THERE is not, at first or even second glance, much common ground between Jazzie B, the dreadlocked driving force behind late-1980s dance sensation Soul II Soul, and the man once dubbed “the Chingford Skinhead” – Margaret Thatcher’s hatchet man, Norman (now Baron) Tebbit.

As a minister in Thatcher’s government overseeing cuts and closures, Tebbit became a figure of hate in an era of massive unemployment. In 1981, three months after the Brixton Riots, he gave a notorious speech in which he took a swipe at dole-queue Britain. “I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father,” he said. “He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work.”

Jazzie B is from the other side of the fence. He grew up black in London in the time of the so-called “sus laws”, when police were able to stop and search people with little or no pretext and targeted young black men disproportionately as a result. He cut his teeth in the capital’s reggae sound-system scene, coming up against the law and the overt racism of those meant to uphold it in much the same way as the character played by Brinsley Forde in his favourite film, Franco Rosso’s Babylon. And then he became a chart-topping pop star thanks to hits like Back To Life (However Do You Want Me) and Keep On Movin’.

But common ground there is. For a start, both men share the unlikely middle name Beresford. More than that, Jazzie took Tebbit’s advice to heart and did get on his bike to find work. Sort of, anyway: not actually having a bike, he climbed onto the number 14 bus instead. But it came to same thing and, packing his records into a shopping trolley, he would ride the bus from his home in North London to wherever he was setting up his DJ equipment and sound system that night. And as his entrepreneurial drive took hold and his ambitions grew, he made use of another Thatcherite innovation, the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, to open a shop in Camden Market selling records, clothes and – importantly – attitude. He had plenty of all three and it was here that Soul II Soul the brand was born.

I hesitate to call Jazzie B the love child of Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit. But the entrepreneurial spirit that made him turn his hand to engineering, production, promotion, fashion design and retail, and which made him into a dynamic, one-man brand originator, must have come from somewhere. So where?

“I wanted to be the biggest sound system in the world,” he says simply when we talk. “Different people who have different views tell me my core things are different. So some say, ‘You ran a shop, you did this you did that’. But they all go hand in hand. A sound system traditionally is where people come to listen to the music and drink off the bar. So I just stretched out the principle of that. I just wanted to be the biggest sound system in the world. And all of those things go together because it’s not like you can go into a Job Centre and learn to become a sound system or learn it at university. It’s a hands-on job.”

For him, Soul II Soul is now and always has been a collective. “We’re a musical movement. We’re not a band, we’re a sound system, an amalgamation of both music and fashion, which go hand in hand. As a young teenager you’re always trying to find a path or your way of life. For me the sound system filled that void. It was something both culturally and philosophically that was part of my DNA”.

Today, aged 54, Jazzie B is one of the elder statesmen of Black British music, a fact recognised in 2008 when he was awarded an OBE. He’s still in demand as a DJ, and his studio reputation saw him hired by James Brown, no less, to produce his 1993 album, Universal James. In 2006, when Brown was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, the singer demanded it be Jazzie B who did the honours.

“We were proper friends,” he says of the soul legend. “Maybe what I learned from him was to believe in yourself because most people don’t. He was somebody I admired from afar and most people when you meet them they sort of let you down. But we properly got on. He’s somebody I can say was a friend … The one altercation we did have, he ended up saying to me, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’, so that’s the kind of relationship we did have.”

So he was the elder statesman in that case? “Yeah, with f****** curlers in his hair, telling me what to do. Anyway, that’s another story ...”

Soul II Soul itself is going strong again too after reforming in 2007 following an eight-year hiatus. They continue to tour and release records, most recently last year’s live album Origins: The Roots Of Soul II Soul. In December they’ll be in Glasgow to offer the city the full sound system experience in a Barrowland gig featuring an appearance by Caron Wheeler, vocalist on the band’s seminal 1989 debut album, Club Classics Vol One.

Before then – tonight in fact – Jazzie B takes to the stage of the city’s Kelvingrove Bandstand for a DJ set as part of a West End Festival Opening Party headlined by soul legend Chaka Khan. So what will he be playing? He snorts when I ask. “Never tell secrets, pal. Never give that away. Gotta get punters in there, in’t ya? Tell them it’s all about Abba, yeah?”

So there you go. It’s all about Abba. Yeah.

Later, however, he unbends a little and goes off to dig through his record collection at my request. I’ve asked him what’s in there that would surprise me.

“Elton John’s Benny And The Jets,” he shoots back. “Ziggy Stardust, Sky, Judy Tzuke.” Then: “One sec. Let’s see what’s here that I can freak you out with.” (He’s on a roll now, and heading for where he keeps the more eclectic stuff.) “Hang on, here’s a good one … The Dubliners”.

I am duly freaked out, even though it’s just the cover he loves.

ONE of 10 children, Jazzie B was born Trevor Beresford Romeo in January 1963 to “God-fearing” Antiguan parents who had emigrated to Britain, worked hard and bought their own home, a terraced house in Hornsey Rise. It was outside the front door of this childhood home that Jazzie, aged 14, made his debut as a sound system DJ during a street party to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.

