Fallen’, about his friend Rojas appears) and Country Vol 1. They now plan to release further mix CDs that cover every genre.

The response from the top brass has also been encouraging. ‘The military bosses love it,’ says the 29-year-old Gilfillan. ‘They really see the benefit of the soldiers expressing themselves as long as they do it professionally and not offensively. It’s good for the image of the military and they realise they can’t censor soldiers who are fighting for freedom of expression.’ A number of acts were recently invited to play at the Pentagon where, as one put it, they were ‘treated like movie stars’, and although no plans are in place for them to return to Iraq to entertain the troops, it’s something Gilfillan would like to see happen.

‘Music is all about social issues, about grassroots, about authenticity and nothing is more grassroots, authentic and patriotic than music by members of the military,’ says Gilfillan. ‘One of the hardest things about being in Iraq or Afghanistan is that when a friend is killed you have to go out the next day to the same spot. You don’t get a break. It can take a heavy toll on you and you have to deal with that at some point. I think music in this situation can be very therapeutic.’

Josh Revak, 27, a former sergeant with the 1st Armoured Division who fought in Baghdad, Falluja, Karbala and Ramadi, is one of Gilfillan’s artists with a song on the Country Vol 1 compilation - ‘Empty Boots’. He has also released an album - In the Hours of Darkness - under the moniker Crutchhiker, which he recorded with the Grand Ole Opry house band. It’s a moving record that touches on the transitory nature of life and asks big questions about the greater plan for us all in a bitter, raw and emotionally charged style. Revak’s experience is a testament to the role music can play in war.

In 2003 he and a friend wrote a song in Baghdad when a friend called Tim Hayslett was killed. ‘We were devastated, absolutely crushed,’ he explains, ‘and when the sergeant major heard we’d written a song he asked us to perform it at the memorial service.’ The difference between this service and previous memorials was clear. ‘Soldiers were weeping, they were venting and grieving,’ says Revak. ‘Previous memorials had been dry-eyed and professional, which is not a word that I’d like to associate with a memorial service. You need to grieve or you’ll lose your mind and I believe that the music helped with post-traumatic stress disorder.’

After that first performance, the sergeant major effectively ordered Revak to play at every subsequent memorial. His moving, deeply personal songs provided a conduit for the soldiers’ grief. ‘It was hard because we knew we’d have to write and perform these songs, but we didn’t know who’d be killed next. It was very stressful. Each time it was a closer friend.’

During his second deployment, Revak would often sit in his unit’s postroom writing and recording songs with his best friend Aaron Jagger. They played all of the memorials together, sharing the burden of songwriting duties. Then, one morning while providing armoured support to a team building a combat outpost in Ramadi, Revak and another colleague came under mortar fire.

‘We had got to a rendezvous point and everyone was out of the vehicles,’ recalls the blond Revak sitting in the Veterans of Foreign Wars post (VFW, an American organisation similar to the Royal British Legion) near his home in Minnesota. He had been out late the night before, singing around a campfire at a friend’s party and he’s hungover and wearing mirrored shades, his voice cracking as he talks. ‘A mortar round fell about 100 yards away and my friend and I decided to get back into our vehicle. As we were doing so a second mortar round fell on the other side of the vehicle. My friend didn’t make it and I took shrapnel through my ankle. The doctor said he could see right through it.’

Revak was shipped out to the military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany, where his unit was based and Jagger arranged the delivery of his guitar as he had surgery to rebuild his shattered ankle using bone grafts from his pelvis. While he was in hospital another friend was killed and then, just as he was leaving to begin a year-long rehabilitation as an outpatient, news arrived that Jagger, his best friend and companion at all those memorial services, had also been killed. ‘He was an amazing musician,’ says Revak, choking up at the memory. ‘His was the last memorial service I played and writing and singing that song for him is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I was crushed. I really miss him.’

Although it was a particularly painful experience, today Revak looks back gratefully at his performances at these memorials. ‘I’ve met a lot of Vietnam veterans,’ he says, looking about the run-down interior of his VFW post, which is lined with flags, a poster advertising a meat raffle and, sitting at the bar beneath a sign stating that vulgar language will not be tolerated, a veteran who has headphones on and is swearing loudly to himself before being told to turn it down. ‘I knew I didn’t want any feelings locked up. I want it all out. These songs I hold dear to my heart. Performing them was beneficial to me and those around me.’

Click above to watch a short film with Sgt Josh Revak

In the gloomy basement of an old wooden house in Chicago that he shares with his young wife Josseline, Isaiah Santopoalo is standing before a large US flag pinned to the brickwork. Beside him is a microphone and in the corner his computer gently hums, its screen emitting a pale glow. This is his recording studio where the clean-cut, dark-haired Santopoalo recorded his hip-hop tracks covering everything from the lot of struggling single mothers to turning away from the temptations of Chicago street life; to a song called ‘Moving On’ which came out of his first deployment to Iraq.

Santopoalo saw fierce fighting with the 5/73rd Cavalry of the 82nd Airborne in the battle of Turki village, near Baquba, about 30 miles north-east of Baghdad in the murderous Sunni Triangle in 2006. He lost close friends and although he was officially released from the military in February 2008, he is still going to counselling and occasionally suffers flashbacks. ‘I have good days and I have bad days,’ he says quietly.

Although just 24, Santopoalo has been involved in some of the key events of recent US history. He joined the army just two weeks before the attack on the Twin Towers and was later posted to New York. Then, in 2005, he was in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina before his deployment to Iraq. Through it all he carried his love of music, which had been fostered by his stepfather, also a former member of the 82nd Airborne, from the age of around 12.

He played Beatles and Prince records oldies were goodies, says Santopoalo, who remembers seeing his fathers medals and donning his old fatigues to go and play at soldiers in the woods. Upstairs are display cases full of his fathers Beatles memorabilia. I’d sit and listen to his music all night through headphones, rewinding and trying to recite the lyrics. On the streets of Chicago he developed a love of hip hop the Roots, DMX and particularly Bone Thugs-N-Harmony spoke to him and he started emulating his rap heroes. It made me look at my life and think about how I could express it.

In the army, Santopoalo held on to his love of music, dreaming up lyrics for raps while on patrol, sitting on sentry duty or manning his .50-calibre gun, saving up the lines until he was somewhere safe where he could jot down his songs. He would gather his colleagues round and free-style as he’d seen Bone Thugs-N-Harmony do in a video when he was younger. He spent most of his time on his two deployments in Iraq out in the field, far from Camp Warhorse, the nearest forward operating base, often engaging insurgents in action. But during those rare hours back in the relative safety of base hed make use of the satellite phones to call one of his collaborators back in Chicago to rap lines down the phone and request a beat. Over time these long-distance songs took shape and during one brief visit to the camp he signed up for a talent show.

‘It was the first time I’d ever performed and I was extremely nervous,’ he says, ‘but I popped on the mix and did the song and got rave reviews.’ Not only did he have a touch of stage fright but, as the stage was lit up, the performers were worried about being mortared. But once the music started that all pretty much went out the window and everybody was focused on the stage. ‘Its probably the closest I’ll ever be to stardom,’ he jokes. ‘All the girls were coming up to me afterwards asking where I stay. I did a few more songs and ended up scheduling a full-blown concert.’

Click above to watch a short film with Sgt Isaiah Santopoalo

Earlier this month officials met in Ramadi, once a hotbed of insurgent activity about 70 miles west of Baghdad where Santopoalo had fought, to hand over control of the vast eastern Anbar province to the Iraqi authorities. As America prepares to go to the polls in November, talk about phased withdrawals of troops becomes ever louder.

Meanwhile, for these soldiers who, by their own admission, are still piecing together their lives and readjusting to civilian life, politics a once distant and academic business is now very relevant. Politics mattered to us in Iraq, says Santopoalo. ‘We’d hear McCain or Bush talking about how the surge was working and many of the guys would discuss who they thought was telling the truth. In the end, unfortunately, you’re faced with the decisions politicians make.’

‘As a label, we are non-partisan’, says Gilfillan. We wouldn’t have anything that is overwhelmingly anti-right wing or anti-left wing, but everyone has their view and is allowed to express it through their music and many of the soldiers you’ll hear are pro-military but anti-war.’

‘McCain wants to go back to Iraq,’ says Dobbins, ‘and I don’t.’ Santopoalo has had his eyes opened to how much of the world perceives America. ‘I think were a spoiled society,’ he says wearily. ‘To come home and hear people complaining about the most minute things waiting in line, not having enough hot water is very disconcerting.’ He sees Obama as the one man able to rebuild the country’s image in the rest of the world.

Revak, however, has gone in a different direction. He had never paid much attention to politics until he started meeting Vietnam veterans who had been prisoners of war with John McCain, who was due in town the following week for the Republican National Convention. ‘When I got back to the US I started to pay pretty close attention to the presidential race. I met Leo Thorsness and Dave Wheat who had both been PoWs with McCain and I started to learn about what had happened. After talking to these guys, it became real, not just a political campaign.’

He says the final straw came when Obama cancelled a visit to meet wounded soldiers at the hospital in Landstuhl where hed received treatment. Obama had been advised by the Pentagon not to go, but, says Revak, ‘It really started to upset me.’

Revak also has fond memories of the Iraqi people. ‘It was great to get out, me and my buddy dancing with Iraqis in the city square in full uniform.’ Music was a way of connecting with the Iraqi soldiers they worked alongside and the Iraqi people they met. And wherever they went, Michael Jackson was a firm favourite.

