"I USED to go by the moniker Lynx Man, like Lynx the deodorant man” says Afrikan Boy. “I don’t know why.”

After that he went by the name Smiles, he attributes that to his winning grin, but then Grime MC Olushola Ajose finally settled on Afrikan Boy.

“The defining moment was when I decided to spell it with a K,” he says. “I wanted someone to be able to type in Afrikan Boy and find me. If you type it in with a C there will be all types of different images on Google, like deprivation and starvation.

“By putting in the K it allowed me to be found but it ended up being quite poignant as later I gained some extra understanding about what it means to to spell Africa with a K.”

The name Africa is tied to Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who defeated Hannibal and lead numerous military campaigns into the continent, so

Olushola says “some believe spelling Africa with a C represents the European centred point of view of Africa, while spelling it with a K represents the Afrikan perspective looking out on all around.

“It goes deeper, but in the simplistic way that is the difference between the spellings.”

The 27-year-old London based MC was born to Nigerian parents and is known for his fusion of grime and hip hop music with African rhythms.

His sharp, to the point lyrics, laced with humour about modern life, tackling topics such as Asda and Lidl, amassed him a following on the scene since he first emerged as a teenager.

But he has evolved as an artist who intimately embraces his origins.

“Having different cultures around me growing up was just awesome,” he says. “I feel as though a lot of humanity should be exposed to that.

“Living in a city, a place like Woolwich in south east London, where there were lots of ethnicities, Turkish, Ghanaian, Somalian, Kenyan, Nigeran, British, Irish Scottish, it was crazy.

“Having grown up around that and them being able to travel the world and see my local community’s global scale and then come back just makes me think ‘I love this place’.

“Everywhere I have been in the world is here in this little town and that has made my music from the get go about keeping it expansive, experimental, free.”

He added: “After going on tour in my teens, I realised there was a platform for the music which was churning out of me. Over the years I have learnt to accept that as I have learned that there is a global audience for my sound to people to digest and appreciate it.

“I was no longer trying to appease my friends, or the kids I went to school with, I was just being confident in the music that I made influenced by everything around me.”

The worldwide appeal of his style has even led to him returning to the neighbourhood his father grew up in Nigeria, saying “I really went back to my roots”.

“I spent about a year there and then in 2014 I had my first gig there which was awesome,” he says. “I was bringing grime to heavily populated afro-beat orientated Nigeria, they were looking at me like ‘who the hell, what boat did you come off from?’, it was crazy.

“Music has allowed be to discover my culture more. It has given me another aspect, I knew it through the language, I knew it through the food, but music allowed me to delve into it more, it allowed me to travel, to understand certain things.”

“My grandma’s house was exactly the same,” he adds. “Where my dad is from the ghetto of Nigeria, but the percentage of Nigeria you can class as the ghetto is quite high. It was rough and rugged, it was raw and it had so much soul, there is a lot of hurt and a lot of creativity.

“It really was a homecoming in the fullest sense. It is a true what they say – you do not know where you are going until you truly know where you have come from.”

Doors 7pm, £8, visit www.thegreendoorstore.co.uk/whats-on.