FIVE
In September 2003, only a few months after his heated tussle with Crazy Titch on the Deja Vu rooftop, and less than two months after he was stabbed in Ayia Napa, Dizzee Rascal won the Mercury Music Prize. Did he deserve to win, asked the BBC, experimenting with a new approach to interactivity with their audience? ‘Yes’, said 33 per cent, ‘no’, said 25 per cent, ‘who?’ said 42 per cent. He collected the Mercury Award from Ms Dynamite at the star-studded ceremony, took it back to Burdett Estate in Bow, and struggled to comprehend the disjunction between the two. Boy in da Corner was always intended as a document. Even at the age of 16, during which time most of his debut was written, Dizzee saw himself as an observer, as much as a participant in the stories he told. A detached social commentator on his peer group – a voice from the inside describing the lives of young people either ignored or misunderstood; not so much a spokesperson, as a reporter. ‘MCs better start chatting about what’s really happening,’ he says censoriously over the opening bars of ‘Brand New Day’.
A record which described the dichotomy between the lives of the British sovereign and Dylan Mills (‘Queen Elizabeth don’t know me, so/How can she control me, when/I live street and she lives neat?’1) also launched the latter on a course to become as famous as the former, and won the album a gold plaque, a Mercury Prize, and countless laudatory column inches. By the end of the decade it was regularly cited near the top of ‘album of the decade’ lists, a visionary work that paved the way for so many others, that changed the conversation about the British underclass being left behind by New Labour. Yet even as it was lauded, only a few voices in 2003 suggested that serious attention to Boy in da Corner’s themes was needed: Martin Clark wrote in the Guardian after the Mercury win that ‘its sobering message is at risk of being drowned out by applause … Every MP in Westminster should be forced to hear it.’ This is exactly what happened with the 1995 French film La Haine; a document of society’s ills so powerful, and hitherto so ignored, that the French Prime Minister held a compulsory screening for his cabinet ministers.
Mathieu Kassovitz’s film springs to mind during ‘Sittin’ Here’, the opening song on Boy in da Corner: they are both contemplative yet volatile, callow yet wise. The track is devastatingly bleak. It is dominated by a haunted and synthetic twanging which repeats while Dizzee intones, ‘I’m just sitting here, I ain’t saying much, I just think/My eyes don’t move left or right, they just blink.’2 Our world-weary narrator gazes straight ahead without movement, stoned and immobile – taking in everything that he’s seen in his young life, fixated by its permanence. He is an unwilling spectator on life in the manor, unable to tear his eyes away, and unable to use his wisdom to distance himself from the consequences. The track recalls one particular scene in La Haine, where Hubert, the most thoughtful and mature of the three young protagonists, smokes a spliff in his high-rise bedroom, his Isaac Hayes record bringing a moment of isolation from the estate beneath him, an oasis of solitude in a world with no privacy. Dizzee and Hubert are frozen in their snatched moments of reflection; frozen by the hopelessness of a community riven by systemic and everyday violence. ‘Brand New Day’, another of Boy in da Corner’s poignant snapshots of bleak social realism, draws on the idea of lost innocence, of growing up too soon and too alone (‘looks like I’m losing hope/cos I climb this mountain without rope’), of playground scraps somehow escalating to dead bodies: ‘Looks like I’m losing mates, there’s a lot of hostility near my gates/We used to fight with kids from other estates, now eight millimetres settle debates.’3 The first time Dizzee played the song to his cousin, Slix from Ruff Sqwad, Slix ‘dropped a tear’.4 It’s an understandable reaction.
Once the fall has happened, the innocence is gone forever. Dizzee has spoken in interviews of several teenage friends being stabbed at 14 or 15. On the little-known B-side ‘Dean’ he zooms in from a generalised atmosphere of urban tragedy to pay tribute to a lost friend. It’s a gut-wrenchingly frank letter to a former school friend, who committed suicide by throwing himself from a high-rise tower block (‘I heard they found your body in three parts man’). The cathartic kitchen-sink realism of grime is integral to its identity, even if it is only part of its appeal, and only part of its content – dispatches from the other side of London’s social divide, where, ‘All five man eating off the same plate, all five cars with the same plates,’ as Jme spits on ‘Keep Moving’: ‘if that rings bells we’re from the same place.’5 For Dizzee, social exclusion is immutable and self-perpetuating, ‘the same story, now and then different actors.’ It is, he says on ‘Round We Go’, ‘just one big cycle here’ – joy, love, innocence, even life itself: all are transient.