But music also soundtracked the war. There was pumping rock music to fire up the soldiers before they drove into battle and, as Dobbins says, ‘It’d be a big thing for us all to prepare the playlist together before we went out a bit like in the film Blade where the girl puts together a playlist before going out to kill vampires.’ Santopoalo, however, drew the line at actually listening to music while fighting: ‘The battle was the music.’

At other times there was a more personal soundtrack. ‘There’s a group of songs that remind me of my time in Iraq in the same way there are songs that remind me of college,’ says Gilfillan, now a captain in the US Army Reserves and running the label full-time. ‘When my friend Rob died, I remember listening to songs over and over again I listened to “Mad World” by Gary Jules and when I hear that now, I think about Rob.’

Music has taken on a transcendental purpose now for these former soldiers. ‘Before I’d write comedies, funny love songs. They were terrible,’ says Revak, laughing. ‘But in the military, music took on a whole new meaning. I’ve always loved playing, but I’ve never been any good until now. Nothing mattered until I wrote about life and death.’ CW

Sgt. John Dobbin’s Iraq war playlist

1 ‘Dogface Soldier’
It’s the theme song of the 3rd Infantry Division.

2 ‘Voodoo Chile ‘- Stevie Ray Vaughan
My personal favourite.

3 ‘Let the Bodies Hit the Floor’ - Drowning Pool
It fits, right!

4 ‘Stupify’ - Disturbed

5 ‘Down with the Sickness’ - Disturbed

6 ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ - Guns N’ Roses

7 ‘Thunderstruck’ - AC/DC

8 ‘Enter Sandman’ - Metallica
We’d listen to pretty much anything from Metallica.

9 ‘Dig’ - Mudvayne

10 Any song by Rammstein
They were always guaranteed a place on our playlist.

☞ You can read the original piece here

☞ To view more photographs from the brilliant photographer Jamie-James Medina, visit his website here

For a decade, Vice magazine has pioneered a no-holds-barred approach to the counterculture. But now, with a TV channel and hard-hitting reportage from the frontline of the world’s trouble spots, it’s aiming to shock in a different way. Carl Wilkinson hears how the streetwise teen-zine finally grew up

The stars are in town. The Rolling Stones are staying over there, my driver says, pointing out of the window as we speed down Unter den Linden in central Berlin. And Penelope Cruz there. Each hotel is fronted by a gaggle of paparazzi sunning themselves on the pavement. It’s the Berlinale, the annual film festival, and I’m here to meet the founders of a countercultural magazine with designs on the television and movie industry.

Back in 1994, three friends in Montreal - Shane Smith, Suroosh Alvi and Gavin McInnes - bought out Voice of Montreal, a magazine funded by the Canadian government as part of a welfare programme to provide work and promote community service. After a fallout with the original publisher, they wrested control, dropped the ‘o’ (’for legal reasons’, Smith explains over a kebab) and Vice was born.

‘We wanted to be the first international voice for the universality of youth sub-culture,’ says Smith. At 38, he now looks more like a media mogul than a countercultural hipster. In just over a decade Vice has gone from little more than a fanzine to a magazine with 900,000 readers in 22 countries and an international brand which takes in clothing, TV, book publishing, music (Bloc Party has released an album in the US through Vice Records) and now film.

‘Vice’ is practically a definition of the magazine’s content. All off-kilter life is here. Skaters feature alongside interviews with the likes of Abu Hamza. And its take-no-prisoners approach has captured the imagination of what marketing people call ‘trendsetting metropolitans’ aged 21 to 34. The Cassandra Report, the influential consumer guide, named the magazine the number-one tastemaker in this crucial demographic for the past five years.

The magazine’s roster of photographers includes Terry Richardson, Ryan McGinley, Richard Kern, Dash Snow and Observer contributors Jamie-James Medina, Alex Sturrock and Danielle Levitt. Richardson is famed for his point-and-shoot style and has shot campaigns for Gucci, Levi’s and American Apparel. McGinley, a former photo editor for the magazine who still contributes cover shots, was the youngest person ever to have a solo show at the Whitney in New York.

‘I first saw Vice in my local video store,’ McGinley tells me from his Manhattan studio. ‘I hadn’t seen anything like it before.’ As one of a group of young, up-and-coming photographers and writers, McGinley recorded the fast life of the magazine and its friends in New York’s Lower East Side. ‘Things back then were crazy,’ McGinley concedes, ‘but these images were just a part of my life. When you group all the images together though, as they were in Vice, it creates a myth.’

These images are now included in a lavish coffee-table album, The Vice Photo Book, which reveals the magazine’s strikingly broad range of photography, from serious photojournalism to party snapshots to nudes. ‘Vice runs everything,’ says McGinley. ‘It happily runs full-frontal nudity, which is pretty ballsy.’

Jamie-James Medina, 25, who started working for the magazine when he was 19 and made his name photographing London’s burgeoning grime scene, agrees. Now focusing more on photojournalism, Medina has travelled to Tokyo, Bangkok, Jamaica, Sudan, China and North Korea with Vice. ‘I love the fact Terry Richardson can shoot girls, Ryan McGinley can shoot this beautiful art photography and I can sneak in there with a bit of photojournalism,’ he says.

The magazine’s range has broadened enormously in recent years. As Medina puts it: ‘Hipsters grow up. It’s just not cool to be dumb any more.’ Later, at dinner in a Twenties-style Berlin bierhaus, Smith appears, sporting a Kim Jong-Il lapel badge he was given by a general he befriended in North Korea while making an undercover documentary. I ask him about the criticism Vice has faced over the years.

‘There was a time in the Nineties when it was all about cocaine and asymmetrical zippers,’ Smith admits. ‘We did a lot of drugs and went to a lot of parties and had sex with a lot of supermodels. But you realise there’s a whole world out there, and as we’ve expanded, the scope of the magazine has got broader.’

To that end, Smith has set up VBS.tv, an online television station which boasts Spike Jonze as its creative director. ‘They’re inventing new things every day,’ says Tom Freston, a creator of MTV and former head of Viacom. ‘It reminds me of MTV in the early days.’

‘We became a magazine when the barriers to making a magazine effectively became nonexistent,’ explains Smith. ‘You could do desktop publishing on a Mac and print for cheap. Now you get a digicam and a Mac, and you can have something broadcast on the net within 15 minutes.’

It was VBS that premiered Heavy Metal in Baghdad, a documentary about four young metal fans in the war-torn city trying to rehearse and play gigs to a tiny group of like-minded fans before escaping to Syria. The film won critical acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival. Its producer, Monica Hampton, and editor, Bernardo Loyola, worked with Michael Moore on Fahrenheit 9/11. So where do the magazine’s political allegiances lie? ‘We’re not trying to say anything politically in a paradigmatic left/right way,’ argues Smith. ‘We don’t do that because we don’t believe in either side. Are my politics Democrat or Republican? I think both are horrific. And it doesn’t matter anyway. Money runs America; money runs everywhere.’

The Vice brand - for all its dislike of celebrity - now has a growing band of celebrity followers. As well as Jonze, Hollywood stars Luke Wilson, Johnny Knoxville and the film director Michel Gondry are all friends of Vice. More unlikely still is the Bono connection. ‘I have to admit we’ve also started working with Bono. I should hate him,’ Smith laughs, ‘but he’s a good guy.’ The ‘good guy’ has called VBS ‘punk rock for the 21st century’, so one wouldn’t really expect Smith to describe him any other way.

After dinner, we move on to a party in an old warehouse in East Berlin. The walls are covered in peeling paint, and Berlin’s hipsters are queuing to get in. Peaches, the New York DJ, is playing, and Smith and Alvi are circling the room. Among the party talk I hear snatches of conversation about international distribution deals and future projects. Earlier that evening, under the disco ball, Smith said of the early years: ‘We definitely tried to put our flag in the sand against the status quo media.’ Now the line attached to online TV station VBS reads: ‘In 10 years, we’ll be the mainstream.’

· To order a copy of The Vice Photo Book for £25.95 with free UK p&p, go to www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875Vice Squad

I’ve spent the past eight months editing a series of books which are published each month with the Observer newspaper and last month I took a day off to shoot a video for the band Mr Hudson & The Library for their song ‘Upon The Heath’ from their debut album A Tale of Two Cities. It was a fun day and you can see the results below…

Stratospheric house prices mean even the bottom rung of the property ladder is out of reach for many. Carl Wilkinson meets the couch surfers and warehouse guardians who’ve found novel ways to save their rent

Location, location, location goes the trite estate agent’s mantra. But just what would you be prepared to do for the right location? Take this advert for a London flat posted last month: ‘Excellent transport links, close to Archway tube (Northern line) and Holloway tube (Piccadilly line). Excellent bus routes, 15 mins from Central London.’ It’s a bargain, at just £75 per week. The catch? You sleep on the sofa.

The last time many of us would have fallen asleep on a sofa would have been in front of Newsnight before retiring upstairs to bed. However, for a new generation of ‘property poor’ the sofa is their bed.

While much of the UK is in the grip of a house-price frenzy, it’s at its most intense in London. Awash with foreign buyers’ cash, City boys’ £1m bonuses, and with property speculators frothing over the Olympics, London property prices are careering out of control, without ever quite hitting the buffers. The housing price bubble refuses to burst, despite regular pointed warnings. Meanwhile, many people on the ladder don’t sell their houses any more; they rent them out, free some of the capital and buy somewhere new. The traditional process of buying, selling and moving on to somewhere bigger after a few years appears archaic and financially ill-advised. It seems that everyone with a foot on the ladder is scheming a buy-to-let empire, often subsidised with interest-only mortgages and deposits scammed from credit cards. There are no rules.

