Last updated: 18 November 2008
A politically-literate, mischievous blogger and rapper from North Wales, once signed to Interscope records.
It takes a lot to convince people that a skinny white journalist from Anglesey with a sideline in clever electro hip hop would ever be signed to a label most famous for 50 Cent and Eminem. But that's exactly what happened in 2004 when Adam Alphabet - aka Akira The Don - inked a deal with the huge Interscope imprint.
I have a magnificent moustache.
Akira The Don
As he told Sound Nation magazine, his deal with the label giant was preceded by an existing arrangement with the small indie Something In Construction label, which released his first three EPs.
The secret of Akira The Don has always been his combination of his quirky, intelligent music with a huge blog-based website and funny animated videos, such as the one accompanying Living In The Future from his second EP. He's a multimedia-savvy technophile, with an unusual story to tell of how he got to one of the world's most powerful labels from the Welsh island.
"It was a strange set of fortuitous circumstances," he told Sound Nation. "I conned my bank into lending me money to fly to America as I had mates in Miami and New York who thought they could get me shows.
"Anyway, I was looking at baby dinosaurs in the Everglades and came out to find thousands of messages on my answerphone. A CD I'd sent to a mate in New York had been overheard in a hairdresser's by some record company dudes and they'd gone crazy, as is their wont."
Whatever the real process of his record deal negotiations, his solo material wasn't his first foray into music, as he'd previously been part of the hip hop group Crack Village, managed by Paul Hitchman and Jim Gottlieb - the two men behind behind Playlouder, the website for which Adam writes.
They remain his management team, and are pleased with the process by which Akira has been allowed to establish himself with Something In Construction before Interscope develop his international career. It remains to be seen quite how the international music scene will take to this strange but funny hip hop maverick.
Akira The Don's debut album, When We Were Young, was released in November 2006.