At the root of it all is poverty, and its outward signs and fellow riders: petty crime, lost youth, violence, ‘bank scams, street robbery/shotters, blotters or H.M.P’, and, on the level of personal life, ‘pregnant girls who think they love, useless mans with no plans’.6 It wasn’t something mainstream British culture was used to hearing, certainly not often, certainly not from someone this young and emotionally articulate, in a period that was supposed to be suffused with the optimism of a new century and a new start: a modern, classless society. The modernity audible in Dizzee’s music came from its sonics, which were abrasive, discombobulating and bewilderingly uncategorisable. If he and his peers were ‘a problem for Anthony Blair’ – the lyric from ‘Hold Ya Mouf’ the broadsheets were fond of quoting as shorthand for grime’s disreputable energy and lyrics – it was chiefly because they were doing pop-cultural modernism entirely the wrong way. This wasn’t inclusive, and it certainly wasn’t the safe populism that had led to the embarrassing scenes around ‘cool Britannia’ in the late nineties, when Noel Gallagher had been invited to meet Blair at Downing Street.
At times the press acted like colonial reporters who’d just arrived in the orient – having, in most cases, just taken the tube a bit further east than they’d been before – and were astonished by the customs and practices of the natives. Beneath the headlines about this remarkable teenage prodigy, there was a partial recognition that something else was going on beyond Dizzee Rascal’s debut in 2003: an underground scene underneath the break-out star. His occasional collaborators, Lethal B’s More Fire Crew, had been one of the few crews, along with Pay As U Go, to straddle the garage-into-grime period with a record deal. Their skittish single ‘Oi’ had been a Top 10 hit in 2002, but their album had failed to touch the charts, and they split. ‘As soon as Dizzee won his Mercury, the majors started calling up again,’ Bizzle said in East is East, a BBC Radio 1 documentary broadcast in July 2004. ‘Like, “Yeah yeah Lethal, how’s it going?”’ Dizzee had succeeded on his own terms, rather than trying to make pop, or hip-hop, and even though ‘the east London sound’ didn’t have a name yet, there was a sense of proprietary pride and confidence emerging from the generation of teenagers, who knew, in spite of their youth, they were making something entirely new, entirely different, and entirely uncompromising: some of them even started to sign record deals. ‘We’re still gully: the only pop you’ll hear from us is “pop pop pop!”, then we’re out,’ Kano spat on his breakthrough single ‘P’s And Q’s’ (the trio of pops mimicking a volley of gunfire). Davinche’s production on the track, a propulsive and irresistible riff, with scattergun drums underneath, underlined the point beautifully.
Away from the handful of artists who signed deals in 2003 and 2004, an off-the-grid vinyl industry was thriving, entirely separate from the major labels and the established music business. The youngers who were creating what would become grime had formalised the rolling pirate sound into sellable objects, visiting vinyl-pressing plants like Music House in Tottenham, and cutting the beats they were making on home PCs onto white labels, shifting them at record shops on a ‘sale or return’ principle. Several artists generally better known as MCs started releasing instrumentals on vinyl this way: including Skepta (starting with ‘Pulse Eskimo’ in 2002) and Dizzee (with ‘Go’ and ‘Ho’, both 2003). The process of producing physical music helped bond together the nascent scene: both the cutting houses and the record shops became essential meeting points – the iconic Rhythm Division on Roman Road in Bow, but also Uptown and Blackmarket in Soho, Independence in south-east London and Big Apple in Croydon – in addition to the network of pirate radio stations, which would lead to future collaborations, remixes, guest spots on the radio, and the production of one-off versions of the records being cut, produced specially for the DJ, often with the DJ’s name called out over the top, known as ‘VIPs’ or ‘specials’. It all helped to construct an alternative network existing alongside, and apart from, the existing music industry.
Wiley was one of many who quickly realised, that with a profit of about three pounds on each unit, this could be a better way to make instant cash than the small-time (and sometimes not so small-time) drug dealing some of their peers were involved in. It helped that Wiley was phenomenally prolific: most of his peers would have at most two or three records available in the shops; at the peak of his eskibeat period, in 2002 and 2003, Wiley’s music would often cover an entire shop wall. ‘When the first batches started making money, I bought a car, and became like, a geezer with a van, selling them straight from the boxes,’ he recalled. ‘I would have gone anywhere. The local shop was Rhythm Division, but I’d sell them to every record shop in inner London, and outside the M25, greater London; any record shop, anywhere. I’d drive up to Birmingham on a certain day, or Manchester. I think I’ve covered more miles than any MC.’ ‘Eskimo’ itself, released in 2002, sold over 10,000 vinyl copies alone – with no record deal, no manager, no PR, no artwork, no adverts: all sold from the boot of his car.
In these early years, from 2002–04, the nascent scene began channelling the freewheeling live energy of pirate radio and raves, the pairing of beats and bars, into making and recording songs. You could make beats or write bars at home, but recording vocal tracks required something more like professional equipment. They started going to paid-by-the-day recording studios a lot more to record. Wiley in particular, having made a decent packet from all his vinyl sales, and his album deal with XL, decided it was time that grime professionalised somewhat. He wanted Roll Deep to make an album, and paid the rent on a residential studio in Leroy Street in Bermondsey in south London for the whole summer, inviting not just his crew, but pretty much the entire east London scene. ‘My attitude was, get everyone in here! Let’s have a fucking party,’ he said to me in 2016. ‘In a way it wasn’t good, because it made some people in the crew think, “Fucking hell Wiley, you’ve got everyone in here! Why’s Kano in here? Why’s so-and-so in here?”’ For the younger MCs, like fellow Bow crew Ruff Sqwad, it was an opportunity too good to turn down, as producer and MC Rapid recalled. ‘I’d be in college and get a call from Wiley and he’d be like: “Come to the studio right now.”’ They went.