The latest manifestation of this property madness is the ’supergazumper’, a buyer who ‘wins’ a property via the increasingly common sealed-bid process and then, in a final act designed to put pressure on the vendor not to back out, gazumps his or her own offer with an extra cash sweetener of an additional ten grand or so. This is before seeing a survey and is non-refundable if the vendor has a change of heart. ‘It’s the opposite of buyer’s remorse,’ says one Chelsea estate agent.

According to Adam Sampson, director of Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity, ‘we are seeing the slow demise of the housing ladder, which is now completely out of reach for the majority of young people.’ Citing the fact that by 2026 only 35 per cent of 30- to 34-year-old couples will be able to afford their own homes, Sampson says that for first-time buyers a housing ‘rockface’ has emerged: ‘It’s virtually impossible to get on without years of saving or financial help from family or friends, and more precarious than ever once you are on it.’

The reason? The London property market is at boiling point. ‘Without question, the market’s crazy,’ says Daren Haysom, manager of the Shoreditch office of London estate agent Foxtons. ‘We’re on target to have our busiest month since this office opened three years ago. We’re looking at selling in excess of 70 properties in a month, which is crazy. If I had 100 I’d have sold them.’

London’s Evening Standard has become a good barometer of the frenzy. Here’s a selection of headlines from the past few weeks: ‘Cost of average London house rises to £300,000′; ‘March of London’s £1m homeowners’; ‘Homes in London only for those who inherit them’; ‘House prices soar by £1 a minute in hottest of hotspots’, and so on.

‘We’re a nation of homeowners,’ Haysom explains. ‘There is a certain stigma if you’re in your thirties and haven’t bought a property.’

But here’s the problem: to buy a £250,000 one-bed in London with a standard 90 per cent mortgage based on three-and-a-half times your annual income you’d need a 10 per cent deposit of at least £25,000 and an income of just over £64,000 before a lender would approve you. Without a fat deposit you don’t stand a chance. The deposits Haysom is seeing are getting bigger. ‘Some parents have got houses that they’ve paid off and they’re sitting on £400,000 and can lend their son or daughter £50,000, £100,000. So the deposits are getting bigger every year. Generally speaking, 20 per cent isn’t shocking, so you’re talking £60,000-70,000.’

However, if you’re not one of these fortunate few, saving a deposit is even more critical. And it may explain why so many young Londoners are taking to sleeping on sofas to save money.

Take Tristan Greenacre, 26. He lives in a plush flat with a great view of London Bridge and the Thames and is firmly in zone 1, a major boon when transport costs are some of the highest of any city in the world. For this hallowed property, he pays the measly sum of £75 per week, which includes all bills. The only downside is that, like his nine housemates, Tristan shares his bedroom to keep costs down. And his five-bed, single-level flat can get a little crowded.

A more fortunate legion of stay-at-homers rent their former childhood bedrooms from their parents while they save for a deposit. Jessica, 28, has been living with her parents in west London since she left university.

‘It can be a bit weird and it’s annoying not being able to have your friends over all the time, but it’s good to have a cheap base from which to find a job,’ she says. ‘It gives you breathing space, but it’s only a stop-gap. You could end up becoming like Timothy, Ronnie Corbett’s character in Sorry! Not good.’

For Nic Adams, a 25-year-old freelance stylist, living at home is not an option. Instead, he pays £40 a week to sleep on a sofa in Clapham. Compare that with an average of £112 a week for your own room in a shared flat and you can see why more and more people are turning to couch surfing as a short-term solution.

‘I try to do a lot of the cooking and cleaning,’ he says. ‘I make sure there’s milk in the fridge and shower gel in the shower. I’ve got a lot of friends who’ve ended up moving in with their boyfriends or girlfriends, but it can cause a few problems and it wasn’t for me. Couch surfing isn’t ideal, but at least I’m saving money.’

Gumtree.com, the busiest flatshare website in the UK, has seen a 20 per cent rise in room-sharing ads in London in the past six months, and demand for couch surfing explode by 120 per cent since it launched the option last June. ‘The average cost for a week’s rent of a sofa is now about £24.50,’ says Sophy Silver, Gumtree’s communications manager. ‘That’s cheap. London’s a very expensive place to live and there are a lot of people battling for rooms. It’s very encouraging that there are all these different solutions for different price brackets.’ In fact, couch surfing has been so successful that Gumtree.com is looking to introduce it to other UK cities in the future.

Of course, there have always been cheap rental options in London, from squats to boarding houses. But a new breed of renter appears to be on the increase, hunting down listed buildings in the heart of town and renting them for a pittance through Camelot Properties, a management company which specialises in protecting unusual empty properties.

These ‘guardians’, as they’re known, live in old listed churches, run-down warehouses spotted with graffiti, offices, or a host of other properties not normally found in the pages of Loot or rental websites. In return for minuscule rent they act as a deterrent to squatters who might either do damage to an empty property or hold up development once the building’s owners have planning permission.

‘We need to be in London to meet the right people and this is the cheapest way I’ve found apart from sleeping on a sofa the whole time,’ says Tom Leamon, 25, an artist and veteran Camelot ‘guardian’ who currently has the run of a vast warehouse in east London with a couple of friends from art college.

As house prices are driven up by a chronic shortage of affordable homes (social house building has decreased by 27 per cent in the past decade) and the buy-to-let boom, which exploded by 68 per cent between 2004 and 2006 - both of which remove ideal first-time-buyer properties from the pool - ever more people will be forced to either move elsewhere or look into alternative forms of living.

But even shared-ownership properties in more desirable locations, run by groups such as the Peabody Trust (where you buy a stake in a flat and pay rent on the remainder until you can afford to buy the final share), can have waiting lists of several years. Other schemes originally intended as affordable homes for ‘key workers’ - nurses, police officers, teachers - have had to be opened up to the wider market because applicants need a minimum salary of around £40,000 to be eligible. It’s no wonder many resort to more extreme measures. Why else would you take on an ‘extreme mortgage’? Try, for example, a 40-year mortgage; a loan of five times your salary; a loan in excess of 100 per cent of the property’s value; or a ’self-certified’ mortgage, whereby you don’t have to give proof of income, the trusting lender simply takes your word for it. Handy. Throw into the mix rising interest rates and you can see the flipside to the couch-surfing boom. According to a survey conducted at the end of February, 30 per cent of homeowners are now struggling with repayments and looking to ease their mortgage woes with part-time lodgers, who can drop in for a week at a time to ease the pain.

Couch surfers don’t just show the difficulty of getting on the ladder, but of staying on it once you’re there. As Amy Mulholland, who owns the flat in which Nic Adams couch surfs, says, ‘Having someone on the couch is not ideal, but with interest rates so high now it’s the only way to make ends meet.’

Of course, there is an argument for moving out of London altogether. While £300,000 can buy you a one-bed in the East End, it goes a lot further elsewhere. But while many Londoners priced out of the capital are investing in other cities, the London market is certainly not deterring everyone. And with a Londoner’s home not so much a castle as a sofa in an over-priced shared flat, it’s not hard to see why so many ingenious renters are finding novel ways to beat the system.

The warehouse guardians
Tom Leamon, 25; Lisa Comerford, 25, and Michael Jackson, 26

Tom: We live in a large warehouse - perhaps 4,000-5,000sq ft - on an industrial estate in a dodgy part of Bethnal Green. It’s very run-down, but has the basics: hot water, a sink, a kitchen area, a shower and some space for bedrooms.

We all know each other from art college and have lived together for a while. We pay around £250 per month in rent, which includes council tax and all bills. It’s a huge saving. Lisa’s here because she’s got a very well-paid job, but wants to save money to buy a house. I have some other friends who have already bought a house, but are living in one of these properties and renting their house out to make money.

We have three large communal areas that are about five times bigger than any lounge you’re going to get in a rented flat, and that, for me, is the real reason I’m doing this. I’m an artist in a small collective called the Lipman Virus which launches in the summer and encompasses furniture, painting, sculpture and writing, so I need space to work.

I’ve lived in about four or five of these properties now and you do have to make the best of it. My first place was a warehouse in the Angel, Islington, which I shared with 11 people. I’m still in touch with all of them, which is fantastic and shows that it tends to be likeminded people who live like this, usually for creative reasons. They were all graphic designers, set designers and painters, and had studios that you’d wander into during the day and talk about your work.

The room-mates
Renee Ehnsen, 23, and Marni Pennell, 22

I’ve been living in London for 18 months and I’m room-sharing with my cousin Marni, in Wandsworth, south London. The location here is so good and so cheap - it’s really hard to find anywhere as good. We pay £285.60 a month each, which includes Sky TV and council tax, but not bills. It’s a four-bedroom place so we have another three housemates.

When I moved to London I was sleeping on a friend’s sofa before I got a room in a flat with my best friend - we shared a bed for the first month, which was interesting! The room I’m in now has two double beds; I’ve been sharing it with Marni for about nine months. She’s a nurse and has just been given nightshifts, so we don’t really see each other very much. I’ve essentially got my own room. And at weekends we’re always out, so it’s basically a place to sleep.

You don’t live as high a lifestyle as you could elsewhere, but we do get along quite well. I do miss my privacy at times - if you want some space you just have to go for a walk or a run - and you have to be quite thoughtful about the other person, but it’s not too bad. I have shared a room with one of my friends in the past and that was a bit more of an effort. She used to wake me up at 5am every morning when she got up to go for a run or to go to work.