By the start of the 1980s he had his own sound system, initially called Jah-Rico and specialising in Lover’s Rock, a type of reggae birthed in London in the 1970s. Then, as he moved into the soul and funk hybrid that would put him on the musical map, he re-christened it Soul To Soul. By this time he had adopted his trademark “Funki Dred” haircut – braided on top and shaved round the sides – and was wearing it tucked up into a hat when his mother was around. She didn’t approve of dreadlocks.

For him, as for most young black men in London, the 1980s were not an easy decade and his mother was the least of his problems. It’s not hard to see why the film Babylon made such an impression. Starring Aswad singer Brinsley Forde as David and Trevor Laird as his friend Beefy, it’s a vivid portrayal of poverty, disillusionment, community anger, police brutality and racism set in London’s black community and against the backdrop of Brixton’s 1970s sound system scene.

“That’s a great depiction of how life was for us,” says Jazzie. “It’s spot on. That’s me, 100 per cent. What happened to Brinsley [Forde] and the character Beefy [Trevor Laird] could have happened to me. You could take that film and put it in the 1980s when we were coming up as a sound system and the tracing paper would only have to move a fraction of a millimetre. We were more stylish than them guys, but it was exactly the same thing.”

So how hard was life for him between the Brixton Riots of 1981 and the so-called Second Summer Of Love in the late 1980s, when rave was at its height and black and white clubbers came together in a euphoric subculture that DJ Trevor Nelson has called “the birth of multi-cultural Britain” and which had Soul II Soul in its vanguard?

“What’s easy?” he says by way of reply. “I never came up easy. Nothing was easy. So I don’t understand the terminology of hard. I mean I’m born in England so I come from an era when people used to think we had tails, like an animal. People used to pat our heads for good luck. So I’m born it. There’s a great scene in Babylon where a guy tells them to ‘f*** off back home, you black c***, you n***** blah blah’ and Beefy retorts by saying to him, ‘I am f****** English. I am f****** born here. This is my country’. You know what I mean?”

Does he at least feel any progress has been made in terms of race relations?

“I’m not a politician. I’m born and raised a working-class kid,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s been a really hard uphill journey. I didn’t have to face Hitler. I was born from slavery, but I’m not a slave.”

He is still stopped regularly by the police, though.

“I don’t argue with it and the reason why I don’t is because I’m not the only one getting stopped. That’s how life is. Sometimes when I get stopped they’ll end up saying sorry and that. Sometimes they don’t even say sorry. It’s part of our life when you grow up in the city as a black person. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. People are still starving all over the world, there’s injustices done every day, half of my population are probably locked up. And we’re up against stuff like what happened in Manchester. F*** that. I ain’t got no problems [in comparison]. I really haven’t when you look at the world. I’d be a fool to think that it’s more difficult for me than it is for my neighbour. I just fear God and live, that’s my mantra.”

Does that mean he’s a Christian?

“I just fear God and live,” he says, avoiding the question. “I’m a Funki Dred. My music is all about being optimistic and positive. Other people do politics very well. I don’t need to do that.”

When in London he lives in Camden. He’s married to Efua Baker, a Ghana-born former singer who worked with Soul II Soul in the 1990s. Together they have two children, Jessye Romeo, an actress, and Mahlon Romeo, a footballer with English Championship side Millwall (in an enticing glimpse of what could have been, he tells me he briefly trained to become a PE teacher and also undertook some FA coaching badges. The best manager his beloved Arsenal never had?). But he spends much of his time in Antigua, where Soul II Soul are based and where he has what he calls his “holding companies”.

“I’ve been in and out of there all my life,” he says. “Half of my brothers and sisters were born there, and the other half were born in London. But it’s funny because everyone who was born here spends more time there now. It’s sort of like the roles have been reversed. And because I have my own place there it’s sort of my home really. Or my second home.”

It’s a pleasant enough vantage point from which to look back on a career in music now well into its fourth decade and showing no sign of letting up. “I wonder if this is how Mick Jagger felt,” he muses when we touch on his and Soul II Soul’s longevity. “I’ll ask him next time I’m in the Caribbean.”

It turns out he isn’t joking. “I see Keith [Richards] all the time,” he tells me. “He comes to my island. I talk to him. I don’t really talk to Eric [Clapton], he’s a little bit strange, but Keith’s really cool. Maybe Eric doesn’t like me or something. He lives down the road from me.

“Keith’s little crew down there are very cool, and when you’re out in spaces like that there ain’t any airs and graces so people don’t know who you are, which is really nice. People are more themselves.”

Jazzie, of course, has several selves to present to the world – raconteur, musician, entrepreneur, Funki Dred, even closet Dubliners fan – though I imagine any one of them would appeal to the legendary Rolling Stones guitarist. But does Richards actually know who Jazzie is? Is he a Soul II Soul fan?

“I doubt it,” he laughs. “We just met as geezers.”

And of course that’s another role in which Jazzie B excels.

Jazzie B DJs at the Kelvingrove Bandstand tonight as part of the West End Festival 2017 Opening Party; Soul II Soul are at Glasgow Barrowland on December 9