The east London scene pretty much lived in that studio during the summer of 2004 – eating, sleeping, smoking weed, playing pool – and Roll Deep made their debut album, In at the Deep End. They also finished two Roll Deep ‘Creeper’ mixtapes and two Ruff Sqwad ‘Guns N Roses’ mixtapes, and launched numerous careers in the process. It was one of countless times the godfather of grime has, without being asked, volunteered to pay for other artists’ studio time – or their international plane tickets, or brought them along as teenagers to a major show, or to Radio 1 – without thoughts to a future debt, or favour: just because he wanted grime to succeed. ‘I’ve realised recently,’ Wiley said, ‘that that’s why I’m the godfather. Because I think about all of us. In a way, your ideal priority would be just yourself, your manager and your team. I can’t think that way.’
Roll Deep were, in 2004, ‘peaking on the underground’, as Target put it to me, but they hadn’t even spoken to any labels, before finishing their album in Bermondsey that summer. It was picked up by Relentless, a plucky young independent label that had soared to prominence after putting out the less slinky and ‘grown-up’ side of UK garage, including Artful Dodger’s ‘Re-Rewind’ and all of So Solid Crew’s material, and they had made a chart hit of Lethal Bizzle’s underground smash ‘Pow! (Forward)’ too. The Roll Deep album, In at the Deep End, has aged surprisingly well, but at the time it caused some scepticism: there was a lot on it that didn’t sound especially grimy – most notably its two singles, ‘Avenue’ and ‘Shake A Leg’, which charted at 11 and 24 respectively, and even saw them smiling and jigging around on Top of the Pops. There was consternation on the underground that grime’s first crew were finally getting recognition with such playful, soft-centred, family-friendly pop. That XL had chosen Wiley’s ‘Pies’ as a single was met with equal derision by the underground – it was built on a proper eskibeat instrumental, but with Wiley in a fatsuit in the music video, and a chorus based on the football terrace chant of ‘Who ate all the pies?’, the whole thing seemed embarrassing (and the single didn’t make the Top 40).
‘When people sign to major labels,’ Ruff Sqwad’s MC Fuda Guy explained sadly in 2006, sitting in his childhood bedroom in Bow, ‘it’s not like they’re doing it their way; they’re doing it the way the labels want them to do it.’ He offered up local idols and friends Roll Deep, in particular ‘Avenue’ and ‘Shake A Leg’, as specific examples. ‘Any real grime fan is going to hear those singles and think “HUH? I like ‘Eskimo’, I like ‘Creeper’ … What’s this?” But I know them personally, and that’s what they got made to do.’
At the time, I nodded sympathetically – such are the compromises the industry forces on you: it’s sad, but you can’t beat the system right? In hindsight, it seems as though Roll Deep were saying one thing back in Bow, to safeguard their reputation as the authentic kings of grime – they had to be able to show their faces at Rinse FM – and saying something altogether different in the label offices. As the crew themselves tell it now, the pop turn had not just been with their consent, but was entirely their idea. ‘A lot of people even now still think we were under pressure to do tunes like “Avenue” when we got signed,’ Target says now. ‘But we just wanted to make tunes like that! They were literally just some fun ideas, something a bit different. We’d made so many songs with a similar kind of sound, and we’d always listened to and been influenced by lots of different sounds, so we thought why don’t we mess around and mix it up. Until that point, if you were a grime artist, you only ever made grime. I think it caught people by surprise a bit.’
The desire to spread their wings and fly speculatively beyond the icy-cold margins was too powerful – after years of growing heat on the underground: Roll Deep wanted a bit of chart success, and a decent pay-cheque, and, as Shabs Jobanputra, CEO of Relentless puts it, some legitimacy: not least because Lethal Bizzle, as head of rival east London crew Fire Camp, had secured a Top 10 hit with ‘Pow!’. ‘Roll Deep wanted to go over the top,’ Jobanputra insists now. ‘There was the harder stuff on the album as well, but ultimately they wanted to take grime and make it interesting, comic and fun. All these MCs, Wiley and Scratchy, were brilliant wordsmiths, and they had a comedy value; they had a pop sensibility as well.’
