Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Dan Hancox

Cover design by Jonathan Pelham

Cover image © Getty

Dan Hancox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008257163

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008257149

Version: 2019-01-24

Dedication

For my parents, Helen and Rod: thank you for bringing me up in London, among other things.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PROLOGUE: DON’T HOLD HIM BACK!

ONE: THE CITY AND THE CITY

TWO: IN THE ROOTS

THREE: THE NEW ICE AGE

FOUR: THE LAST OF THE PIRATES

FIVE: THE MAINSTREAM AND THE MANOR

SIX: GRIME WAVES AND THE RESPECT AGENDA

SEVEN: NEIGHBOURHOOD NATIONALISM

EIGHT: SHUTDOWN

NINE: DIY AND REDEMPTION SONGS

TEN: WE RUN THE STREETS TODAY

ELEVEN: GENTRIFICATION AND THE MANOR REMADE

TWELVE: A TRUE URBAN RENAISSANCE

THIRTEEN: THE REAL PRIME MINISTERS

EPILOGUE: BACK YOUR CITY

Notes

Acknowledgements

List of Images

Index

Also by Dan Hancox

About the Author

About the Publisher

Dizzee and Wiley in front of Crossways Estate, aka ‘the three flats’, 2002

PROLOGUE

DON’T HOLD HIM BACK!

It’s dusk on a spring evening in 2003, and the start of something exceptional: the hottest summer in years, a sweltering heatwave lifting temperatures in London above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. But it’s cooler when you’re high up on a rooftop, and windy, so hoods are up and beanies are on. Around 20 members of the legendary east London crews Roll Deep, East Connection, Boyz in da Hood and Nasty Crew are squeezed into a makeshift pirate-radio studio, the occupied box room being used by Deja Vu FM. The average age in the room is about 17. A few hangers-on lean against the walls watching, part-time MCs nodding their heads to the beat, hoping to be given some time on the mic or just there to witness, without realising it, a seminal moment in the history of British music.

On the decks is Roll Deep’s DJ Karnage, who slowly builds momentum with his freshly cut vinyl, exclusive unreleased instrumentals unavailable to the general public, and the mic is passed from MC to MC, each of them spitting their bars over the new dubplates.

The MC line-up ranges from graduates of the jungle and UK garage scenes such as Wiley, Maxwell D, God’s Gift and D Double E – each of them veterans already, by virtue of being in their early twenties – to early grime heroes Demon, Sharky Major and Lady Fury. There’s even a minuscule, half-squeaking, Tinchy Stryder, then only 16 years old.

The event is being filmed for an amateur DVD called Conflict by Troy ‘A Plus’ Miller, who has begged his girlfriend to borrow the camera from her university media department for the summer, to shoot some footage of his mates on the east London pirate-radio scene. Miller, from far-away Hackney, has met Bow boys Wiley, Geeneus and Slimzee in the nineties through their shared love of jungle, and become involved with their station, Rinse FM, Deja Vu’s neighbour and rival. Wiley suggested he come down that day and film at Deja. ‘No one had given me a tip, I wasn’t expecting anything,’ he says.

In its early days grime really was a scene, with its own institutions and infrastructure, friendships and rivalries, independent record labels and shops, as well as the pirate stations. It was also a community, in which the (mostly teenage) MCs and DJs all knew each other: if not from school, from youth clubs or just from hanging around the local area, then through ‘doing music’. Their rejection by the older, more refined, aspirational and grown-up UK garage scene forged a unique camaraderie, and drove the music to new heights of innovation – the competitive bravado forcing MCs to keep writing new, bolder, better lyrics.

Like all pirate stations, Deja Vu FM is by definition illegal, and its secret studio location has been moved regularly to escape the Department for Trade and Industry. In summer 2003, it’s in a grotty whitewashed box room – one window boarded up with chipboard, another blocked out with a bin bag – up on the rooftop of the same building that housed the notorious EQ Club, where numerous seminal UK garage nights took place. ‘Deja was the maddest one,’ MC Shystie says. ‘Because the studio was on a rooftop, and the roof literally had no edge: so if you take one wrong move, you’re dead. We should not have been up there! Because it would be late at night, and dark – so if someone gets pushed, or someone trips and falls back, they’re going to fall off that fucking roof and die. It’s mad when you look back at it now: nowadays the radio stations all look like how 1Xtra looks, all nice and shit – and they’re all in flipping Shoreditch.’

