‘The smiles on people’s faces – it’s all that matters’

The Blast Off tour comes to the region in March and dancehall legend Shaggy is in the line-up. We chat to him

Are you excited to be heading back on the road?

Yeah! I’ve literally just got back off the road with UB40 in North America so this is a perfect time to be hitting the UK and Ireland! It [the Blast Off Tour] is a great line-up also, and as soon as I looked at the line up I said, “yeah, I definitely wanna go!”. It’s a line-up of great hits.

Nelly, Salt N Pepa, Blu Cantrell – how do you feel about these 90s & 00s big names joining you on the tour?

It’s going to be good vibes! I’ve done a couple of shows with Nelly on several occasions... I just think with the amount of amazing records these guys have got... it’s just going to be a really, really good night!

You’ve not long completed a tour with Sting! How did that come about?

I’ve known Sting for years! We have a mutual friend in common which is Martin

Kierszenbaum – he was my A&R at Interscope and also Sting’s A&R at Interscope – and then Martin started managing Sting and then managed me and he just thought that we would work well together. We went into the studio to do one song and then we thought that we had a lot in common on many levels that turned into a friendship, which then developed into an album. We just couldn’t get enough of each other and the way we make music, and the laughs and the fun, we just said, “We’re gonna take this show on the road.”

Your joint album 44/876 was a massive success and also won you a Grammy – did you expect to receive such an amazing response to the album?

We didn’t know what to do with that thing because Sting & Shaggy on paper looks really weird! That’s kind of what attracted us to it anyway, the fact that no-one was really expecting it... But one thing was undeniable, which we knew would be, that once you came to a show, you would leave entertained, and if you look at most of the write-ups and reviews of the shows throughout the whole tour, people were saying that they came even though they didn’t think they would like it and they found it a little weird because they forgot how many hits we have between us and it’s the journey and soundtrack of people’s lives – and that’s what it’s all about. The smiles on people’s faces, that’s all that matters really.

You’ve had four UK number one singles. How do you find playing the UK compares to elsewhere?

I used to go over to the UK for years – it’s almost as if people thought I lived there! We’ve had a few number ones and a lot of pop records over there, which started in 1992 with Oh Carolina, which was the first dancehall record that actually went into the British chart at number one, and then we