Cold, hard reportage is important, but starts to weigh you down after a while – what’s more, if you’ve become the biggest fish in the small pond, it’s a standard trajectory to want to reach out beyond it, after a while. Wiley’s debut album for XL,Treddin’ on Thin Ice, released in 2004, was almost a concept album charting his desire to transcend the ‘madness’ and ‘pain’ of street violence, drug-dealing and petty crime: ‘I’ve had enough, I can’t cope, I just want to make dough with my ni**as,’ he blurts on ‘Special Girl’ – which is ostensibly a song about settling down into a serious relationship, with the woman of the title a cipher for a different kind of stability. So with Wiley at the helm, managing Roll Deep ‘like a youth club’, as he put it to me, Roll Deep had plotted out an album on a single piece of paper that became like a holy tablet, glossed with tweaks and comments, as a route to the mainstream, and out of the manor. There was a very deliberate focus on the charts, and on mainstream success, reasons Jobanputra – much of it driven by the same competitive impulses that came from clashing on pirate radio:
‘They wanted to be bigger, better and stronger than the next crew, that’s why they started making hits. I think they deliberately created anthems knowing that if they were more melodic they would get more money.’ Relentless, having started as an independent, underground label, did a deal with Virgin/EMI which helped give them a leg-up in terms of promotion. ‘Roll Deep were quite reticent to begin with,’ Jobanputra recalls. ‘Their peers were watching to see if they made money; there was pressure on them. I think it was tough for a lot of those guys to get out from their estates, but the desire to make music, the passion and the drive to do it, was inescapable. And when they started walking into the offices of EMI and Virgin, they were further emboldened, and one step closer to the establishment. It meant they felt more confident, as they deserved to. It was an opportunity to be legitimised, and given a voice – and not just a fringe voice, either.’
Like Roll Deep, Shystie had already created an album’s worth of songs when she began attracting major-label interest, following the underground buzz around her ‘answer track’ to Dizzee’s ‘I Luv U’. She was signed to Polydor amidst a flurry of media interest, and quickly hailed as ‘the first lady of grime’. Shystie went away and finessed the work she already had, re-recording it on proper studio equipment; but she did so without interference or A&R-ing – without, it seems, even much of a view as to how they’d sell her and her ‘double-timing, triple-rhyming’ lickety-spit MCing to the pop world. ‘They didn’t ask me to change anything,’ she says now. ‘They didn’t try and push me to make more radio-friendly stuff. I don’t feel like I had to compromise.’ Diamond in the Dirt was released in July 2004, and didn’t chart. ‘One Wish’ just dented the Top 40. The problem, if anything, was that she hadn’t compromised enough for the only channels through which hits were made then: a handful of major radio and TV outlets. ‘Because grime was nowhere near where it is now, at the time on radio it was all pop songs and indie bands, so when “One Wish” came out, they were like “Jesus, this is way too hard for radio, we can’t playlist this. We can’t do anything with this.”’
The only TV channels that would play the ‘One Wish’ video were underground cable outlet Channel U, and MTV Base – and in the latter case, only in their dedicated ‘homegrown talent’ section, tellingly scheduled for late at night, away from primetime. She was competing for resources with – and inevitably, losing out to – label mates who were already massive household names in US rap like 50 Cent and Eminem. Meanwhile it was ‘indie season’ throughout: ‘It was all Arctic Monkeys and Keane and all these flipping other bands dominating the charts,’ she laughs. ‘We didn’t stand a chance.’ It was no tragedy: the album still sold well, and Shystie went on to have a flourishing acting career, starring in the semi-autobiographical Channel 4 series Dubplate Drama – there’s no bitterness about her experience with Polydor. The other obstacle she faced was less about the prevailing winds of what was in fashion at the time, and rather more wearying: Estelle, another young black British female artist, had just released her poppy and amenable single ‘1980’. ‘Obviously that song was more radio friendly and commercial, and I remember Radio 1 had said to our people they could only push one, and they were going with Estelle’s. That’s when I learned about radio politics. So “1980” got pushed and pushed and pushed, and “One Wish” got slept on. The industry wouldn’t take a risk: for them it was like “it’s too dark, it’s too ghetto”; but nowadays they flipping love it, they can’t get enough of it – it’s the same sound!’
Only a handful of artists signed album deals in this first flurry of industry interest – it was never quite a full-on gold rush – and they were all strong talents, who put out good albums; but they never made a great impact on the pop mainstream. Kano released Home Sweet Home in June 2005 (peaking in the charts at 36), the same month as Roll Deep’s In at the Deep End (50), and was followed the next month by Lethal Bizzle’s Against All Oddz (89). More Fire Crew’s CV and Shystie’s Diamond in the Dirt had failed to chart; Durrty Goodz and British R&B singer Gemma Fox both signed to Polydor but ‘parted ways’ before releasing anything. Wiley’s solo debut had peaked at 45 the previous year, and even Dizzee’s Boy in da Corner had only reached as high as 23. The alien sound of the British underground had intrigued the labels, and the press, just enough to give it the time of day, but they were never pushed hard enough to challenge a diet of proven American hip-hop, pop and R&B imports – artists that needed no A&R-ing, no development, and not even that much promotion – and a steady stream of guitar bands. Beyond that handful, no one else on a thriving underground got a look-in. The two Run the Road compilation albums released on 679 in early 2005 and 2006 did a lot to foreground the rest of the scene: Riko Dan, No Lay, Durrty Goodz (previously Doogz), D Double E, Crazy Titch, Ghetto, Ears and a range of producers all got a showcase on the same label as The Streets and Kano; as good as the compilations are, they didn’t lead anywhere.
