Summer 2006 is one of the jump off points in Escaping Babylon. It’s likely that there will be readers who have no memories of that time. What did the landscape of Black British music look like for you, then? What records were in your rotation?
“In terms of Black British albums, not many. A lot of it was raw mixtapes, freestyles, stuff that I caught online because YouTube had just launched, and DVDs that I caught wind of. I was listening to Kano’s ‘Beats + Bars’ mixtape and ‘Home Sweet Home’ a lot, too. Listening to albums in a UK context was still fairly new to me, outside of Craig David, Lemar, even Keisha White. For me, it was still very much: go to the market and buy a mixtape. That summer I got my first job, and I do remember going to HMV and buying whatever CDs I could find too, so I did buy some Roots Manuva CDs because of hearing him on the Kidulthood soundtrack, and also The Streets. It all came from the Black British canon. And I feel like if a song, EP, or album came out back then, you weren’t done with it after a month. It would stay in your rotation for months on end, sometimes years. I was still buying stuff that came out in the late 1990s because, for me, that didn’t feel like a massive distance in terms of time. Now, when I think about 2016, that feels so distant.”
Is there an artist from that mid-2010s era that you listened to who perhaps didn’t go on to enjoy the longevity and success you might’ve hoped for them?
“Well, this particular artist has really come back into the fray in recent years. But I would’ve said Scorcher. He was probably my favourite MC between 2007 and 2010. I bought every tape I could find and I bought his debut album, ‘Concrete Jungle’, as well, on iTunes. I downloaded the ‘Audio Wave’ mixtape from 2011. His ‘96 Bars of Revenge’ freestyle was the perfect epitome of what Scorcher was at the time, and his actual potential as well. We all know the reasons why he wasn’t able to get to where he should’ve been as an artist, but I think he often gets left out of the conversation in terms of MCs who are in most people’s top three. It’s one of the things I touch on in the book; artists were still having to battle the realities of everyday life, and at that time he wasn’t able to focus on career stuff.”
In grime it was often the pioneers who fell into that space because they were taking the risks to pay for things like studio time and cutting dubs.
“Yeah, exactly. And what’s happening now is fitting. I went to Scorcher’s headline show in The Orange Room. Seeing the energy in the room was amazing, seeing all those MCs from the first gen and also the new gen, like Duppy, who I think is one of the coldest MCs. He’s so cold.”
He reminds me of the very first wave of the genre.
“I feel like when we talk about grime culture, I think [Duppy is] the essence of what grime culture is. Like, one day you’re a producer. On another day, you’re an MC. Or a DJ. I think Scorcher doesn’t get enough credit for his production as well. I think some people get grime and grime culture confused. I think they’re very distinct things. Grime culture is what people actually live. This idea of grime is what people might attempt to do, but they don’t necessarily immerse themselves in what that is, beyond spitting. And it wasn’t until recently that I started to understand that we were part of grime culture, too. We may not have been part of the grime scene as in artists, MCs. But we were part of the culture because of the way we lived, what we wore, what we listened to, what we were doing in the playground. All of that fed into grime culture. I’m grateful that I was part of that era where I was able to see it grow into what it is today.”