Originally I would never have considered sharing a room with someone I didn’t know, but now I think it would probably be quite fun.

The couch surfer
Nic Adams, 25

I pay about £40 a week to rent a sofa while I save for a deposit on a flat. I try to contribute to the bills, do odd jobs in the flat and cook now and then to make sure the girls I share with don’t get wound up having me around.

The sofa I sleep on is quite big and when you get in from a long day at work you don’t really think about it. I try to avoid big nights out - to save money and so as not to disturb the girls. If I wanted to bring anyone back I’ve decided that it’s either their place or not at all!

I’m a stylist and make clothes freelance, but I don’t have much storage space, so I keep a lot of my stuff in a friend’s lock-up nearby. I don’t have most of my own clothes in London. Couch surfing is all about living out of as few bags as possible.

I’d love to buy a one- or two-bed in east London. I’m putting away about £250 a week towards a deposit and in the next few weeks I hope to move on. I’d like to get a two-bed and rent out the second room. If I got a one-bed, though, maybe I could get someone in to sleep on my sofa.

The snake was at least two metres long and eventually identified as a forest cobra, although I initially had it down as a piece of hosepipe. It was writhe-around-in-the-dust, nasty-way-to-go deadly. And it was in my shower. That I considered picking it up says little for my common sense, but the fact that I didn’t reflects well, I think, on the training I’d received a few days earlier while on CC Africa’s Bush Skills Safari.

‘Grace under pressure’ - that’s what Hemingway famously called courage. But if I’m honest, in my case I think it was little more than ignorance.

The four-day specialist safari I completed at Phinda Private Game Reserve in South Africa is a condensed version of the course eight intrepid celebrities begin tomorrow in BBC2’s Safari School. Whether they’ll have to face anything as dangerous as that snake remains to be seen, but like me, they’ll have to learn shooting, tracking, walking safely in elephant and lion country, how to make rope from tree bark and much more.

It’s the ultimate Boy’s Own adventure and a great way of getting a new perspective on the usual safari experience. Since I had been weaned on books such as Willard Price’s adventure series (African Adventure being a favourite) and H Rider Haggard, and tales of derring-do from Livingstone to Hemingway via Baden-Powell (before he got into helping old ladies cross roads), the opportunity to safari like this was as a red rag to a raging bull elephant. I just had to do it.

The crack team of rangers tasked with training me were Graham Vercueil, Alastair Kilpin, Richard Walsh and the extraordinarily sharp-eyed Zulu tracker Dumisane Madide, and they had their work cut out. I’d been expecting a leisurely chat over sundowners followed by a hearty dinner round the campfire. Instead we were out in the Land Rover within minutes searching for fresh tracks to identify.

On one small patch of dusty earth alone we pored over the tracks of elephant, leopard, genet, dove and kudu. I was engrossed. Then it was time for me to have a go. I perched in a perilous fold-down seat mounted on the corner of the Land Rover’s bonnet trying to spot tracks in the roadway ahead. After about three minutes of furiously scanning the ground I took a chance. ‘I think there’s something here,’ I said tentatively, peering at some tiny marks in the dirt.

It was at that moment I raised my eyes from the road to see the herd of wildebeest that had left the marks happily grazing right ahead in the open. After that I pretended to scan the ground, but really just waited for Alastair to stop the Land-Rover, then claimed I was just about to raise my hand. This seemed to work much better.

The lot of a ranger is a hard one, but they make it seem so easy. Spotting a single lion print at 20 yards from the bonnet of a Land Rover moving at 40kph is some feat, yet they do it regularly without batting an eye. We did finally get those sundowners - by the river, in a scattered forest of luminescent lime-coloured fever trees dotted with zebra - and I went to bed happy.

The following day we set out early to track on foot. At first, getting out of a vehicle to have a closer look at an elephant or rhino seems a little wrong-headed. After all, the first rule of Whipsnade is that you stay in the vehicle. But it’s actually quite liberating. We stood about 40m downwind of a rhino and her baby in the shelter of a bush and watched, speaking only in husky Attenborough-like whispers. Then we lost them and I had to climb an acacia tree to get a better view, picking the thorns from my palms as I scanned the horizon with my binoculars.

That evening we were driven to a dry streambed where we were to camp without a tent. All night the dull, deep-throated roar of lions nearby serenaded us. I don’t think I’ve ever slept so well, or indeed felt so alive the following morning. I’d survived a night, outdoors, in Africa with nothing but a mosquito net between me and the lions. Perhaps I could make a ranger after all.

It was all over bar the shooting, and that we did in the afternoon. In a sun-dappled clearing we learnt about the rifles the rangers carry and their ethos - by law they have to carry them, but they don’t use them unless they really have no other choice, as it’s better to back out of a situation with everyone intact than to have to shoot a lion. We then spent about an hour practising loading, unloading and firing the rifles before Graham took us one at a time through a specially constructed range with pop-up buffalo targets, a charging lioness, a leopard ready to pounce and a rhino looking shiftily through some branches. I bagged the lot, but after three days this close to nature, there was little satisfaction to be had in the ‘kill shots’ or the campfire tales of how we’d brought down an angry (cardboard) lioness at 10 paces.

On the final day we headed up to a bluff overlooking the park for coffee at sunrise. It was a fitting finale. In the distance we spotted elephants and rhino grazing. Then, driving back to the lodge, and feeling like a true adventurer by this point, I was reminded that we’d only scraped the surface. We met a real trainee ranger, alone, walking the roads (to learn routes and the lie of the land) in shorts and shirt with a radio, bottle of water and a map and without a gun. We stopped for a chat and he pointed back the way he’d come.

‘There were some leopard tracks crossing the road back there. They went through about two hours ago. And a few minutes ago I saw a big group of elephants head over that way into the trees,’ he told us coolly.

Now that’s grace under pressure.

Carl Wilkinson made a journey to meet the Karen tribes of Burma - and found them in Thailand

It’s 6am. The sky is the colour of gruel as the mist clears, and there is the fine scent of old wood smoke in the cold air. From deep inside my thin sleeping bag I can hear nothing but a cacophony of pigs, chickens, dogs and buffaloes grunting, crowing, barking and snorting. Beside me is the rhythmic chanting of a Buddhist prayer as my 75-year-old host kneels on the bare teak boards of his house in the mountains of northern Thailand and prays to a small photocopied image of a Buddhist prayer wheel pinned to the wall.

It takes me a while to remember where I am and, indeed, why on earth I came. This has been the most uncomfortable night of my life. Nine hours earlier, after an incredible yellow curry, cooked over an open fire in the timber building by our guide Singh, we had stretched out on the cold wooden floor and tried to sleep. We had been driven into our sleeping bags by the cold, the noise of the animals and the darkness around us. Only once we’d lain down did I realise just how torturous the next nine hours would be: cold, noisy and painfully uncomfortable.

I’d come because in 1943 my grandfather was posted to Burma, where he was stationed at Imphal at the time of the Japanese siege. Here, he and his comrades were billeted under canvas - uncomfortable during the torrential rains of the monsoon. He made contact with some of the local Karen tribespeople and learned from them how to build a bamboo hut, into which he moved for the remainder of his time there.

Since that gruelling siege, surrounded by the Japanese, under air bombardment, and working 24-hour shifts to man important but technologically fledgling radar equipment, he had talked with fondness of his meetings with these hill tribes and so I had always wanted to visit them.

Today, many of the tribes are persecuted or driven into forced labour by the Burmese authorities, and have escaped over the border into Thailand, where they now live in a scattering of shabby villages in the mountains west of Chiang Mai. In many ways, my host and the rest of the inhabitants of this small village in the bucolic Mae Wang Valley are the lucky ones. An hour and a half’s drive from the refined and rather attractive regional capital, they live in a beautiful, secluded valley where life is hard, but moves at a sedate pace. Further west are the refugee camps into which Karen and other hill-tribe people continue to flow - according to Amnesty International’s annual report, there were almost 143,000 Karen and Karenni refugees in camps along the Thai-Myanmar border last year.

The evening we arrived, our host family had been sitting around on the bare boards of their home as the sun set. Before I visited, my guide had asked me to sign a form absolving him and his company of any responsibility, should I smoke opium with the villagers. It’s a problem among the older tribespeople and, with the help of backpackers and other visitors, one that is spreading to the younger generations.

Rather disappointingly, the older tribe members were not smoking opium, but instead chewing a grim mixture of tobacco leaf, betel-nut and limestone powder made from a rare local rock, which, I was told, is burned and then dropped in water before being ground to dust. Their blackened teeth and gums give away these betel chewers. Occasionally they would shuffle to the edge of the homestead and hawk up great wads of the concoction on to the earth.

The old couple’s son and his new wife were preparing for a night out at a nearby village, where there would be Thai boxing, drinking and maybe a dance. She crouched by the edge of the platform cleaning her teeth over a small enamel bowl; he sat with us swigging from a bottle of locally made rice whisky - sweet and powerful. Around us were the sounds of village life, unchanged for centuries: animals and children, punctured only occasionally by the more modern noise of a motorbike or truck. The village has been here for about 150 years. In that time little appears to have changed. The large timber-framed houses built on stilts are dotted about the slopes of a hill overlooking a fertile valley of rice fields. There is a road of sorts that winds up a steep hill, but in the village itself there are only pig runs of compacted mud between the houses.

In the space beneath the houses buffaloes and pigs sleep and scavenge, barefoot children play in the dust, and the women of the village gather to hang out the beautiful woven cotton scarves, throws and shawls that they spend their days weaving. And they are adept at weaving. We bought some scarves, each of which had taken roughly three days to make by hand, but cost us just 150 bhat, or about £2. To say these people are poor would be an understatement.