When Conflict was filmed, the geographical horizons were as narrow as the sonic ones were wide: ‘That’s where I’m from, Bow E3,’ Wiley boasts into the Deja Vu mic at one point. ‘I’m like the 38 bus, because I never turn up!’ he continues, shouting out north-east London’s least reliable bus service. This closed-world intensity, bordering on claustrophobia, vibrates outwards from the crowded little Deja Vu studio, in the MCs’ clamour for a turn on the microphone.

The Conflict video is grime at the point of its creative eruption – still unnamed, but undeniably alive – as the futuristic mutations of UK garage’s slinky charm settled into the shape of an explosive new genre. This was the exact moment when the effusive charisma and hype of the MCs began to take over the show. Prior to that, anyone with a mic in their hand was first of all answerable to the beat, to the producer-DJ auteur, and pirate radio was all about ‘rolling out’ the instrumentals – building a steady, if restless momentum. The MC was a performer, and a host: a master of ceremonies, but also, in the parasitic sense, possessed by those pioneering early grime beats and their subdivisions – Wiley’s ‘eskimo’, Jon E Cash’s ‘sublow’ – all of them summoning a kind of macabre, horror-show minimalism.

There’s D Double E, the lanky, cheeky fans’ favourite, also known as the Newham General, not in military fatigues tonight but shrouded in a black boxer’s hoodie, with a skippy, idiosyncratic flow and his own verbal audio-logo, ‘the D Double signal’, which is not easily transcribed, but sounds something like: ‘Ooooerhhhhhh, ooooerhhhhhh – it’s muuuuweee, muuuuuweee.’ There’s Maxwell D, who in his early twenties has already been to hell and back, survived an upbringing of domestic violence, sheltered accommodation, hostels and foster care, been on TV – on Crimewatch – gone to jail for armed robbery, come out, become a major UK garage MC and a major drug dealer (at the same time), had hits and gone back on primetime TV, but as a pop star. There’s Lady Fury, unmoved by being – as she often was – the only woman in a room full of jostling male egos, getting plaudits for her ferocity: ‘I don’t give head, but I give headbutts,’ she spits, and the record playing underneath, ‘Ho’ by Dizzee Rascal, is wheeled back as her male peers throw their hands up. ‘Dun no I represent for the ladies,’ she says, as the stuttering gunshots of the instrumental start up again. There’s Tinchy Stryder, still in school, expounding the strange wisdom of youth, ‘brand new energy, same old Stryder,’ he spits, like he’s been doing this for years – he has – clutching the microphone with both hands like his life depends on it. And then there’s Wiley, the godfather of grime, whose manic enthusiasm and hilarious non-sequiturs suddenly give way to moments of sublime clarity, like when he captures the whole bizarre and uniquely skittish practice of grime MCing: ‘I’m futuristic, quantum leaping/there’s no defeating E3 tiger/see me creep on the riddim like a spider/kill them with a 16-liner.’ Grime ‘spitting’ is twice the speed of US-style rap: typically, you had just 16 bars to show your skills (or 21 seconds, in So Solid Crew’s case), before passing the mic to the next MC – it is the most thrilling, exhausting, ADHD onslaught of a genre: a tension headache you can dance to. Andy Warhol’s generation should count themselves lucky they got fifteen entire minutes to make an impact. But for all the idiosyncratic talents, they’re in it together. The powerful conviviality and kinship in a genre where lyrical threats of violence are one of the primary means of communication may be surprising, but it’s there all the same – a chain created between artists every time the mic is passed from one MC to the next.

As the energy of the set mounts, Crazy Titch is bopping with cartoonish energy, his face screwed up at the sheer meanness of the track playing underneath, his blitzkrieg of bars including the lyric, ‘Draw for me, you’ll be on the Ten O’Clock News.’ Only three years later, he actually was on the Ten O’Clock News, when he was charged with murder: a moment when grime’s casual lyrical brutality was horribly borne out in reality. ‘When Titch came in, I could feel there was an edge,’ Troy Miller says. ‘He changed the dynamics of the room. Everything got a bit more serious, whereas it was all fun and banter before.’

Throughout the Conflict video Dizzee’s voice has that lean, straining, high-pitched teenager’s tone, altogether gone from his songs now that his throat’s been fleshed out by success, and time. He is visibly defensive, an outsider even among his peers, the boy in the corner of the room, just as he was at school. Titch is much less guarded, happily lost in the music, grinning when he passes the mic to Dizzee, nodding his head to his rival’s bars, adding a cheerful ‘what!’ to Dizzee’s lyrics in choral emphasis.

