Navigator takes one last remaining sip from his drink and places it back on the table before fixing me with his intense, steely gaze. "Jungle, drum & bass is the millennium beat. It's the millennium music and that's the message we need to be getting across," he utters in all seriousness.

For all its detractors, for all those who complain that this music which has so thrilled us for the best part of a decade has somehow lapsed into a sheen of complacent insouciance, the real foot soldiers who made this music what it is, have never said die and are fully versed in the Ferguson rhetoric of never knowing when to give up. MC Navigator is one of these people. An indomitable character who has spent the past 20 years devoted to spreading the gospel of music, in all its redemptive, transcendental glory.

MC Navigator is wiry, lean and angular, but despite his slender appearance he's a towering presence - a presence fuelled by an extraordinary self-belief as much as any physical attributes. Sitting in a pub in a part of Islington that Tony Blair and his chattering classes cronies obviously forgot, this is something that strikes you almost immediately about the fella. Yet this isn't to suggest that he's cold, far from it, the man can chatter and all in an entertaining and amiable way.

One of the towering and pivotal figures of the scene, Navigator has helped ensure that the art of MCing - so often marginalised in the eyes of some - has remained to the fore and through his recent work with electro-breakbeat terrorists The Freestylers, his machine gun style of rhythm and rhyme has been discovered by not only an entire new generation, but a whole new genre.

Leaving school in 1979 (although to look at him you'd think he had left school in 1989 such is youthful demeanour), Navi was always going to do something in music. From a young age, his dad's record collection had enthralled and encaptured him, reggae, blues, be-bop and jazz, all these varying strains of what is essentially folk music, fed into the young Navigator's mindset. "My dad was into music big time," he remembers. "He never played a musical instrument or whatever, but he had a good record collection that I really loved and that was when I really got interested in music. I started doing parties here and there and got involved in the reggae sound systems in the late 70s. From 1980, I was out every weekend doing it."

These were, Navi concedes, halcyon times: "In the start, I was DJing - that's what Jamaicans call MCing - I was DJing over reggae rhythms." From there, the entire gig snowballed moving onto the legendary Unity sound system where he first hooked up with The Ragga Twins - key players in the Navi story.

However, it was those first formative experiences that shaped Navigator's attitude to music - these encounters with Duke Reid, Dr Bud and all the Studio One and Trojan stuff, deep funky music. Music with a message. This was compounded by his fascination with dub. "Oh yeah, people like Leroy, Prince Far I, Desmond Dekker - these were the first sing-Js, because they were singing and DJing at the same time. They really got me inspired into chatting and picking up the mic," he explains.

Music with a message packs a punch and these guys caught Navi smack bang in the centre of the sonic solar plexus. Navi knows there has to be a certain degree of shooting from the hip - sometimes you've just got to call that spade a spade, sometimes you have to fight for your right to party.

"I always loved my music but I'm a realist and I love to chat reality lyrics," he points out in his thoughtful and forceful way. "It's all very fine having a party but there's a lot of kids out there that don't know a from b - it's easy for them to pop a pill and just get off on one and be totally oblivious." But Navi's all about trying to bring back that real aspect - yeah, it's fine to have a party, but there's all this shit going on and we need to be aware of it.

"During those years on the sound systems you were either chatting about badness, or slackness or you were chatting about reality. Those were the three topics or genres when it came to DJing, so there was all that 'I'm gonna shoot the place up if you do this or do that to me' or it was 'I'm gonna get the girl and I'm gonna do this to her' or there was another geezer who would say something and you'd be like 'damn, where did that come from?', and that was what I hooked into.

"I feel that you just can't be burbling on, saying nonsensical stuff - just rhyming words," he continues. "It's good to make party lyrics, I'm not saying it's not, because I do that as well, but there has got to be a point when you say something in your music. Whether it be about yourself, whether it be about some experience that you had in your life or it be about something that is plain as day in front of your face. You put lyrics to those type of things and suddenly you step into another category of lyricist. People will start checking what you're saying and say 'yeah, that's deep shit.' It's also important to say something in your music to show people that you're not braindead and just told what to do by your record company."

