IT'S SATURDAY MORNING in a Tokyo hotel room and Shaggy looks, well, shagged. The self-proclaimed Mr Lover Lover is hunched over a coffee table, in jeans, a shirt unbuttoned to reveal his hirsute chest and his face barely visible beneath the trademark mop of unruly hair that earned him the Scooby Doo-inspired nickname.
The Jamaican-born singer/songwriter is not only big in Japan, where reggae has a massive following, but the world over. He sold more copies of his last album than Bob Marley did in his lifetime. At least 10 million people have bought Hot Shot, a dancehall reggae crossover into radio-friendly pop, since its release in 2000 - a response that has planted Shaggy firmly in the big time after a couple of false starts.
While Shaggy's latest release, Lucky Day, is not that cliched 'difficult second album' (it's his fifth long-player), it did pose a similar question. How exactly do you follow up such a phenomenal success?
'I didn't feel any extra pressure,' says Shaggy, gazing at the carpet as if in introspection. 'I had the freedom to record what I wanted with who I wanted. It came together surprisingly quickly. Obviously I want to sell records, but I don't judge it by that. It doesn't have to sell more than Hot Shot to be a success.'
What may interest listeners as much as the music is how Shaggy's album lyrically deals with women. He may have outsold Marley, but Britain's Guardian newspaper recently dubbed Shaggy the 'Jamaican Benny Hill' after the comedian renowned for crude, sexist humour.
Shaggy has long received flak for his ribald humour, exacerbated by his penchant for using lots of scantily clad women in videos and giving upfront interviews on who he would like to really get down with - Britney Spears, Lucy Liu . . .
It Wasn't Me, his biggest-selling single from Hot Shot, offered a simple mantra for men to invoke whenever their woman suspects them of cheating. As if in riposte, Lucky Day features Strength Of A Woman, a track in the mould of his hit Angel, in which Shaggy says errant men who lie to their spouses are wasting their time. 'When a man cheats on a woman, she always knows. It's written all over his face,' he says of the song. 'When a woman cheats, the man won't find out.' Women, in other words, are the real relationship power brokers.