There’s no sense of a fight in the offing for the first, enthralling 35 minutes of the video – it explodes from absolutely nowhere. Dizzee asks for the mic, is refused by Titch, who is still in full flow, and somehow in a split second the two of them are yelling at each other and squaring up, fingers are pointed, and the music underneath cuts out abruptly, like in a spaghetti western; the card tables are flipped over, the piano stops playing and the saloon doors are left swinging in the breeze.

Wiley and Maxwell D are immediately in between the two young MCs – the elder statesmen who’ve seen this kind of bullshit before, and seen it get out of hand before. Wiley takes charge, the man who has always behaved like he cares more for the scene’s collective success than his own. (‘What’s the highlight of your career so far?’ Wiley was asked in 2017. ‘Skepta making it.’ ‘No, your highlight,’ the interviewer pressed. Wiley wouldn’t change track: ‘Skepta. I took him from a DJ to an MC.’1) He holds them back, instructing them to ‘seckle, seckle’, his eyes darting all around the room as other MCs move in to either help or hinder the rapprochement. Dizzee and Titch are pulled apart still shouting at each other, and everyone spills out onto the rooftop from the TARDIS-like studio, silhouetted against the dark blue east London gloaming, as friends attempt to calm them down.

‘Don’t hold him back, don’t hold him back,’ Dizzee yelps, as the struggle to defuse the anger continues. He was still so young at this point – still barking his anger out, straining passionately, defensively, hungry both on the mic and in the fight with Titch. ‘I’M NOT A MOOK, I don’t know what they told you but I’m not a mook!’ he yells repeatedly at an equally aggressive Titch. He’s scowling, livid – determined to defend his reputation. No one seems to agree on the etymology of ‘mook’ here (it might be a throwback to Scorsese’s Mean Streets), but it’s clear from the rage in Dizzee’s eyes, and in his voice, that he’s not one, right?

The clash looks serious, and is taken seriously by all the others present on the rooftop – and it was soon followed up by diss tracks from each MC to the other. As menacing as they both look when they’re screaming at each other, the scrap is underscored by grime’s quintessential, frequently comic tendency to the melodramatic. When the scuffle starts, it could almost be a scene from EastEnders – appropriately, given the location. When the music cuts out abruptly, amid the clamour of raised voices and bravado we hear ‘step outside!’, ‘leave it, man’.

Three years later, Carl ‘Crazy Titch’ Dobson was sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the murder of 21-year-old Richard Holmes, a crime that supposedly originated in a disrespectful grime lyric. In that Deja Vu show, Crazy Titch is captivating, going a hundred miles an hour on the mic, arms pumping, grinning ear to ear, wiping the sweat from his brow with his T-shirt. It’s not a stretch to suppose that the gleeful, reckless energy he displays on the mic came from the same place as his manic, unhinged tendencies.

There’s no blue plaque on the building commemorating this pivotal evening in the history of British music, because there is no building left at all. In 2003 Deja Vu was on the edge of an industrial estate, in a scrappy, marshy part of Stratford that was about to be wiped off the map – grime’s machine gun snares and adolescent yelps were among the final, spluttering cries of the informal city. The pirate studio only lasted a few months there before moving on again, and the block that housed it was soon bulldozed to make way for the mannered and manicured London 2012 site, and the £486-million Olympic stadium.

Dizzee was back in the same spot that summer, nine years after his fight with Crazy Titch, to perform his number-one hit ‘Bonkers’ at the £27m London 2012 opening ceremony, to an estimated global TV audience of 900 million people. He wore a specially embroidered E3 baseball jacket, honouring the east London postcode that will forever be synonymous with grime.

‘Forget all this, man, forget all this,’ one MC is heard saying after the fight breaks out, attempting to subdue the rising temperature. He meant they should forget the beef – and soon enough, they did. But as this hyper-local rhythm began to reverberate beyond the narrow radius of the pirate transmitters, a great deal more was forgotten with it.

Canary Wharf and Limehouse, 2002

ONE

THE CITY AND THE CITY

I’m from where Reggie Kray got rich as fuck

East London, who am I to mess tradition up?