One new arrival in this period ought to have given a huge boost to black British underground music in the mainstream. In August 2002 BBC Radio 1Xtra launched, targeting 15–24-year-olds, ‘particularly – although not exclusively – those from ethnic minorities’. The press linked this to the growth of pirate radio (the number of stations was estimated to have doubled during the 1990s, with 400 in London alone by 20007), and some of 1Xtra’s DJs were poached directly from the pirates. The arrival of 1Xtra coincided with the increasing popularisation of the category of ‘urban music’ in the UK, but the BBC were careful not to use it themselves: the wording of the BBC licence stipulated that the station would broadcast ‘the best in contemporary black music’. There was precedent for the label as an entry point for people of colour into the industry: the market category of ‘urban music’ had been established in the 1980s in the US, and the MOBO (Music of Black Origin) Awards had been launched in the UK in 1996. There has long been discomfort about the term as a grouping for the myriad divergent styles that come under the heading – just like the constant quibble about the phrase ‘music of black origin’ (how about basically all popular music?). In Simon Wheatley’s photojournalist book about London in the mid-2000s, Don’t Call Me Urban!, Pay As U Go MC God’s Gift specifically rejects the label: ‘it’s a way of segregating us,’ he says – of ghettoising black British music away from the mainstream. ‘When that word came around, everything in the “urban” chart was either Asian or black. The person’s ethnic background doesn’t matter, because we’re not singing in an African language or whatever, so why are we being classed as something?’
Although 1Xtra was launched with shows from some credible names from the UK garage scene (Richie Vibe Vee, J Da Flex, Femme Fatale and Heartless Crew), it was a slow start – available only through the very new medium of digital radio – a medium of which the target audience were the least likely to be early adopters. It was an overdue recognition of how painfully slow to adapt to Britain’s multicultural youth cultures the BBC had been. ‘I was at Radio 1 when dance music passed it by,’ said Radio 1’s head of specialist music Ian Parkinson, when 1Xtra launched, ‘and black music was nowhere to be heard on the network, so I understand the initial suspicions, but I say give it a chance.’ At the time, every one of the 18 members of the BBC’s Executive Committee were white (as indeed all ten are now at the time of writing, fifteen years later).
Grime and underground UK pirate sounds still didn’t get much of a look-in in those early years: ‘When I first joined 1Xtra in 2005,’ Austin Daboh would tell me in 2011, by that time the station’s music manager, ‘I was scheduling the music for a show, and I remember being told off for placing two UK tracks back-to-back.’ There was no dedicated grime show, even in its early peak in 2005. Indeed it’s noteworthy, in the evolution of ‘grime’ as a genre, that one pivotal 1Xtra set in July 2004, hosted by Wiley and featuring Trim, Crazy Titch, Lady Fury, Riko, Flow Dan and Fire Camp, was still being billed as part of the station’s Garage Weekender. Garage really had waned by this point, but the new guard hadn’t fully emerged from its parent genre’s shadow, even a year after Dizzee’s Mercury win. The industry still didn’t know where to put these kids, or what to do with them. Ironically, that champion of outsider music on Radio 1, John Peel, had acknowledged the word on his show two months earlier. ‘I’m not very happy with the name “grime”, but that’s what a lot of people seem to call it, so we’ll call it that for the time being,’ he grumbled, introducing a live guest set from DJs Eastwood, Krafty and Cameo and MCs G Double, Purple, IQ and IE.
There was a prevailing sense that the institutions of the mainstream industry weren’t ready for them, as Shystie had found. ‘Without the pirates, not one of us would be here now,’ Geeneus told Radio 1’s East is East documentary in 2004. ‘There’s no way for people to hear us. How would we have been heard? It’s impossible. We wouldn’t have been able to get a show on Radio 1 or any other station would we? They’d laugh at us if we tried to send a demo tape to one of the legal stations.’ In The Pirate’s Dilemma, Matt Mason cites a Malcolm Gladwell theory, ‘the Law of the Few’ to point out that the original MC stars on pirate radio thrived in the long run precisely because they were happy to start out small: Dizzee would never have succeeded if he’d started his career by conscientiously mailing demo CDs of weird, wonderful creations like ‘Brand New Day’ straight to major labels – they would never have opened the envelope, and if they had, they wouldn’t have had the faintest clue what they were listening to. Instead, Dizzee spoke to his small but dedicated audience, and that audience ‘let the labels know who he was on his behalf’. A track like ‘I Luv U’ thrived on the underground, in raves, on pirate radio, as a white label – and didn’t get a commercial release until much later, when the industry and the wider public were ready for it.
