Within minutes we’re sitting on the grave of a 1930s director named Irving Cummings (the word CUMMINGS looms above our heads, which makes her laugh) and Banks is trying to explain how she became the most loathed woman in pop.

“My mother has never reprimanded me but she reprimanded me after the thing with Zayn [Malik] happened. She was like, ‘Azealia, you hurt a lot of people’. I was like, ‘f**k’.” And pretty soon she starts to cry.

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She’s often hilarious, sharing icy put-downs with her fans (whom she calls The Kunt Brigade).

But she has also wished gang rape on Sarah Palin and has a long-running feud with her bête blanche, Australian rapper Iggy Azalea (whom Banks accuses of cultural appropriation for stealing her ideas).

Oh, and she announced she’d be voting for Donald Trump for the presidency — only recently changing her mind — while her unkind comments about grime (“UK rap is just a disgrace to rap culture in general”) prompted Rinse festival to cancel her headline appearance back in July.

So London, she’s sorry about that one, she didn’t mean to offend anyone. “What can I say, UK rap is not my cup of tea. But Dizzee Rascal I love. Skepta I love.”

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She has apologised; the episode seems to have affected a change in approach. “It finally reconciled these two conflicting thoughts I had about being real and being professional,” she says.

“I realised you’re not keeping it real by being a crazy girl. You don’t lose anything by keeping your mouth shut. So maybe it’s time to stop being a crazy girl.”

When I push further, she adopts the “locker room” defence. “You know sometimes you get carried away when you’re joking. There’s this crude, ignorant, mixed-up New York City humour where people call each other all kinds of f**ked-up s**t.

"I use the N-word all the time. I was being stupid, not trying to be hurtful.” It was messy, she says.

“But there was a point to be made about being stolen from and then having to be the black person defending your blackness. Sometimes you just lose it.”