Jellied eels, pie and mash, two pints of that Pride on tap

Polo top, pair of Stans, flat cap and a Burberry mac

Back when Lethal Bizzle was Lethal B

This is how we used to dun the dance in East

We used to spit 16s till they called police

Probably somewhere in a party or a dark shebeen

Kano, ‘This Is England’

In the Museum of London Docklands, five minutes from One Canada Square and the shimmering glass totems of Canary Wharf, among the exhibits on slave owners and sailors’ rebellions, tall ships and frost fairs, hangs a painting of the river made in 1883 by William Lionel Wyllie. It shows barge workers shovelling coal in the shadow of a clutter of trade ships, the river alive with noise, fumes and activity – the painting is titled: Toil, Glitter, Grime and Wealth on a Flowing Tide.

It’s easy now to forget that London was, for most of its 2,000-odd years of life, not just a working city, not just an industrial city, but specifically, a port city. The world’s dry dock; the shoving-off point for innocent expeditions and brutal subjugation. And as the title of Wyllie’s painting suggests, port cities have a few consistent attributes: one is transience, a constant clamour of people leaving and arriving, drifting in and out with the tides. Another is inequality – rags and riches, a halo of insalubrious low-level criminality, insobriety and dirt hovering around the glittering cargo – or a halo of enriching gold around the squalor and decadence, depending on which way around you look at it. Either way, one travels with the other, one lives with the other. A hundred and twenty years later, Wyllie’s namesake would use some cheap computer software and a microphone to document the same toil, glitter, grime and wealth flowing through twenty-first-century London, at 140 beats per minute.

Some cities are divided between distinct geographical binaries. North and south. The centre and the suburbs. Uptown and downtown. The shanty towns and the gated communities. London is not easily disentangled: it weaves its divisions into a fine mesh, like the netting that stops pigeons gathering underneath railway bridges. The council tower blocks are mingled in with the multimillion-pound mansions. The greasy-spoon caff that’s been there since the seventies stands next door to the refurbished gastropub charging £15 for a Sunday roast. The grandiose seventeenth-century church faces down the night-time den of iniquity.

When widespread rioting erupted across London and several other English cities in August 2011, the writer James Meek reflected on an incident that he’d witnessed a few years before in one of Hackney’s most prominent new bouji enclaves, Broadway Market – when a group of 30 tooled-up black teenagers, chasing two enemies with a hand gun, suddenly entered (and quickly departed from) the lives of the white middle-class people sipping wine at the outdoor tables. ‘It is as if the council-owned tower blocks and estates behind, around and in-between the gentrified patches, where less well-off and poor people live, belong to some other dimension,’ he wrote. ‘Loving the cultural diversity of London as a spectator-inhabitant is not the same as mingling with it. The yuppies don’t go to the white working-class pubs, and the white working class don’t go to the yuppie pubs … this isn’t mixing. It’s the ingredients for something – nobody knows what – laid out side by side and not being mixed, not touching.’1

London was in an unsettled temper at the start of the new millennium. It had survived the much-feared but unknowable threat of the Millennium Bug, but suffered the embarrassment of the Millennium Dome, and the damp squib of a Millennium Eve ‘river of fire’ on the Thames that was supposed to be visible from space, and wasn’t even visible from the Embankment. The clock ticked over from 1999 to 2000, planes did not fall out of the sky, and the world didn’t end – but some more slow-burn changes were starting to take shape. In May, the British capital acquired an elected Mayor for the first time in its history: Ken Livingstone shook off the contempt of Prime Minister Tony Blair, resigned from the Labour Party, and ran as an independent against the Conservative Steve Norris, and the candidate from his own party, Frank Dobson – beating both comfortably. London had a new City Hall, and a maverick left-winger and newt obsessive in the Mayor’s chair.

Two days after Livingstone’s victory, to the annoyance of maturing dance music sophisticates everywhere, Oxide and Neutrino’s frantic ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ – with a chorus built around the theme tune from TV hospital drama Casualty, sampling a silly line from gangster flick Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and peppered with gunshot noises – entered the charts straight at number one, flicking a V-sign at the music establishment. The UK garage scene which the two young south Londoners had emerged from had previously prized refinement, romance, aspiration and an urbane multiculturalism above all else. But clean lines, shiny shoes and champagne were being replaced with something much darker, and murkier – just as the city itself was about to start moving in the opposite direction. A new sound was about to muddy the waters of UK garage’s infinity pool, just as the new Labour government, indeed the New Labour government, were hatching grand plans to drastically smarten up the inner city forever.

