ONE good reason to go to Bristol this weekend is that chart topper Kelis is live in concert in the Academy. Time to lock up your boyfriends.

It's been five long ones since Kelis first beat up her ex in public and won the hearts and minds of women across the nation.

With blood in her pen and venom on her tongue, she led an angry pack of females down the street screaming: "I hate you so much right now! Aaaargh!"

This year she released Tasty, her third album, and this weekend she's coming as close as she'll get with it to Newport.

The 24-year-old has not lost her edge but has been sharpened by many of today's hottest hip-hop and R&B producers including the Neptunes, P Diddy, Timbaland and Raphael Saadiq.

However, it's kind of her first solo outing without so much of the tutelage of the Neptunes' Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, who she's known since she was a teenager.

Born Kelis Rogers, her name (pronounced kuh-LEESE) is a combination of her parents' first names. The singer-songwriter was raised in a middle-class household in Harlem.

Her Puerto Rican and Chinese mother, Eveliss, is a fashion designer, and her black father, Kenneth, who died two days before she signed her former deal with Virgin in 1998, was a jazz musician and a Pentecostal minister.

As a child, Kelis sang in her church choir as well as the Girls' Choir of Harlem, and played violin, piano and saxophone while attending a prestigious private school on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

When she was 13 Kelis shaved her head and, when it grew back, she dyed it a succession of colours (blue-black, blood red, green, orange, platinum blond and pink).

By the time she had turned 16 and enrolled as a drama major at New York's renowned La Guardia School for the Arts (immortalized in both the movie and television series Fame), her mum and step dad, worn out from trying to control her, kicked her out of the house.

It was a bad time and she had to support herself working odd jobs but she still finished school rather than drop out.

She also formed an ill-fated R&B trio called BLU (Black Ladies United) but it caught the attention of the biz.

Gigs singing back-up for fledgling rap groups such as the RZA side project Gravediggaz followed. After graduation, a friend introduced her to the Neptunes.

That friendship led to the record deal that yieldeddebut album Kaleidoscope.

It was a hit in the UK but the Yanks snubbed it and today her spokesman says: "Its vibrantly funky fusion of hip-hop, R&B, rock and soul were too imaginative to get played alongside the cookie-cutter R&B coquettes of the day."

And; "On the other hand, Kelis's innovative sound was too sophisticated and street-smart for pop radio."

Overseas it spawned three Top 40 hits, Caught Out There, Good Stuff and Get Along With You, and Kelis won the Brit trophy for Best International Newcomer, the Q statue for Best Video (Caught Out There) and the NME prize for Best R&B Singer.

Her reputation here was secured with a fantastic live show complete with an all-girl eight-piece band and a varied set, including a cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

In 2001 she released her second album Wanderland but only in Europe and Asia due to "internal restructuring at Virgin Records."

Even here it wasn't a big hit which was due, apparently, to lousy promotion.

But Kelis didn't stay put and spent most of the year playing gigs on both sides of Atlantic, making her name the old and honest way. She supported Moby and U2 before returning to America for a lengthy series of collaborations.

Artists as diverse as Busta Rhymes (What It Is), Timo Maas (Help Me), Foxy Brown (Candy), Richard X (Finest Dream), OutKast (Draculas Wedding), Guru (Supa Love) and Nas (Hey, Nas). Meantime, she also relocated from Virgin to Arista under the Neptunes' Star Trak imprint, and began working on the songs that would form Tasty. l Kelis plays Bristol Academy on Saturday, August 28.