FESTIVAL GUIDE

Tinie Tempah: ‘Outdoors is where Coldplay fans can stumble across me’

The rapper with more No 1s than Elton John and Bowie, tells Ed Potton how festivals are a way to widen his fanbase and ‘become a beacon of the British Dream’
Tinie Tempah wants to take his message outdoors
Tinie Tempah wants to take his message outdoors
SHIRLAINE FORREST/WIREIMAGE

Looking at Tinie Tempah slinking through the private members’ club in east London — sunglasses on, jewellery flashing, glad-handing the movers and shakers — it’s hard to imagine him as a festival kind of guy. GQ’s best dressed man of 2012, who recently spent some of the proceeds from his seven UK No 1s (more than Bowie and Queen) on a £165,000 Lamborghini Huracan, mingling with sweaty hippies and getting mud on his peach calfskin trainers? Cannes and the Baftas, yes (he name-checks the former in his new song, Girls Like, and he famously high-fived Prince William at the latter in 2014). Glastonbury or Reading, not so much.

Rubbish, insists the 27-year-old rapper from southeast London, real name Patrick Chukwuemeka Okogwu. “I’ve always