In the late 2010s, we tend to look at the cranes going up around London and assume they sprouted from the city’s chalky soil, or we gaze wearily upon the prettified glass towers of luxury flats, the pop-ups and the hipster cereal cafes and assume they landed out of the clear blue sky. But urban change is not like the weather, and gentrification is not organic, inevitable or natural. The new millennium began with grime’s inner city on one side, and an entirely different, largely new kind of inner city growing rapidly to take its place: expensive, monocultural, private, surveilled and planned from the very top by Tony Blair’s government.

At the time, inner London was the richest region in the European Union, yet alongside citadels of banking wealth like the City of London and Canary Wharf were some of the most deprived council estates in the country. Long-standing economic and social divisions were intensifying, as the changing winds of late capitalism induced the middle classes to begin moving back from the suburbs and the home counties. They were about to get a big push from the government, who wanted to make the inner city the engine of bourgeois modernity, cosmopolitan culture and aspiration – the essential spirit of what was self-consciously referred to as the New Labour ‘project’.

The reality on the ground as Blair took office was not good. After 18 years of Conservative government, social problems and hardship were thriving in British cities, and in the country at large. By the mid-nineties Britain had more children growing up in unemployed households than anywhere else in Europe, and the highest teenage pregnancy rate. Child poverty had trebled between 1979 and 1995, the number of drug addicts quadruped in the decade to 1996, and the number of homeless people sleeping on the streets had soared.

Since the deregulation of the City in the late 1980s, London’s role as Britain’s primary economic engine had been greatly magnified: by the millennium, earnings in the capital were on average a third higher than the rest of the country. But the divisions were greater, too: Londoners had a higher unemployment rate than the national average, and a much higher proportion of children growing up in households with no income: 36 per cent of children in inner London lived in workless homes in 1999 – compared to 17 per cent nationally. London households were also more likely to be overcrowded: 16 per cent compared to 6 per cent in other English cities.

In east London, the area that will always be most associated with grime, the boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham have consistently appeared among the most deprived local authorities in the entire country; in 2000, the government used a new, complex model for analysing different aspects of poverty, from housing to health, which they called Indices of Multiple Deprivation. Across all of England, the grime boroughs were ranked at 1, 2 and 3. A medal-winning podium of poverty.

‘East London is in need’ has been the received wisdom of London local government ever since it was first introduced in 1888. A century and a half ago, Tower Hamlets was home to the disease-ridden squalor, vice, filth and overcrowded warrens of the infamous Old Nicol slum, before it was finally demolished in the 1890s, following the Housing for the Working Classes Act. The slum clearance programmes continued for decades, both before and after the devastation of the Blitz; some residents moved out to the suburbs, others were given low-rent social housing in the modern new council estates being built. Between 1964–74, the last of the slums were demolished and the Greater London Council built 384 tower blocks of ten storeys or more, providing 68,500 new flats. They were accompanied by utopian rhetoric about a new way of living and ‘streets in the sky’, changes that would finally grant the dignity London’s working-class communities deserved, and dramatically lift the quality of life. In 1981, at the peak of the social-housing boom, there were over 75,000 council homes in London, housing nearly 31 per cent of the capital’s population. It is no coincidence that they were heavily concentrated in exactly the boroughs where grime and UK rap would later thrive: 42 per cent of London’s social housing was in ‘Inner East London’: the boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Islington, Haringey, Southwark, Lambeth and Lewisham.

London has historically been a fairly low-rise city, with relatively few skyscrapers, landmark blocks of luxury apartments, or high-end hotels and offices – it has not looked like Manhattan, or latter-day Dubai, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Largely this was by design: planning laws have prohibited tall structures which obscure certain ‘protected views’ of iconic old London landmarks like St Paul’s and the Palace of Westminster, as seen from certain high points on the fringes of the capital, like Parliament Hill, Richmond Park and Alexandra Palace – it’s not the specific views themselves which matter so much, but their utility as insurance against a cluttered skyline.