Part of the problem was that there were precious few people working in the music industry and the media who understood the pirate-radio scene. Chantelle Fiddy was a rare exception, a critical supporting voice in the early days of grime, who put on live shows, worked for 679 Recordings, Kano’s label, A&R-ing the second of the influential Run the Road compilations, and worked as an influential blogger and journalist. She explained the sticking point was often a lack of interest from gatekeepers, who were especially risk-averse and myopic in a period of dwindling print circulations. ‘There’s a core issue with many editors,’ she told me in 2006. ‘They simply can’t see past their own socio-economic background and class reference points. Pitching Wiley features to Mixmag in 2003, they’d say “no one has ever heard of him”. Which was true, if you asked the attendees at Cream or Ministry of Sound, but if you walked through Mile End with him, he was a street demigod. It’s narrow mindedness, and it perpetuates social division and the underachievement of any act not appealing to middle-class journalists.’ Likewise, I was told by the music editor of a national newspaper around this time, by way of explanation for his lack of interest in grime pitches, ‘I’m white, middle-class and I like indie rock, and so do my readers.’ They changed their tune eventually, just like the record labels did – but it took years.
The result was that the road from the manor to mainstream fame was only traversed by a very few artists. But the underground was slowly building its own networks – without the help of social media or YouTube, at this stage. One particular media arrival would give room to breathe to grime at this critical time, even if it was itself relatively underground and marginal, a kind of TV equivalent of the pirates: Channel U was founded in 2003 to give a visual platform to grime, UK garage, and up-and-coming British R&B and rap – to black British underground music, essentially. It broadcast on cable, and quickly developed a cult following. When founder Darren Platt passed away in 2016, the tributes flooded in from artists: Platt was ‘a visionary’, wrote Lethal Bizzle in a tribute on Instagram. ‘[He] helped me when I was at my lowest point, and got me back on top.’ He had pushed grime ‘when no one else cared’, Bizzle wrote.
‘Channel U made the man across the street a celebrity – people who spoke the same tongue as you,’ said MC Poet, in a subsequent discussion on YouTube chat show Not For The Radio. ‘It was still a craft that wasn’t respected musically, grime.’ That craft, and black British MC-led music, was finally presented on TV as a wider scene for the first time, and Channel U revealed that beyond the handful of crossover successes, the likes of Dizzee, Ms Dynamite or So Solid Crew, there was a whole cohort of stars-in-waiting emerging from the manor. It gave them a platform, and helped fans connect a face and personality to the voice. Channel U, along with the DIY DVD publishing scene that would soon begin to flourish alongside it, was bringing the unvarnished energy of the pirates to a visual medium for the first time. ‘We called it pirate TV,’ said Vis, the host of The Ill Out Show, ‘because there was really no rules.’ They had 50 Cent, Christiana Milian, Ciara – big US stars – sitting on their cheap living-room sofa, along with Crazy Titch and Lethal Bizzle and Devlin. Stars were made there, and it gave a big boost to the process of propelling grime outside of small parts of inner-city London.
Cat Park, the channel manager at the station, said that it was often a fight for Platt to promote the underground scene. ‘There’d be fines from Ofcom for playing videos that they deemed unsuitable, and he’d have to pay the solicitors’ bills that went along with them. He’d have pressure from police who would watch the channel carefully. Nobody was investing in our scene then, nobody wanted to know and people certainly didn’t want to advertise on the channel.’8 In broadcasting a thriving underground, against the prevailing winds of US imports, Channel U also put the likes of MTV under pressure to adapt to what their young audience were listening to, in the same way the BBC’s hand had been forced by the success of the pirates. MTV Base, an urban iteration of the American TV mega-brand, had launched in the UK in 1999, but like 1Xtra in its early years, it was very light on homegrown talent, relying largely on ready-made successes imported from the world of American R&B, hip-hop and soul.
Channel U became a staple part of the grime scene – and created a broader shared experience of it: one that pirate radio, by its geographically limited nature, had not been capable of. You’ll find YouTube comments attesting to popular ‘Channel U classics’ attached to mid-2000s videos like ‘Southside Allstars’, ‘Pull Up Dat’, ‘Murkle Man’ and ‘Brown Bear Picnic’ – the more theatrical and wacky videos and tracks did especially well (‘Picnic’ is a grimy riff on Teddy Bears’ Picnic; Jammer’s ‘Murkle Man’ video sees him dressed as the superhero of the title). Tracks featuring multiple MCs thrived in particular. While beef – between individuals, between crews, between areas of London – was still in the air, and diss tracks were common, the symbol of an emerging unity in the scene came in the now legendary ‘all-star’ or ‘link-up’ tunes, where five MCs or more from different crews would come together to each do a verse on a hot new instrumental. These moments were crucial in binding together grime’s first wave – in 2003 grime was a long way off the united front visible today, where the likes of Wiley, Lethal Bizzle, Boy Better Know, Stormzy, and road-rap stars Giggs and Krept and Konan routinely put in guest turns at each other’s concerts. The all-star track is perhaps the closest that grime has managed to get in a studio recording to capturing the frantic, pass-the-mic hype of a live pirate radio or rave set. It also captures grime’s ‘scenius’, Brian Eno’s term for the collaborative genius of a scene, the idea that – for all the MC ego – grime’s creativity thrived precisely because it was a collective, not a solitary pursuit.
