Tottenham-based rapper and entrepreneur is helping musical youths find their voice.

Mary Otumahana runs The RecordShop, a social enterprise, based at the 639 Enterprise Centre in the Tottenham High Road.

The shop offers free recording sessions for 16 to 25-year-olds every Saturday. Youngsters can record and mix their tracks with an engineer and, at the end of the session, they will receive an MP3 of their work.

Tottenham has had a very positive impact on my life so helping Tottenham youth is important to me,” said Mary, aged 28. “At the end of every ten-week ‘term’ there will also be some sort of celebration event for the artist to perform their track and we’ll invite the public. I’m also planning free weekly workshops to look at all aspects of music production and performance such as lyric writing and rapping.

Mary is able to offer the free sessions thanks to the success of her own production company, Prodigies of Nature. The company runs a recording studio, The RecordShop and a talent agency, arranges music events, music and video production and is a platform for Mary’s own rapping talents as WondRWomN.

I started rapping and writing when I was 13,” she said. “I was always writing in my school books because it was a way of expressing myself. But growing up there was nothing like The RecordShop at all and I mostly did stuff in my bedroom. I lost my confidence a bit in secondary school but then, in my early 20s, I started going out and meeting people, got my confidence back and that’s where I came up with Prodigies of Nature and The RecordShop.

Since then Mary’s ventures have gone from strength-to-strength and last October she won a New Entrepreneur Mind of the Year prize at the Basic Business Initiative UK Awards 2017.

That was just great and I also got to perform at the event,” she said, beaming. “It was the first award I’ve won and it just shows what can be accomplished if you are dedicated and put in the work. I now want to give something back and it’s fantastic to hear young people coming here and saying how good it is to have the experience of recording which they might not have had before. Sometimes it might just be about giving them that confidence, that head-start, to set them off to who knows where.

• For more details go to: www.therecshop.co.uk

• To hear Mary in action go to: www.wondrwomn.com