Elsewhere in the village there was a single, frankly squalid latrine block, to which we had to stumble in the dark, and a small shop where the entire stock was lined up neatly along one small shelf. Three cans of Singha beer stayed cool in an ancient, rusty refrigerator. The shop was run by girls - no more than 15 years old, each dressed in a striped dress of red, orange, green and blue cotton, denoting her status as a married woman, and each with a child on her hip.

Last month, General Saw Bo Mya, the revered Karen resistance leader, died in Burma. He had led the Karen National Liberation Army, which he helped found, until 2000. The KNLA is fighting for independence from Burma and for the creation of a separate state. It is a fight that began back in 1949, after my grandfather and the rest of the British army had returned home. The Japanese invasion had thrown into sharp relief the tensions between the hill tribes - of whom the Karen are the largest group - and the Bamar majority in Burma. Since then, the Karen have marked 31 January as Karen Revolutionary Day: the day their fight for autonomy began. This year will be no different.

In the almost 60 years since my grandfather made contact with the tribe, the region has changed dramatically. The people, however, still cling to their traditions. As the last notes of the Buddhist chant faded into the chorus of waking animals, I stretched out, glad to be up as the village came to life; glad that the night was over. But also glad that I had finally come.

On a remote tip of land in Australia’s empty north west, an Aboriginal tribe has built a luxury, safari-style camp, where visitors can explore the local traditions in a stunning setting. Carl Wilkinson went a little bit native

‘White man living in the wrong climate,’ said Robert as he pulled on long pink fingerless gloves designed to protect the pale arms of the long-distance outback driver. ‘You’ve got to be careful out here.’

The four-hour, 150-mile drive north from Broome in northern Western Australia, along dead straight, red dust roads to the Aboriginal-owned camp, Kooljaman, at Cape Leveque is not to be taken lightly. Even the light here seems sunburnt like the rest of the landscape.

In fact, the only thing not sunburnt for miles was us, sitting jet-fresh and pale in the noisily air-conditioned cab of Robert’s Toyota Land Cruiser, stashing water bottles under our seats, daubing sun cream on all exposed skin, adjusting our sunglasses and beginning to sweat.

In the wet season, the roads here can be washed away or submerged by flash flooding; in the dry season, fast-moving fires that leap from tree to tree as the eucalyptus oil burns can sweep through the area. It’s also a pretty rough ride. But this lumpy dust road hacked through the outback scrubland leads battered 4×4s to an extreme paradise.

At Cape Leveque a vast expanse of burnt-orange land meets a sliver of bleach-blond sand, which in turn slides into a turquoise sea. It’s stunning.

Kooljaman sits at the tip of the Dampier Peninsula, which juts out into the Indian Ocean. The peninsula was first visited by Europeans in 1688 when William Dampier travelled though the region. It was one of the last places in Australia to be settled by Europeans because of its remoteness. Today, Cape Leveque attracts more than 17,500 visitors a year. Its remoteness is the attraction.

The peninsula has been home for more than 5,000 years to the Bardi people, a tribe of saltwater Aboriginals. In 1986, Cape Leveque was handed back to the Bardi after the lighthouse that was erected there in 1909 was automated and today they own and run a tourist camp there. They get on with life pretty much as they always have - fishing and crabbing - and seem only too happy to have you along for the ride.

The area sits on one of the world’s largest pearl beds. In the 19th century, pearling was big business and the town of Broome grew up around the industry, which has left its mark, even as far north as Cape Leveque. Many of the Bardi have a mixed ancestry that includes British, Malay and Japanese blood. One family is named Wigan, after the town, because a missionary found their own name too complex for his thick-tongued mouth.

A few miles south of Cape Leveque there is a beautiful whitewashed church built in 1917. The interior is stunning, the altar and windows inlaid with mother-of-pearl shell collected nearby. Fans lazily move the simmering air. The church sits, incongruously, in the small ramshackle Aboriginal community of Beagle Bay. The community was once one of the largest missions to which Aboriginal children taken from their parents by the government - the ’stolen generation’ - were sent from all over Western Australia.

Despite the influence of pearlers and missionaries, the Bardi, unlike many of Australia’s Aboriginal tribes, still follow their traditions closely, which makes a visit to the region even more special. Kooljaman, which has won numerous awards over the past few years, is owned and managed by the local communities at One Arm Point and Djarindjin. It is part of a slowly growing tourism trend in Australia, which is allowing visitors to explore more of the country’s indigenous culture and history.

Robert dropped us at Kooljaman and we were shown to our de luxe safari-style tent fitted with all the modern facilities you could need to live a comfortable beach existence. The safari tents sit on the hill overlooking the beach, but you can also stay in basic beach huts or under beach shelters only metres from the surf, a wonderful place to wake each morning.

Within hours of our arrival we’d slipped into a somnolent routine. We sunbathed, fished and swam, washing off the red dust that would stain our feet. Later, we grabbed some cold beers from the fridge and headed for Sunset Beach to the west. There we found some smooth, candy-striped sandstone on which to sit and watch the sun sink into the Indian Ocean.

It could not have been bettered. A warm breeze, a cold beer, a beach of soft sand, a jaw-dropping backdrop of rich red iron-ore saturated cliffs (which hold a special significance for the Bardi and on which visitors are not allowed to tread) and a clear sky turned pink and gold by the vanishing sun. And then there are the stars. Out here, closer to the edge of space than we were to the nearest town, the sky is dense black velvet punctured with a pointillist sketch of light that gathers and swirls across its broad expanse. The intermittent flash of the Cape’s lighthouse provides the only unnatural light.

Dinner was as you might imagine: a barbecue. Steaks, garlic bread, jacket potatoes and salad delivered to our tent for us to cook up on a barbie under the stars. I had never felt so relaxed.

Until, that was, we spotted the bugs. In keeping with the oversized landscape, the insects homing in on our meagre lights from miles around were huge and grotesque. Flying bugs the colour and size of humbugs hit the tent (and me) and dropped to the floor; grasshoppers as long as a hand span crouched on the ceiling and beetles scurried around the shower. All harmless, but hardly restful. The only thing to do was to switch off the lights and watch the stars, then go to bed about 8.30pm.

Time here is not measured in hours or days but in tides. I had wanted to go snorkelling around the rocks off the beach below our tent and, as low tide (the best time) was about 7.30am, the spectacular sunrise at 5am was welcome. By 8.30am the sun was high and shoulder-blisteringly hot. We swam in large pools and snorkelled in search of Nemo who the locals said usually hid out in the rocks. Instead we found possibly the most disgusting creature to inhabit the ocean: the sea slug - a foot long, like a thick black turd, and desperately slow moving. We were gratified to learn later that our visceral response to these creatures was not unusual. Even the Bardi - who pride themselves on boiling up shellfish to drink as a soup to cure colds and who will strip the green fat and blood from a turtle as delicacies and will eat dugong, those blubbery, pale grey mammals, without batting an eye - really draw the line at sea slug.

And so did we. Leaving the snorkelling, we joined Dwesmond, a Bardi, on an informal bush-tucker tour he runs for guests around the site. I expected shades of I’m A Celebrity… with snacks of wriggling witchetty grubs and beetles. Instead, Dwesmond opened up another world for us. The arid outback with its nondescript trees and coarse little bushes was teeming with wildlife and edible or useful plants.

He showed us the ilngam, or banyjoord, leaves, used to numb pain and dropped into rock pools to stun fish so they can be collected less labour-intensively than through spear fishing; bush bubble gum, for chewing, of course; pandanus, which signifies a good source of fresh water even at the height of the dry season; and, most impressive, the madoorr, or gubinge (Kakadu plum) tree, the bark and fruit of which contains 50 times more vitamin C than an orange and is a staple of Aboriginal bush medicine.

After our introduction to the Aboriginals’ alternative medicine, I wanted to brave some of the seafood and so we went mud-crabbing with a Bardi, Eddie James. The following morning, he and a young boy from his community called Bernard, who could not have been more than 10, took us down to the mangroves to hunt crabs armed with a bucket and long metal hook.

It took about an hour of squelching through the thick rich alluvium to catch four of these large crustaceans. Bernard seemed to know exactly where to look. He ran off, peering into the dark recesses under the splayed roots of the mangrove trees and calling out ‘Here! Here!’ as we followed more slowly.

The crabs Bernard and Eddie dragged out had their vicious claws lopped off and were dropped in the bucket. We roasted them later over a barbeque at Eddie’s house and stood round sucking the deliciously sweet, smoky meat from the claws. But before lunch we went for a well-earned swim, which proved to be the highlight of our day’s hunting.

While we wallowed in the warm shallow water washing the mangrove mud from our feet, Bernard took himself off with his spear to do a bit of target practice. After a while I went to join him and he nonchalantly told me of the tiger shark he’d seen scouting the shallows not 20 yards from where we’d been swimming. Then, as he was talking, we spotted some small sharks zipping around nearby.

Bernard went into full stalking mode. He focused in on the sharks, anticipating their rapid movements. Twang went the spear and in a flash of splashing water and shouting he pulled a 3ft shark from the water, skewered neatly on his spear and carried it to the shore for us to inspect. It was a baby - not good eating - but nevertheless its rows of razor-sharp teeth could have taken off your fingers without too much effort.

After a week of swimming, fishing and lazing I had forgotten about the world beyond Cape Leveque. But my sense of isolation was shattered by the buzz of the tiny Cessna dropping down on to the airstrip by the lighthouse to return us to Broome.

