"John Lennon said you have to inhale before you exhale, musically - and I totally live by that," says DeAblo. "Maybe, at 18, I wanted to be out there with a record deal, but I'm glad it didn't happen, because now I can do it right." Extolling patience, prizing experience over 21st century fast fame, citing the late Beatle as a mentor - DeAblo doesn't sound like your average rapper. He's also white, a TV documentary producer, a diabetic and former (self-cured) epileptic, and hails not from hip hop's US heartland but from Belfast, Northern Ireland. If that isn't different enough, take a listen to 8 Track Tape, a debut album that fuses hard, break-inspired beats with flamenco guitar; rock atmospherics with dance music exuberance; lushly orchestrated live instrumentation framing lyrics that buck all the prevailing rap stereotypes, delivered in a thick Belfast brogue - a voice hip hop has never heard before, but one that's as authentic as the music has known. James Dougal, 26, has been DeAblo since a trip to London eight years ago, when the name was coined by friends: a corruption of Diego, the Spanish form of James. On the same visit he met "Labrinth", a shockingly gifted musician and beatmaker then barely 14 years old. On 8 Track Tape, Labrinth plays all the instruments and produces the tracks, with DeAblo taking charge of vocals, lyrics and concepts. It's far from being a typical rap record, but in its single-minded determination to do something individual, creative and different, it's as in keeping with hip hop's ethics and ethos as the first emcee was when he picked up the first mic at the first Bronx block party more than 30 years ago. "I'm trying to tell my story through the music," DeAblo explains. "Hip hop, to me, has always been music about the struggle, and on my level it's more about the personal struggle: me, why I make music, why I'm hungry to make music, and why music means so much to me. I have an urge to write quality rhymes, and say something that maybe hasn't been said before, or to say it in a different way." The son of a journalist, born, raised and resident in Belfast, James became hooked on hip hop after hearing DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's Boom! Shake the Room just as he became a teenager. "I heard NWA and all the rest of it later," he laughs. "It may not be the coolest reference point, but it was the Fresh Prince who made me a fan of hip hop. The music in the UK at the time was Take That, East 17 - boy band pop. This was something different." The teenager became obsessed with hip hop; but James was always a fiend for lyrics, so he also absorbed classics from rock's great poets. "Bob Dylan was an influence," he confirms. "And Johnny Cash. With both there's often an element of spoken-word-over-music: sometimes it's hip hop in how it's delivered." Yet the idea of making his own music came relatively late. Partly James was looking for a creative outlet after realising the acting career he was training for probably wasn't going to work out - "The problem with acting in Northern Ireland is that we don't really have any theatres or a film industry here, so acting colleges are churning out 30 new actors a year who all go for the same six parts" - and partially he was starting anew after closing a years-long chapter of illness. "I'm diabetic, I've been on insulin since I was four, and that's pretty well managed," he says. "But epilepsy was the worst. You were always wondering whether you were gonna have a fit, then if you did have a fit, what was gonna happen. Your brain goes on seven-year cycles, and works out different routes for the neurons to go down: by the time I was 14 the epilepsy went, and I sort of believe that I had some sort of say in it because of that. I hated it so much." That level of determination - the idea you can cure yourself of a debilitating condition simply through the power of thought - and the patience to play the longer game, help explain why James has taken such a long and winding path towards his first LP. Making the leap from fan to practitioner was easy; "I just sort of woke up one morning and decided to make a record," he laughs. "Found a studio up the road, wrote eight tracks with my next-door neighbour, then recorded it that afternoon. It wasn't very good, but it did get me thinking, 'If I put my mind to it, I could do this.'" But finding his own voice took a little longer. In common with many rappers from the non-American, English-speaking world, James began by rapping in an American accent. "When I first started I thought it didn't sound good otherwise," he recalls. "And for the first two or three years I rapped in an American accent. I was a battle emcee, and I came to London to get involved in battles. This was before 8 Mile came out: after that in Belfast you had people battling you at the bus stop. But that first time in London, when I met Labrinth, I think the first day we worked together the American accent just disappeared. I've still got the tape somewhere - it's not a great track! - but by the time the second verse kicks in the American accent disappears. And I never went back. My accent tells my story - what would be the point of fabricating anything?" There's more ingredients to that story - the birth of his son; the two years spent working in a call centre; the job alongside his dad that has seen James spend time listening and talking with major figures in British and Irish politics ("I've met Ian Paisley, I've met Martin McGuinness, and they're just random, normal people," he argues. "I wouldn't define what to say about them politically, but they're charismatic people who understand the power of words, who're doin' their job - whatever their job is. I met Tony Blair on the day North Korea announced they'd got the bomb, but we had a half-hour conversation about music."). But to DeAblo, it's all just grist to the mill. "Unless you've actually experienced something, how can you legitimately write about it in a way that's gonna touch people?" he asks, rhetorically. "I'm a great believer in fate, and I'm sure whatever's meant to be will come to be. I believe in what I do, and I've been doin' it for so many years now that my competition isn't that guy at the bus stop tryin' to battle me because he thinks my shirt looks stupid: my competition is the likes of Dizzee Rascal and Eminem. You have to think like that, and that's why you have to do something different with your music - something new and refreshing, which people will hear and know automatically is you. And, hopefully, I'm gonna be able to do that."