But that was sort of the point – original grime was its own reward, and could afford to be entirely self-referential. It was under minimal commercial constraint, and taking part was the most important thing, especially if the only audience you were targeting was there with you in the pirate’s studio, passing the mic.
Such immediacy had an evolutionary effect on the vocals, which moved on from jungle’s essential, albeit heavily Londonised, Jamaicanisms to the capital’s almost ubiquitous yoof-speak. So pan-racial were these tones that two generations on from the Windrush arrivals, it was now not only impossible to tell what a person’s roots might be, but whether, unless you could actually see them, they were black or white. This really was the capital’s first truly indigenous black population, a melting pot that was given a further stir when the Home Office did its best to shut the door on arrivals from Jamaica, while economic immigrants and refugees from sub-Saharan Africa increased proportionately. One of the most noticeable aspects of the grime wave was the number of participants who had African names – Dizzee’s heritage is Ghanaian and Nigerian.
Inevitably, a new streetwise style attracted mainstream attention for mostly the wrong reasons. I was talking to Dizzee not long after he won the 2003 Mercury Prize for his Boy In Da Corner album, and he was frustrated and a little baffled about doing loads of press around the award, but seldom being asked about his music:
‘Tell me about it! They’re just looking for an angle … a story. But the story’s the music.’
For much of the media, though, the story was an unfortunate incident that summer in which Dizzee was stabbed after being set upon in the rave hotspot of Ayia Napa. In some parts of the press, this came to define grime; to grime itself, this was an unwanted, if somewhat predictable by-product. Dizzee himself would palm it off with ‘no point in talking about that when 50 Cent’s been shot nine times!’, but he still shows an understandable irritation at the lack of appreciation of what grime was really about:
‘Really and truly, I was there to make music, I love to make music, but I was limited in my facilities, and pirate radio was an avenue to get my music heard. Because MCs on pirate radio could say what they like, they can be quite limited in what they say because, most of the time, everybody just goes with the flow of the week and often that could be raw. A lot of the time people on the outside didn’t understand what we were doing, There’s this little thing called clashing, where everybody starts writing lyrics for [about] each other, saying all sorts of things about each other. It’s like the old soundsystem thing, but it gets very raw over here and because people [MCs new to pirate radio] don’t really get the nature of it, it can get stupid. Because it’s pirate radio, it’s a lot less controlled, it’s much closer to the street where anything goes, so it could get self-destructive.
‘It gave a bad impression, so then the clubs were always getting shut down, and you’re hearing abut a shooting or a stabbing or a fighting – people just saw grime as pirate radio, raves, gun shootings … that lifestyle. It’s all that as well, but there’s a lot more talent out there. You’ve got to think about what people are doing independently, without record company involvement, without no one helping them, off the street, off their own back.’
What grime did, was invade the pop world in same way that hip hop did in the US. And this was as much about business acumen as it was about musical skills.
LIKE SO MUCH OF LONDON’S BLACK MUSIC, grime’s driving force was a desire to overcome cultural colonisation and make music representative of the kids who would be listening to it. Jammer, who proudly admits to being a ‘massive fan of Wookie and Shy FX’, also talks about a lack of homegrown stimulus:
‘When I was growing up we used to listen to a lot of Biggie Smalls, Tupac, Snoop, so they were the people who had a big influence on me looking at music as being something someone like myself could do. But I couldn’t really relate to what they was talking about, because I’m not from America. I wanted something I could relate to, even if I wasn’t aware of it. What made grime different is a lot of the things we’re talking about were relevant to people that live here, and were living in the same situations and having the same experiences as us, because we all live here in London.’
A big factor in how tales of Harlesden rather than Harlem gained credibility is that they were told in the emergent black London dialect, and that worked because the music was completely new. As an MC-ed art form, grime – and the rougher end of UKG – had been designed, however subconsciously, for the composite cadence of the capital’s youth, and this meant in turn that it was designed for the capital’s composite youth. As a style, it organically represented so much about life within the M25 – at one point Jammer describes ten-year-old grime as ‘mixed-race music’. Alongside its more cliched urban audience, grime also attracted a growing sub-section of middle-class fans, for whom it provided a suitably parent-upsetting, male-teenage-angsty alternative to the X Factor fodder and shoegazing indie rock that had been clogging up the music business since the turn of the century. That they accessed the music via word-of-mouth, often chaotic illegal broadcasters gave it a level of playground urban cool that money couldn’t buy.
Perhaps most important of all was that grime was willing to embrace this expanded audience. While partly for pragmatic commercial reasons, this was largely because, like Soul II Soul before them, they saw themselves being as much a part of the United Kingdom as anybody else. What they had to offer – exactly as they wanted to offer it – was relevant to everybody else. This was the breakthrough in self-realisation that so many previous generations of London black music had not quite managed, and did a great deal to bolster grime’s spirit of independence.