As we lifted off, I looked out over the remote Cape with its white sand parentheses and rich red cliffs and down to where, the day before, we had been hunting crabs and sharks with Eddie and Bernard. I might have been a white man in the wrong climate, but after a week I had felt right at home.

Two hundred years ago, the first, hungry visitors to Kangaroo Island clubbed the animals to death. Today dining is a little more civilised, says Carl Wilkinson

When Matthew Flinders arrived in South Australia in March 1802 he and his crew were hungry. They hadn’t tasted fresh meat for six months and so the island they stumbled on, teeming as it was with practically tame kangaroos, was a godsend. On the first day he and his men clubbed to death 31 animals, which they boiled into a huge soup, stewed or sliced into steaks. Flinders then sat down and wrote up his diary: ‘In gratitude for so seasonable a supply, I named this south land Kangaroo Island.’

Today, the kangaroos of Kangaroo Island have only the motor car to contend with. Here they call the bull bars on the front of their 4×4s hopper stoppers. ‘I was showing a French woman round the island once,’ says Andrew ‘Schoey’ Schofield, our supremely knowledgeable guide from Adventure Charters. ‘All she wanted to see was a kangaroo. I found some kangaroos and she was happy - it made her trip. Finally we had to drive back and as we turned a corner, blam! A kangaroo came out of nowhere. I killed it outright. The woman was in hysterics. She wouldn’t speak to me again.’

Kangaroo Island is a long sliver of bush-covered land a 30-minute light aircraft flight south of Adelaide. It’s Australia’s third largest island after Tasmania and Melville Island and is one of the best places to see the panoply of Aussie wildlife in its natural habitat. The island has two species of kangaroo, wallabies, koalas, possums, echidnas, platypuses, snakes and more than 250 different types of bird. It also happens to be home to some of the most chic lodges in Australia, with more planned deep in the rugged bush. So getting up close to the wildlife is a particularly luxurious and pleasurable experience.

Still green-faced from the bumpy flight (what could we expect from Emu Airways, named after a flightless bird?), my girlfriend and I were whisked from the more populated east around the main town Kingscote towards the rugged western tip of the 90 mile-long island. Here sits Australia’s largest National Park - named after Matthew Flinders, ironically perhaps - in which a host of distinctive animals are now protected. En route, we see koalas munching away merrily in gum trees and kangaroos bounding away over the fields.

At Seal Bay, on the island’s southern coast, we wandered down over the soft white dunes to where a colony of Australian sea lions were parked up on a windswept beach. These sea lions are some of the rarest in the world. They were once hunted for their blubber and now there are only 10,000 left. This colony supports more than 600. After our tour, Schoey returned us to Kingscote as hungry as Flinders. But it wasn’t kangaroo steaks that were waiting for us. Kingscote is a tiny town with little more than a general store, a large mulberry tree planted by the first settlers and a couple of pubs. We asked Schoey where we should go for dinner. ‘Well, the tourists tend to go to the Ozone Hotel on the front.’ The food there is very good, but, wanting a more authentic experience, we visited the locals’ pub. It was bare and the dining room had a whiff of the village hall about it. We didn’t hold high hopes for the food. But when it arrived it was brilliant. Very fresh ingredients, well cooked with superb Aussie wine.

The following day we moved on to Cliff House, a stunning Sixties-style clifftop residence overlooking Snelling Beach, our own - practically deserted - strip of sand. The house is one of three owned by descendants of the antipodean car making family Holden. Each is uniquely designed and utterly remarkable. Ours had a Brigitte Bardot/James Bond feel, which sat happily with us: lots of thick rugs, an open fire (it can be cold at night), picture windows and a telescope for stargazing. The fridge was fully stocked with champagne and the dining table held an incredible spread of oysters, lobster and yabbies (sweet freshwater crayfish).

The other two houses are equally special. Sky House has a vague Mexican-influence with adobe-style walls and suntraps protected from the wind. As it’s further up the hill behind the beach, the views are incredible. Stone House is the most traditional of the three, a former sheep-shearing house.

Kate, who works for Lifetime Retreats and runs her own gallery and restaurant, Wind in the Wings, further up the hill came down to welcome us and explained that a pod of dolphins is regularly seen just off Snelling Beach, following shoals of salmon. If we were really lucky they might even come into the bay and if I was willing to brave the cold water of the Southern Ocean (Antarctica is the next stop south) I could go out and swim with them. I settled down to wait.

The dolphins didn’t come, but we went for a swim anyway. It was freezing, but fun, particularly as we tried to do backstroke while keeping one watchful eye on the waves for those telltale dorsal fins (dolphins or sharks). On our way back up the cliff path to the house we passed a group of fishermen on holiday from Melbourne. ‘You guys from England?’ one of them asked from inside his zipped-up jacket.

‘How did you know?’ I asked, standing in nothing but a towel and slowly turning blue. ‘Just a guess, mate.’

The following day I went to visit Kate’s gallery. She has an ever-changing collection of rather good Aboriginal art, which only really begins to make any sense once you’ve been in the country for a while as it’s entirely rooted in the connection between the animals and the landscape of Australia.

‘Come and look at this, my pride and joy,’ said Kate pointing to a small shoulder bag hooked over the back of a chair. I peered at the bag, not sure what was about to be produced. Then a long furry stick appeared attached to a baby kangaroo called Winger, who flopped out on to the floor and looked around dozily.

When I got back to the house I took up my position by the telescope and there, yes, the glistening humps of dolphins playing in the bay. By the time I’d got to the beach and thrown myself into the water though they were out of the bay and away.

That evening we were invited to dinner with Lady Holden in the old sheep-shearing shed. There, in what is now a sort of bohemian dining lair, we sat by an open fire and ate beautifully cooked lamb.

I think, in his way, Flinders would have been proud of what has become of his island.

Carl Wilkinson salutes the return of the hip hop kingpin whose friendship with Chris Martin hasn’t dulled his spittin’ skills

Hov is back! ‘Just when you thought the world would fall apart/Take off the blazer, loosen up the tie, step inside the booth, Superman is alive!’ he raps on the title track. The title comes from a 1996 DC comic in which the Man of Steel and friends pit themselves against a younger generation of superheroes. It’s obvious why the tale appealed: seemingly tired of life as the CEO of Def Jam records, Jay-Z (aka Hov, aka Jigga, aka Shawn Carter) has come out of short-lived retirement to stand behind a mic again. He’s the ‘Flash Gordon of Recordin’, throwing sparks in the dark/Peter Parker - Spiderman, all I do is climb the charts.’ Full of all his usual bombast, lyrical ingenuity, intelligence and flow, Kingdom Come is everything you could hope for from the most celebrated hip hop artist of the age.

‘In music and hip hop you need events to happen to keep the excitement going,’ he told me in the studio just over a month ago, as he was putting the finishing touches to the record. ‘I believe at this point hip hop needs albums that are events. It needs another Dre album, it needs another Eminem album, it needs a Jay-Z album. I just believe that.

‘The first couple of weeks in the studio I was just sitting around and really doing nothing and then one week everything just came rushing back. I guess it’s like everything if you take a lay off - like a basketball player. You’ve got to get match fit.’

Lead single ‘Show Me What You Got’ failed to blow fans away when it was leaked on the web, but he clearly did get into the swim of things pretty quickly. The irregular flows, the lyrical agility and the ability to move swiftly through a subject that can be touchingly personal or a big party tune - it’s all here.

On the Dr Dre-produced ‘Lost One’ he raps about relationship problems he may (or may not) have had with his girlfriend, Beyonce Knowles: ‘Me my time in this army is served/ So I have to allow she her time to serve/ The time’s now for her/ In time she’ll mature/ And maybe we can be we again like we were.’ He raps, too, about the terrible pain of losing his nephew, Colleek Luckie, in a car accident, involving the Chrysler Jay bought him to mark his high school graduation.

Similarly, ‘30 Something’ sees the rapper talk about what it means to hit your late thirties, a rich, successful man and to look back at where you’ve come from - in Jay’s case, the projects in Brooklyn. It’s not a showy song, rather there’s a note of very real wonder at how his life has developed and an acknowledgement that, as he turns 37 next month, the maturity he has found in his business life must also be seen in his personal and musical life too.

He told me that he felt politics was what was missing from hip hop; that Kanye West was the closest thing to a mainstream political rapper. Another Dre-produced song, ‘Minority Report’, goes some way to redressing the balance. It features a hook from R&B star Ne-Yo, rain sound effects, and is punctuated by news reports from Katrina-hit New Orleans.

Perhaps the album’s biggest surprise, however, is ‘Beach Chair’, the track produced by Jay-Z’s new best friend Chris Martin, whose voice floats over the song. As anyone who caught Martin’s vocals on ‘Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)’ at Jay’s Royal Albert Hall gig in September will know, while the combination will shock Coldplay and Jay-Z fans alike, the result actually works rather nicely.

With sales of hip hop in the States in decline, Jay-Z has come off the bench to score the winning point. While many will no doubt have set the bar of their expectations too high, Jay-Z has pulled out all of the stops on Kingdom Come. Throw your ROC signs in the air: the ‘Mike Jordan of recordin”, ‘the Bruce Wayne of the game’ is back.