‘We created our own stars,’ Lethal Bizzle said to me in 2011, reflecting on the united front that all-star tracks like ‘Pow!’ had presented. ‘At that time grime was viewed in a negative light because people from different crews were beefing with each other, and warring, all that bullshit – so when ‘Pow!’ came around, with ten different stars on, people were like, “Wow, Bizzle’s on it, Jamakabi’s on it, D Double’s on it, Demon’s on it …” Everyone was like, “What the fuck?” That was when grime was thriving the most, sort of 2004–07, when there were so many collaborations going on.’ We were speaking when grime was really at a low ebb, when the scene’s brightest talents were all making dreadful, watered-down electro-urban pop, just in the name of getting some kind of industry recognition and financial reward for their efforts. Bizzle’s reflections on the collective strengths of the early days, messy and hectic as they were, were delivered with more than a few shakes of the head. ‘I think we don’t even realise how powerful we are. As a unit, we’re more powerful than any record company.’
For those not scoring record deals during this period, the underground scene was home to a mixture of vibrant growth, and frustration caused by hitting the industry’s ceiling. Beneath the Dizzees, Wileys, Kanos and Shysties there was an ever-growing range of crews, DJs, producers and MCs across London who were hoping and waiting to see if they could follow a musical path out of the manor. The underground’s emerging infrastructure was supporting them, and they could reach out beyond the pirates’ aerials for the first time. Substantial rave franchises like Sidewinder and Eskimo Dance built up big followings with all-star grime and garage line-ups – although they had to do so outside of the capital, in towns such as Watford, Milton Keynes and Swindon, such was the pressure from the police after the trouble associated – sometimes fairly, sometimes not – with the UK garage scene, in particular So Solid Crew’s tabloid-enhanced reputation for attracting violence. Spinning off these raves were the rave tape-packs, recordings of all the DJ and MC sets at nights like Sidewinder. The format had been a staple of nineties club scenes – which presented an opportunity for people beyond London, its pirate-radio stations and the south-east raves to keep in touch with the rapidly evolving underground.
RWD magazine provided a rare outlet for the scene in print journalism: Wiley used to refer to it as ‘the book’, because it was the only place that documented everything going on in their world. ‘Everything about RWD was crass,’ former editor Matt Mason told me, proudly – it was a magazine aimed at teenagers, and aimed to speak their language, ‘text speak’ and all. The first issue, in 2001, had featured a bootlegged Versace advert as the back cover – these were still the garage days, and they wanted that aspirational, designer association, even if they weren’t getting any money from Versace for it. ‘These cottage industries were growing and growing,’ Mason recalled of the early 2000s – ‘along with the record shops and pirate stations and the clubs: it was a real ecosystem. And you never would have had that culture without that ecosystem around it.’
One major addition to the existing rave infrastructure inherited from the nineties dance underground was the homegrown grime DVD publishing industry. Out of necessity, grime at its inception was a decidedly non-visual genre, in that so much of it was hidden: digital cameras hadn’t been widely adopted, smartphones didn’t exist, the established media weren’t interested in documenting it, and the hubs for all grime activity were pirate radio stations, which by their nature had to be hidden in the shadows. By the mid-2000s, grime DVD series like Troy Miller’s Practice Hours, Jammer’s Lord of the Mics and Target’s Aim High had become a vital part of the scene. Roony Keefe, creator of the seminal Risky Roadz DVD series in 2004, and now a music-video director and black-cab driver, was working in Rhythm Division when he had the idea to put some visuals to the thrilling sounds coming out of the nearby pirate stations.
‘There weren’t really many music videos from grime artists at all back then,’ he recalled. ‘Because everything was based around pirate radio it was all semi-anonymous. MCs would come into Rhythm Division, and I remember saying quietly to my colleague, “Oh, is that so-and-so?”’ Keefe borrowed some money from his nan to buy a camcorder, and used his student loan to pay for the pressing of the DVDs, and Risky Roadz was born – he would travel around London to go and meet MCs in their local area, leading to memorable scenes like Kano spitting his lyrics a cappella in the street, late at night, wearing a dressing gown and holding a cup of tea. In the same DVD, God’s Gift delivers a freestyle sitting on a wall, while children play on bikes and a London bus goes past in the background. The aesthetic became a key part of grime’s identity: naturalistic, honest and unpretentious – MCs spitting about London as it really was, against a backdrop of London as it really was. No champs, no profiling, no beautiful people, just like Wiley described it.
Largely of course this was just for convenience – Keefe would get the train from Bethnal Green to visit MCs across London and just shoot them where he found them, outside their house or block of flats – but it worked stylistically too; lyrically grime isn’t escapist music, with an escapist style – it’s not about artistic camouflage, or reaching to a far-away galaxy or island in the sun. It’s about the places it came from: from Roman Road in Bow to Meridian Walk in Tottenham.
