NEVER mind The Streets, this is the sound of the streets.

Teenage rapper and producer Dylan "Dizzee Rascal" Mills's first album from the dark side of East London's council blocks, Boy In Da Corner, came out of nowhere, via pirate radio and clubland, to scoop last year's Mercury Music Prize.

The follow-up, Showtime, finds Dizzee stuck halfway between the gutter and the stars, between the grimy urban Britain of Boy In Da Corner and the glitz of suddenly being on the edge of the big time.

Which gives him plenty to rap about with energy, invention and aggression, with his bewildering attack of home-made beats and stripped-down electronics. There's humour, anger, violence, petty vendettas, worries over reputations, respect, sex, success and selling out, all spat out at warp speed in Dizzee's inventive verbal and musical barrage.

Unlike some of the dimwitted graduates of the London garage scene, he doesn't pretend that the life of a council estate petty crim is full of gangster glamour - but neither does he pretend to have the answers. He is just a mixed up, hugely articulate kid here to tell it how it is.

The abrasive, uncompromising Showtime isn't the quantum leap forward from Boy In Da Corner that could take Dizzee Rascal to the musical mainstream, but it's further evidence that this angry young man is the real thing.

Updated: 08:59 Thursday, September 16, 2004