On rap star Jay-Z’s comeback tour the champagne flows fast but the own-label clothing sells faster. A quarter of a century after it first appeared, one thing is certain: hip-hop is now big business. By Carl Wilkinson

It’s a Sunday afternoon, and in a private drawing room at the Lanesborough hotel a sommelier is arranging a couple of bottles of Krug champagne in a silver ice bucket. A side table is heavy with piles of fruit, bottled water, soft drinks and flowers. These could be preparations for an international summit or a board meeting, but it’s all in readiness for the arrival of one man: Shawn Carter, otherwise known as Jay-Z, rapper and self-proclaimed chief executive of hip-hop. Think Jack Welch meets Frank Sinatra and you’ll have an idea of his business acumen, musical reach and style.

While many black American musicians have demonstrated entrepreneurial skill - the soul singer Sam Cooke was one of the first, founding his own label, SAR Records, back in the 1960s - Carter has proved exceptionally astute, both lyrically and financially. So much so, in fact, that in December 2004 he was appointed president and chief executive of Def Jam Recordings, the pre-eminent, Universal-owned hip-hop label, placing him at the pinnacle of his profession.

As head of Def Jam, he earns a reported $8m-$10m a year, with the power to sign or drop artists, according to the dictates of his taste. Carter, who describes himself as a “fair” boss, has control over everything from album production to marketing: “There’s the artist side to me that wants to spend $4m on a video,” he tells me, “and the business side that pulls me back thinking ‘that’s gonna break us’.”

His business interests don’t stop there: Carter also runs his own label, Roc-A-Fella Records, has a clothing line, Rocawear, that grossed over $300m in 2004, part-owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team and has a string of nightclubs. At 36, he is worth a reported $320m (₤170.5m), amassed in little more than 10 years - pretty startling when compared with David Bowie’s estimated net worth of ₤120m or even Sting’s ₤185m. Madonna, who is a decade older than Carter and whose career is into its third decade, is worth a mere ₤248m. Along with fellow rapper Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Jay-Z is one of the most high-profile of the new breed of hip-hop entrepreneurs: men who have gone from poverty to extreme riches in a very short time.

Carter is in London (with his girlfriend, the singer Beyonce Knowles) on the European leg of his seven-week “Global Express” tour, a kind of comeback. Though his musical and business activities had always gone hand in hand, in December 2004 Carter surprised the hip-hop community by announcing his retirement as an artist to concentrate on his new job at Def Jam. However, this month he returns with a new album, Kingdom Come.

Carter is a curious figure. A former drug dealer from New York, he has a mercurial talent for rhymes (which he never writes down, but carries in his head) - even being described as “America’s urban Shakespeare”. Some of his best linguistic play refers back to events in his own life, with his signature languid delivery making even the most complicated rhymes seem easy. In “Kingdom Come”, the title track from the new album, he makes a neat, knowing nod to his return to rap after life in the Def Jam boardroom, likening the switch to Superman’s telephone-box transformation - “I take off the blazer, loosen up the tie, step inside the booth, Superman is alive.”

As a wordsmith, Jay-Z elicits such high regard that in a Rolling Stone profile published last year, even British novelist Zadie Smith got in on the act, praising his ability to produce “’ecstatic’ hip-hop, the kind of urban-lifestyle fantasies that are so joyful they feel like gospel”. She went on: “But the greater part of him, for me, is his strong streak of Tupac-like truth-telling” - referring to rap’s most famous fallen hero, Tupac Shakur - “[with] raps that aren’t about the dream life of urban African-Americans but concern their real, lived experiences.”

Rapping is a spontaneous form of music-making that shows off lyrical and mental dexterity. Jay-Z is a master. While many rappers labour their rhymes and imagery, he slips effortlessly between metaphors and big ideas, from deeply personal to sharp and witty. What lifts him above the competition is his ability to construct these complex lyrical sequences and then deliver them with a natural cool - like Sinatra - while using his voice almost as an additional instrument.

Today, as befits the head of a multi-million-dollar global empire, Carter is wearing a bottle-green velvet jacket over a white polo shirt, box-fresh sneakers and dark blue jeans - with a green cravat stuffed in the pocket. He is tall - though not as large as photographs might lead you to believe; slim but big-featured, with a gentle manner and an engaging, slow-burn charisma. He’s as far from the stereotypical gangsta rapper as you could get. More Hamptons than Harlem.

“I walk into every room as myself,” Carter explains. “I don’t sit with a guy from the Financial Times and go all serious, and when I go back to the Marcy Projects” - the seriously deprived Brooklyn housing area in which he grew up - “I don’t start saying ‘Yo, yo, word up, yo!’ I’m myself.”

Carter rose to fame with the release of his first album, Reasonable Doubt, in 1996, which featured the late Notorious B.I.G. - aka Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace, a high-school friend and acclaimed rapper - and the singer Mary J. Blige. It was an impressive debut that went platinum. Every autumn for the next eight years a new musical instalment arrived in the Jay-Z story - to date, he’s sold more than 34m albums worldwide. He appeared in Time magazine’s “Most Influential People of 2005” issue alongside Rupert Murdoch, Apple boss Steve Jobs, and WPP founder and chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell. He was the first hip-hop artist to feature on the US news programme 60 Minutes.

Ten years on from his debut, Carter is at the very top of his game. As he - not entirely modestly - points out during his concerts, “only two in heaven can touch me” (a reference to rap’s two dead superstars, Biggie and Tupac).

Born in December 1969, Carter came of age in Reagan-era New York, a place of drugs, violence and black-market money. “There were sub-machineguns on the streets and crack was a powerful force,” he recalls. “I grew up in a time when you could smell crack in the hallways… It wasn’t hidden, it wasn’t this dark thing that kids of nine years old didn’t experience. It was all out front. You could smell it every single day.”

The Carter family - mother Gloria, brother Eric, sisters Michelle, Mickey and Andrea, and young Shawn - lived together in apartment 5C. “You’re in a box and there are people all around you,” he says. “Everyone’s going through struggle - because you wouldn’t be living there if you weren’t. And you have to deal with the stress of everybody’s struggle every single day. It’s not jail. There’s fun and kids playing and basketball games. We had our fun. But every day was filled with tension, similar to jail. You had to navigate your way through the system. I was nine years old when I saw someone get shot for the first time.” His voice cracks - he knew that such a fate awaited him too if he didn’t find a way out. (Indeed, he has been shot at at close range but - miraculously - walked away unscathed.)

Carter graduated to the main profession open to young men in his position: drug dealing. It’s an experience he references in his music: “I used to sell snowflakes by the o-z/I guess even back then you could call me/CEO of the r-o-c” - a line from “Public Service Announcement”, featured on 2003’s The Black Album.

“I’m definitely a different person now,” he says, “but the lessons that I carry from growing up are the things that help a guy like me, who hasn’t graduated from high school, compete with people who’ve been to Wharton Business School and have long resumes. I learnt [about] integrity, sticking by your word and taking chances. You have nothing so your choice is between doing nothing and taking a chance. You take a chance. Growing up, you had to be an entrepreneur. I guess that’s helped me a lot in business because I’ve never been one to think in the box. I’m not institutionalised.”

Memphis Bleek, a one-time Marcy neighbour and protege who is now signed to Carter’s Roc-A-Fella label and raps alongside him on tour, agrees. “Selling drugs was a business. You’re counting money and serving people… it’s just all off the books. That’s what allows a guy like him or me to come from such a situation and know how to run a business. You learnt to manage money. I think anyone who came from that era and that situation has definitely a business mind.”

When hip-hop burst into the mainstream with the 1979 release of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” - which took the disco beats of the 1970s and added the semi-staccato, half-sung, half-spoken lyrics of urban African-American struggle - it was a sound that no one thought would last. Twenty-seven years later it is the voice of a generation, and has evolved into one of the most powerful cultural forces in the world. Visit any village in Africa and you’ll find someone with knowledge of American rap, perhaps even wearing a Tupac T-shirt. The reach of hip-hop is global. And for its home-grown entrepreneurs, that represents yet another opportunity.

When it comes to taking care of business, rappers are savvy. P. Diddy, 50 Cent, Pharrell Williams, OutKast, Eminem and even Jay-Z’s partner Beyonce have all branched out, diversifying their personal brands. No corner of popular culture - from films and fragrances to clothing and clubs - is untouched by the sway, the sheer product-placement power of rap. Artists have become brands in their own right, and their music can often appear as little more than a billboard for their current business interests.

So was Jay-Z’s much publicised retirement simply an inspired piece of brand reinvention? He laughs. “No! For about two years I really believed it.” So why has he come back? “I believe at this point hip-hop needs albums that are events. It needs another [Dr] Dre album, it needs another Eminem album, it needs another Jay-Z album. I just believe that.”

The album will certainly be an event. A couple of weeks after we first meet, Carter’s new single, “Show Me What You Got”, is “leaked”, some suggest on purpose. Within minutes radio stations across the US are playing the tune - some as many as 10 times back-to-back. In the UK, Tim Westwood plays it four times during a two-hour show on Radio 1.

That evening we drive over to Wembley Arena for Carter’s concert. This is the sharp end of the hip-hop business. Kids in Jay-Z T-shirts swarm outside, before surging down the corridors of the arena to find their seats. There’s a fug of expectation, then a crack like thunder as the bass starts up. The stadium erupts with cheers of “Hova! Hova!” - one of Carter’s many nicknames - as he bounds on stage.

Like his Superman alter-ego, he has thrown off the metaphorical business suit and donned the cape of rap. It’s a startling counterpoint to the man I’d met only hours earlier. But towards the end of the set there’s a noticeable spot of cross-brand promotion, as the marketing men might call it. Carter asks for the house lights to be brought up so that he can see his audience. He then systematically surveys the crowd and points out those in Rocawear. The message is obvious: if you want your hero to notice you, come in a piece of his clothing.