After a brief time away from the music scene in the late 80s spent chilling in Jamaica, Navi returned refreshed and reinvigorated. "When I came back, I decided to get on more of a UK tip. I thought it was about time that I changed a bit and at that time The Ragga Twins had a deal with Shut Up And Dance and them being friends, it was only natural that I went out and started PAing with them. They started taking me to raves - if it wasn't for The Ragga Twins I wouldn't be here today, it was them that showed me what was going on and introduced me to the people. After that, I was on my own," he opines.

Although he missed out on those first euphoric months of acid house, Navi got back in at the time of hardcore, which of course mutated into jungle. When he heard the emotive "28 Gun Bad Boy" by A Guy Called Gerald he was hooked. "When I first heard those b-lines it was like 'yeah, this is it.' It was going back to dub but with a speeded-up breakbeat. I was like 'yeah, this is new, this is where it is now. This is gonna take us into the year 2000'," he laughs.

Passion is perhaps the hardest emotion to quantify, but it runs through Navi like his lifeblood. A passion for music - forget cold hard facts, this is about the truth... Ruth. This desire was perhaps most evident in his work with D*Note in the mid-90s - the storming "Criminal Justice" and "Iniquity Worker" tracks. "On "Criminal Justice", which was about the Criminal Justice Bill, we made references to the Birmingham Six and the Tottenham Three. I was talking about the judge and how you go to court and you only see a certain type of man there judging you, but what is he doing when he leaves the courthouse, who knows? When he leaves the courthouse he's Mr Bad Boy. He needs judging," Navi argues with a watertight case.

Does music suffer from a lack of substance nowadays though? There aren't enough people out there telling it like it is. Navi considers this before letting forth another diatribe: "There's a little too much negativity nowadays and when there's too much negativity it can only result in negative things happening. I think horror movies have got a lot to answer for, people who think they are doing it innocently don't realise the power they have over other people with vacant minds or young minds. I look at a young mind as a blackboard, an empty blackboard ready to be written on. A lot of connotations can develop which aren't necessarily positive. I'm all about positivity. Forward ever, backwards never, in the face of all adversity but not by any means necessary."

It's this exuberant look on life that has propelled Navigator onto bigger and better things, in particular his work with The Freestylers. Starting off doing their MCing, he ended up laying down a vocal for a track, "Ruffneck", on their critically acclaimed album.

"I'm bang into it. It's a new opening - a new style of music. It's hip hop beats, ragga, ska, electro, rave, jungle - it's all there. We have breakers on stage, there are so many elements fused together that when you see it on stage, it's fireworks. The last show we did in Berne, Switzerland, they were staging. Our styles really work. It blends. This is the lick you know," Navi says getting excited.

But, at the end of the day, it's drum & bass that Navi is known for and that remains his big love - he's currently working with 60 Channels on a project. "I saw where it came from, I saw it grow and I helped nurture it to a certain extent, in my own way," he proclaims.

So where do you want to see it go? "I'm not really looking for it to go anywhere or attain anything. It's already achieved far more than my expectations anyway. I just think that the dons, the gods of this just need to keep it real and go forward. I'm proud to be part of it. The problem is though that the dance scene is so fickle. People are like 'oh no, jungle's not happening no more. Oh no, we don't want Transformers no more we want Tellytubbies, that's the new toy'."

Warming to the subject Navi shrugs off the non-believers with a casual shrug of his shoulders. 'Cause he knows. He knows where this music is going. What it is capable of. Which is where we came in. And it's where we go out. Last word Navi: "When I go to a jungle party in a foreign country. I see a 1,000 people going bonkers. It's like 'this is the shit'. Then you know. That to me is job satisfaction, seeing creativity manifesting into positivity."

WORDS: Jim Butler