That kind of enabling self-confidence relied on financial security, which came from success, which brought greater self-confidence and led to increased success … Pretty quickly, grime had achieved a self-sustaining upward spiral, rooted in a commercial system that was so incredibly straightforward it was about as close to a meritocracy as is possible in the music business. Dizzee explains how to get ahead in grime:
‘When I first started off, I used to do pirate radio. Twenty quid a week you had to pay, because it was getting your name out there. At first I was at school, and then when I was out of school and making a little money, I’d do whatever to get it done and get on the radio … I’d do MC-ing and a bit of deejaying, but with deejaying you have to pay for dubs all the time, so the thing is how many raves am I doing, and how big those raves are? You can get fifty or a hundred pounds, then, as you’re out there, if you’re good and you’re known around the city, then they start giving you one-fifties and that. Then you get into the bit when you might start selling the records yourself, take them round to the shops. How many you sell is what money you get back – something like two pounds fifty a piece, if you’ve got sale or return. If you got a stand-up tune, you might take five hundred to a shop and they’ll give you the cash because they know they can sell it, but that’s at the very high level. Not everybody’s at that level, you have to have a big tune on the underground, on the pirates and in the raves.’
Jammer stresses the importance of pirate radio in this equation:
‘When we had Déjà Vu and we were doing the Nasty Crew and Roll Deep sets, the buzz that I had off the stuff that I made was really good. When I went into the shops, kids were already coming asking “Can I get this record?”, “Can I get that record?” So I had the power of saying “You have to buy these records off me now”. I wasn’t going to give them to the shop, telling them I’ll come back later to see what you’ve sold. It was the radio that created that buzz.’
Not just the radio, but the internet too. The first generation to grow up with the web, these guys were exploiting it mercilessly for showcasing, podcasting and streaming. When they got a grip on Facebook and YouTube, hilarious, rough’n’ready promo videos popped up, filmed on inexpensive digital cameras or sophisticated phones. That everything to do with these visual presentations see
med so random, including their uploadings, was always a plus point, and as artists appeared in the clothes they’d been wearing all day, they reinforced the notion of there being little difference between performer and public.
In the wake of such broad-based access to unadulterated grime, producers recognised the existence of an audience who couldn’t take part in the rave scene or tune into the pirates, yet would clearly appreciate the excitement either situation offered. Grime mixtapes – live sets from the MCs and collectives released on CD or download – became massive-selling items, so much a staple of the scene that established artists like Dizzee and Wiley still put out mixtapes of their more cutting-edge stuff in between conventional album releases.
The gold standard for grime marketing went to Jammer with his Lord Of The Mics series of DVDs. Recorded on a digital movie camera, by himself, in the cellar studio at his mum and dad’s house – grime’s legendary Dungeon – these feature some of the biggest-name MCs in appropriately claustrophobic sound-clash action, live and ad libbed. The series – it’s up to volume five at the time of writing – has proved so popular, they sell it off their own dedicated website, along with a recently added deejay series, Lord Of The Decks.
With such operations being run by teenagers out of back rooms all over London, it’s not hard to see why grime not only went mass market so quickly and is still around twelve years later, but also has stayed true to how it started out. What do these characters need with a recording industry?
That said, grime as the first London black music style to genuinely cross over was far from finished with the mainstream.
CHAPTER TEN
From Pirates to Pop Stars
London’s black music rules
‘WHEN WE WENT INTO SYCO, we went in saying we wanted creative control – Lab’s the artist, Lab’s the producer … we started it and we do everything ourselves. I wanted to do it on our terms, to have control over the look, the feel, the sound… Everything.’
Marc Williams smiles as he remembers his negotiating technique when striking a deal between Labrinth, the artist he manages, and Simon Cowell’s Syco Music. Far more significant than Marc’s feeling confident enough to shout the odds at the ‘most powerful man in pop’, however, was the fact that he was there in the first place. At the company’s behest, too. Until that point, in 2010, the record label had little raison d’être other than to sign up the winners of Cowell’s TV talent shows – X Factor, Pop Idol, Wherever’s Got Talent, that sort of thing. Labrinth was the first act to be recruited on an old-school A&R basis. In reality, this was no more music-business rocket science than releasing records by acts already enjoying huge TV exposure and established approval ratings: Labrinth had been producing and guesting on top twenty hits for a few years. The crucial difference was that these were by the likes of Tiny Tempah, Tinchy Stryder and Chipmunk – grime artists, streets away, literally, from Syco’s regular roster of Gareth Gates, One Direction and Susan Boyle. Marc continues:
Labrinth, at the forefront of London’s redefined musical mainstream – young, black and in complete control.
‘Simon’s not stupid. He’s a very clever man, and he knows his TV empire will have a shelf life, so he’s got to think two steps ahead – he’s playing chess, isn’t he? What they got when they saw us was access into a world that they didn’t understand. The guy who signed Lab, Simon Cowell’s number two Sonny Takhar, he kind of got it. As commercial-minded as he is, he got the idea that it was cool and it was urban, and then figured out it was best to be left alone. Fair play to him, he just let Lab crack on with it.
‘They won’t ever get the urban [music] world, but with Lab they don’t have to get it – we understand that world and he does it all himself. It’s such an attractive proposition we gave them, because they don’t have to start hitting out for producers and figure out the sound. We write the music up here, we produce the music in here, we do the remixes … Lab’s whole album was done by us.’