Two days later we meet up at Metropolis Studios in west London to hear Jay-Z’s new album at a record-company playback. Right until the last minute it was touch and go whether I’d be allowed to sit in - I’d be the only journalist in the world to hear the album before its November 21 release - but now the rapper’s manner is easy-going and friendly, as he plays some table tennis while waiting for everyone to assemble. This is business and today he’s very much Shawn Carter again. He spins the ball across the table and laughs that crackling laugh.

In the studio, he sips some water and asks everyone to introduce themselves. A&R men, marketing and press are all here. Introductions complete, Carter adds, joking, “And I’m Shawn Carter, from - ping pong!”

Then it’s into marketing. Carter talks about the response to his tour so far and how he’s developed an emotional link with his fans. It’s a fair point. His tour is one of the hottest tickets around, despite the fact that he hasn’t had an album out in two years. “What we need to do is find a way of connecting with people,” he explains.

He pauses again, grins and says, “Anyway, without further ado, here’s my album. I hope you like it.” The air explodes, the giant studio speakers wobble and distort under the bass and Carter sits back, nodding to the beat, occasionally mouthing the lyrics. The likes of Beyonce, super-producer Dr Dre, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, rapper-producer Pharrell Williams and singer NeYo all make contributions to various tracks, along with new signings from Roc-A-Fella.

As the last track ends, the audience is quiet. One of the label people comments later: “What can you say? It’s a new Jay-Z album. It was never going to be bad.”

“No questions?” asks Carter. “What do you think?”

“Was that Chris Martin’s track, the last one?” someone finally asks. The song, “Beach Chair,” begins with a beautiful string harmony, which is crashed by a big bassline before Jay-Z starts rapping. It also features a vocal hook from Martin. It’s a sure-fire hit (and, considering the Coldplay singer’s regular line in ballads, something of a surprise).

Carter is determined the album should offer more than feel-good party tracks, however. “I think politics are what is missing from hip-hop at the moment,” he says. Indeed, the searingly political track “Minority Report” goes someway to addressing this imbalance, with Jay’s voice cracking as he rails against President Bush’s inaction in Katrina-struck New Orleans. Over a sonic background of rain, intercut with news reports, Jay raps about women and children on rooftops, and Bush’s much-derided fly-past in Airforce One. The media also come under scrutiny, as Bush’s attitude is juxtaposed with press attempts to get a better shot of the misery.

“Our whole country is divided,” he tells me later. “But for successful [black] people - including myself - you get a false impression that everything’s okay. I’m over here in London, my picture’s in the paper and you think ‘Wow, look how far we’re going’, but it’s only a few of us.”

Then he’s out of the door, whisked away to his private jet - he’s performing in Dublin in a couple of hours.

The following afternoon I pop into Carter’s dressing room at the Royal Albert Hall, where he is preparing for one of his most ambitious shows yet. He will be the first hip-hop artist to perform here in the venue’s 135-year-history, and the significance of the event is not lost on him. Though friendly, relaxed and welcoming, he’s focused on the evening ahead. We chat about the album playback and then go through into the main hall where guest artists Chris Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow, Beyonce and a 25-piece orchestra are waiting to rehearse.

That evening the show passes off successfully, and the party rolls on to Movida, a chi-chi club in central London. Police have cordoned off the road, and there’s a phalanx of super-cars and a scrum of paparazzi at the kerb. Once inside, Carter comes over to say hello. He’s clearly on a high. “Man! What a show. You enjoy that?” he asks. “It must have been a real champagne moment,” I joke. “Tell me about it,” he says. “You should have been backstage, I had a whole dressing room full of Krug!”

The club is full of fans all following Jay’s lead. Waiters fight their way through the crowds with bottles of champagne held aloft. Around the necks of each bottle are firecrackers, which fizz and spit white light.

The hip-hop lifestyle is often stereotyped as consisting of exactly this sort of conspicuous consumption: champagne and lavish parties. But while the late-night clubbing is perfect tabloid fodder - and indeed the party is reported widely over the following days - there is something bigger going on. It’s all part of maintaining an image that keeps this tangled web of corporate allegiances together.

“It’s easy to say that because Jay-Z is a rapper, music’s the only thing, but it’s more the way he wears his clothes or hat. He’s a fashion icon,” says Steve Stoute, the head of American brand and marketing company Translation. “People intuitively pick up on that. It’s not only his rap or rhymes - that’s just the easiest thing to recognise. There’s a lifestyle, a style and certain mannerisms young adults love to embrace. You’re seeing a transformation right now. The big global brands are figuring out how to use this.”

Translation is the leading player in this lucrative field, with Stoute the main broker between the music community and big business. He has hooked up Justin Timberlake with the “I’m lovin’ it” McDonald’s adverts, Beyonce with Tommy Hilfiger and Jay-Z with computer brand Hewlett-Packard. In the HP television ad, only Jay-Z’s torso and hands are shown as he takes us on a tour of his business portfolio by way of the computer’s software. At the end, the legend “Jay-Z: CEO of Hip-Hop” is flashed up.

“Translation has been well placed as the market leader in the US at taking youth marketing and youth lifestyle and positioning it with Fortune 500 companies to develop really robust marketing plans which speak to young adults,” Stoute explains. “We still have a long way to go though, because brands still think they know best about how to talk to 16-year olds.”

He believes that while hip-hop has always been brand-obsessed (Run DMC had a 1986 hit with “My Adidas” and urged fans to hold up one of their trainers during the song), brands have only recently become interested in hip-hop on a large scale. “You can see what happened with Reebok,” says Stoute. “It was going out of business.” The trainer company signed a deal with Jay-Z - the first ever with a non-athlete. “It became the fastest selling Reebok shoe of all time.”

This symbiotic relationship is not always an easy one, however. Since 2003 the brand-strategy agency Agenda has been running a project called American Brandstand. This surveys the lyrics of the Billboard top 20 song and builds a snapshot of the brands that music loves. Last year, Mercedes-Benz took the top spot, followed by Nike, Cadillac, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Hennessy, Chevrolet, Louis Vuitton, Cristal and, tellingly, AK-47.

Perhaps one of the most enlightening incidents is the spat that bubbled up this summer between the producers of Cristal champagne and the hip-hop community. The champagne, once made exclusively for Russian tsars in the late 1800s, had of late become the drink of choice for aspiring rappers who wanted to show off their new wealth.

However, earlier this year Frederic Rouzard, managing director of Champagne Louis Roederer, was asked by The Economist if the link with hip-hop was damaging his Cristal brand. “That’s a good question,” he replied, “but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.”

On behalf of hip-hop, Jay-Z took offence, leading a campaign to excise references to the drink from his songs. The video for the “Show Me What You Got” single even includes a scene at a party where he very pointedly sends back a bottle of Cristal, instead opening an attache case to reveal a gold-plated bottle of Armand de Brignac champagne. Needless to say, the chief executive of Armand de Brignac has not made the same mistake as Rouzard. In a statement, Brett Berish, Armand’s president, said: “We’re delighted to have someone of Jay-Z’s stature include Armand de Brignac in the first video for his new album. Jay-Z has always demonstrated the highest standards and finest taste.”

A few days after his Royal Albert Hall show, Carter and Beyonce take a private jet to France, to meet the managing director of Krug. They lunch at the Krug chateau, and take a tour of the vineyards before a tasting. It’s a clear indication that the rap business has woken up to its own power, and now also being taken seriously by established brands that five years ago would have baulked at courting a rapper.

(Radio 4, another synonym for highbrow culture, is also getting in on the Jay-Z franchise, with money guru Alvin Hall quizzing the “president of hip-hop” on December 2.)

The day after this excursion to the Krug chateau, I join Carter in Milan for the final European date of his tour. Backstage at the venue, Jay and his entourage are laughing and drinking champagne - no room is complete without a bottle, I’ve learnt - Dom Perignon, on this occasion. After the concert, shown on MTV Italia, the party ends up at Hollywood, a nightclub in downtown Milan. The place is heaving, the walls practically dripping with condensation. There isn’t a spare inch to move and Carter’s people look momentarily worried before they manage to commandeer some sofas and set up a secure area for their charge.

It’s here that I see Carter for the last time, surrounded by models, pouring glasses of champagne from a jeroboam. He’s very much in his element. Tomorrow he’ll be somewhere else as the tour presses on. Another country, another audience and, of course, another party. All in a day’s work for the chief executive of hip-hop.

HIP-HOP’S HERITAGE

If hip-hop had a birthday, it would be an autumn baby -because it was in October 1979 that “Rapper’s Delight” was released by the Sugarhill Gang. With its infectious beats and stream of nonsense rhymes - “I said a-hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip hip hop, you don’t stop” - the song named the genre.

Of course, hip-hop did not simply spring ready-formed from the ether. Rap can trace its lineage back through soul, jazz, blues, bebop, work songs and the sing-song delivery of preachers. In the 1970s, dance and disco music overlaid the previous decade’s folk and soul heart. The fierce poetry of the African-American civil rights movement also got into the mix.

The genre grew as a community endeavour, performed in parks and streets - just as had happened during slavery (New Orleans’ Congo Square being a prime example, the only place where slaves were allowed freely to associate, sing, dance and make music). Slipping between the traditions of oral story-telling, spoken word, poetry, spirituals, close-harmony work chants and the improvisational nature of jazz, hip-hop is the culmination of a particularly American experience. And like many American inventions, it has today been commodified, exported and adapted to correspond to local truths on a global scale.

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