‘It’s a DIY style,’ Keefe said of the Risky Roadz approach. ‘It was birthed from wanting to get something done, and making it happen, regardless of budgets, or camera quality. We weren’t too worried about the glossy style, we just wanted to show what the scene was about, and show London as we know it – not just what people think London is, because there’s misconceptions, that it’s all china teaware and crumpets, and there’s a lot more to it than that. The world finally started to see what London’s really about, from music.’
On the first Risky Roadz DVD, south London’s Essentials stand around in a back garden and speak to Keefe about their hopes, dreams and frustrations. ‘We need more support, man, for the scene to evolve; there’s not enough support for the scene,’ says DJ Bossman, referring to the limits of the music industry’s interest in Dizzee Rascal’s peers, following the Mercury win. ‘[They’re] scared to sign people … they need to give people a chance.’
‘We’ll sell units, we’ll make you money,’ says Remerdee, also known as Captain, to the laughter of the rest of his crew, addressing the industry directly through Keefe’s camera, as if there was plausibly a table full of stuffy old white men in suits hiding behind it. ‘Come check us, we’re doing our music, it’s all from the soul – we’ve got a lot of people who’ve come from where we come from … They’re going to buy our CD, they’re going to understand where we come from. Everyone suffers, no matter what you’re suffering, everyone goes through different tings, but it’s all pain, you understand? And we express pain, happiness and everything.’
They discuss the major labels too, and reflect on the negative consequences of a few mainstream failures. ‘When they don’t do well, the majors get scared and don’t want to sign anyone else.’
Keefe asks what their hopes for the future are. K Dot, an MC who recorded a couple of the most blistering solo MC tracks ever, but never finished a mixtape, never made a music video, and never got signed, responds, ‘I’m in this to live good.’
N.E. (Nu Era) flashes a smile and talks about flying around the world, about going to Japan, about being in the Guinness Book of Records. A much-loved character on the scene, he sadly passed away in 2009. His distinguishing lyric was dripping with pathos, inverting the whole logic of MC self-aggrandisement with punishing humility: ‘I might not be the best, but I’ll still merk any man who wants to come test.’ Essentials talk about number-one singles, about building up a business off the back of the music, about following up albums with clothing lines – the will was there, but fate was not: after three promising mixtapes, the crew split acrimoniously in 2006.9
Speaking to Maxwell D now, there’s a sense of regret that there wasn’t the investment and infrastructure to run things professionally for themselves from the beginning, that there weren’t any Suge Knight figures around in the scene in the early 2000s who understood its potential. ‘So many corporate companies have branded themselves off the back of urban underground music, and are making money money off us now,’ he says, ‘but the thing is, it should have been us! We should have been young entrepreneurs within ourselves – the Pay As U Gos, the Heartless Crews – we should have been entrepreneurs having our own stations, doing that stuff for ourselves. But corporations will always win. It’s like going against Barclays Bank.’
The grime DVD cottage industry in these formative years provides some fascinating records of the world around the music: historical artefacts of a part of London life mostly never captured – before ubiquitous documentation via digital cameras and smartphones, and before gentrification swept away much of the inner city. Groups of teenagers in tracksuits and baseball caps hanging out smoking spliffs, swigging from lurid-coloured plastic bottles of fizzy soft drinks, against a backdrop – just like that captured in Simon Wheatley’s photos – of a different London, one transformed in barely more than a decade. It looks greyer, more washed-out, damp: a city yet to be colonised by New Labour’s kids-play-centre approach to urban regeneration, all crayon colours and aspirational slogans. Young people who were never MCs sit around too – ‘this is Scum Dave,’ one of Roll Deep says in a Risky Roadz interview segment, by way of introduction, and Scum Dave stares straight ahead, presumably stoned and utterly blank, not blinking. (There’s a thread on GrimeForum from 2011 where people argue about whether Scum Dave was a) an MC, b) a producer, C) ‘a lengman on road’ and now in prison, or d) none of the above: maybe he’s ‘just someone who lives around the way, [an] associate’.)
Even the MCs – who by this stage have done scores of performances at major raves, and hours of pirate radio – are a mess of nervous smiles and gentle shakes of the head. Discarda pulls his chewing gum out with his finger. ‘Don’t play with your food,’ Breeze instructs him, slightly embarrassed for them both. The lack of media training, the lack of experience in interviews – above all, the shyness – is profound. MCs avoid looking the camera in the eye, no one really wants to answer even basic questions. ‘Come on,’ says Keefe, casting the camera around. ‘Who’s going to tell me … how did Roll Deep come about?’ The same thing happens when he asks what’s happening with the album they’re making: the camera captures only diffident shuffling, heads withdrawn into hoodies, eyes turning down to the spliff being rolled. It’s the reaction you’d expect if you approached any group of teenage boys sitting on a wall facing a basketball court, in the middle of a council estate. Which makes it all the more striking that this particular group were about to change the face of British pop culture.