That Cowell bought into this world in this manner was the most significant endorsement London’s black music had ever received. Not that he was offering much more than other mainstream companies had over recent years in which grime persistently bothered the charts and the award ceremonies. Bidding to get some percentage of the music’s turnover, they’d renamed it ‘urban’, and signed artists on what were essentially distribution deals with minimum effort or involvement. Cowell, however, so dominated the pop landscape that he’d assumed Svengali status, with far more muscle than any mere record company. Free of sentimentality and credibility-seeking alike, his wholehearted recognition of grime amounted to a royal warrant, because it was based strictly on commercial potential. And while it had little immediate effect on the scene – that was doing very well, thank you, without the nod from the man who gave us Jedward – it legitimized the genre in the wider world. If Simon Cowell was taking it seriously, then maybe everyone else should too.
One organisation that had been taking it seriously for ten years before Simon Cowell signed Labrinth was the BBC. In 2002 it launched Radio 1Xtra, a digital station devoted to black music.
SINCE THE DEMISE OF THE DANCE BANDS, frequent complaints about BBC radio had centred on its resolute lack of enthusiasm for black music, especially of the homegrown variety. From the music business side, record pluggers and radio promotions people would tell of dropping off singles at Radio One’s reception, then returning the next week with a new batch to find the previous delivery alone in the box where they’d left it. Apart from personal favouritism by revered presenters like John Peel or Mary Anne Hobbs, the Beeb’s acknowledgement of black music was limited to a few specialist slots, which although they may have given it regular airtime, unthinkingly promoted the idea that it wasn’t part of everyday rock and pop.
As we rolled into the twenty-first century, the modern internet- and pirate radio-powered black music business had reached a point where only grime was mounting a viable challenge to the domination of the BBC’s own charts by Pop Idol contestants. And yet the very programming supposedly tied to those charts – Radio One’s daytime shows – was treating grime as if it didn’t exist. A favourite explanation among senior figures was that the music didn’t ‘fit’ the daytime formula. Hardly a watertight excuse, given the organisation’s charter to represent everybody in the country.
At the same time, Radio One’s listenership was both declining and ageing, with surveys showing that more young people, particularly in London, were tuning in to pirates. In 2002 the average age of Radio One’s audience was 31, which was flat-out embarrassing to a station whose original brief was to appeal to listeners between the ages of 15 and 29. That prompted the biggest shake-up in BBC radio since the station was launched in 1967.
Ruby Mulraine, who joined Radio One as a trainee in 1994, was instrumental in setting up 1Xtra in 2002. One of the new station’s initial producers, she had become an executive there by the time she left in 2013. She recalls how the black music argument had been perennial, but by now nobody could ignore the evidence:
‘They came to the conclusion there was an audience out there that was underserved, and that, literally, the BBC was seen as being quite old and quite white and quite middle class. They felt there was an audience they were missing out on, and the BBC’s listeners were getting older and older. Really, we looked at the fact that we needed to make the audience portfolio a lot younger, and that there were certain portions of the UK demographic that didn’t get served by the BBC at all.
‘It had to be a really strong proposition, because to get the green light it had to go all the way up to government level – this is the BBC! So it has to be a reality, you have to have your facts and figures correct – somebody who is dealing with policy at the BBC is not going to understand the black music scene, and you can’t tell them passionately. Previously, people would try to argue the case passionately: how this is popular music, it’s fantastic, it’s got potential … all that kind of stuff. But that’s meaningless to those i
n charge if there’s no real kind of data there. However, when you’re actually seeing that the top ten is being taken up by lots of black music, how 2-step garage was popular and people were getting record deals on the back of that. When you see that actually happening then you can give some facts and figures to people. That’s what they actually understand.’
Ruby Mulraine on the wheels of steel. In the background is Wilbur Wilbourforce, the other original driving force behind 1Xtra.
Radio One had in fact been compiling its own evidence, monitoring audience figures for the shows that it had been adding to its schedule since the mid-1990s. Then, in a move reminiscent of the 1960s’ raid on popular pirate station Radio Caroline that filled their original deejay roster, the Beeb plundered London black music station Kiss FM. Fabio & Grooverider and Trevor Nelson, along with Judge Jules and Danny Rampling, were all brought over, while the Corporation’s new One In The Jungle further boosted the black music quota. Even more meaningful were the internal changes, in which Radio One took on more black staff at senior levels – young innovators like Brian Belle-Fortune and Wilber Wilberforce, who was involved in establishing 1Xtra, and Ruby herself. She is hard pressed to remember any other black production staff when she joined, but maintains their recruitment made all the difference:
‘It was important that they were there to fight the corner, but equally important that they knew how the BBC worked and people trusted them. That way they could really get things done.’
How they went about getting things done was very different to standard BBC procedures. The team understood that 1Xtra would be dealing with a genre of music that interfaced with its audience in a very unique way, rather than relying on conventional, record company-centred methodology. This was an instant, DIY culture, so the new station’s staff had to be immersed in that world. Conventional BBC recruitment techniques were unlikely to reach the right people:
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