But at the start of the new millennium, a new kind of high-rise building started arriving in the capital: one much less likely to produce exuberant forms of youth culture, clad in glass rather than concrete. Most obvious amongst them was the Shard – Mordor-upon-Thames, owned by Qatar, an obscene 72 storeys high, built with the enthusiastic support of Ken Livingstone, and the backing of New Labour. This directly contravened the ‘protected views’ regulations; English Heritage objected at a public inquiry, and were ignored. At the time of writing, five years after opening, all ten of the £30–50m flats on the tower’s upper floors remain unsold, and empty. Even a visit to the viewing deck costs more than £30. Since then, the trickle has become a flood: in 2017 a survey found that 455 new high-rise blocks were either planned or already under construction in London: ‘safety deposit boxes’ for wealthy investors, expensive hotels, high-end office space and luxury flats. Blocks like the ickily-named Manhattan Loft Gardens in Stratford followed the Shard’s lead and caused controversy by ruining another sight line of St Paul’s. More importantly, not a single one of the 455 was being built to provide housing for London’s poorest.

The Shard started a bold new trend – building hideous neoliberal obelisks which London didn’t need – but the major precedent had already been set: the planting of Canary Wharf’s towers of misbegotten riches, right in grime’s back yard, in place of the city’s abandoned docks. Today, underneath the white office lights and CCTV cameras of what is sometimes known as the ‘second City’, teem the ghosts of empire, hard labour, hard liquor, opium dens, sailors and sex workers. Even as it enters adolescence, Canary Wharf’s cluster of gleaming skyscrapers still feels like a life-size artist’s impression, rendered in three dimensions; free from clutter, free from litter – and free from heavy explosives, you presume, if the security presence is anything to go by.

Look closer, and some of the police aren’t actually the police at all – they’re private security guards, in uniforms designed to look exactly like real police uniforms. The whole area is unnervingly clean. As close as it is, Canary Wharf is almost completely sealed off from its neighbours to the north, where grime erupted into life – Poplar, Limehouse, Bow, and eventually Hackney and Newham – separated by the huge A13 and A1261 dual carriageways, and a no man’s land of train lines, Docklands Light Railway sidings and buildings, business parks, car parks, blind alleys and dead-ends, all of which act as further barricades. It is almost as if the builders of Canary Wharf wanted it that way. ‘That’s where all the yuppies are,’ MC Breeze from Roll Deep says in a 2003 documentary, pointing up at One Canada Square. ‘We’re just over the road, and it’s one of the worst boroughs in England.’2 On the south side of the skyscrapers, in a part of the Isle of Dogs which used to be known as ‘The Land of Plenty’ during Britain’s colonial heyday, the Anchor & Hope pub (Est. 1829) sits boarded up and unloved, its business perhaps swallowed by the two-storey Thai restaurant next door – the hope is gone and the boat is adrift. Commerce spares little attention for sentimental attachment to the past – even its own.

East London’s past is weighed down with poverty, and weighed down with heavy industry: the docks, of course, but also gas, railways, manufacturing, textiles, mills – and, a rare example which is still clinging on today, the Tate and Lyle sugar refinery. It has always been the city’s working quarter, with an abundance of low-paid, physically punishing jobs, and was not just the arrival point for immigrants and internal migrants, for centuries, but also the place where many of them made their first homes in the capital: always more multicultural than the rest of London, and almost entirely working class.3

East London’s industrial history continued to loom over the area once all the industrial work was gone. Even without the factories coating nearby buildings in a layer of soot, and the industrial pollution and jetsam from the docks, east London remained associated with grime, dirt, grit and debris. The connection between the word, the music genre, and the places where grime came from has always been understood to be obvious. ‘Most grime tunes are made in a grimy council estate,’ MC Nasty Jack told an American documentary crew in 2006. ‘Mum ain’t got enough money, everyone’s just angry. You need a tension release.’4 The name of the genre aside, grime has featured a whole range of lyrical tropes in which dirt is lionised: tunes are praised as mucky – mucktion, as a noun – dutty (dirty); Shystie even proclaimed one of her tunes was ‘muddy’. Partly this is about paying tribute to the sonic ‘bottom end’, the sub-bass, but it’s also a testament to the music’s geographical origins.

The East End had been very literally grimier in the past – as in the great smog of 1952, where coal smoke and bad weather conspired to kill around 12,000 Londoners. Regeneration and grime are oppositional forces in the urban arena: in the recent vernacular of urban planning, the word ‘regeneration’ has always been understood as a response to grit, grime, disorder, clutter and failure or decline. It has a Christian moralistic aspect, a sense that the city too can be born again, that it might – with the right purpose and guidance from above – dunk its head in the water and repent its poverty and sin. Indeed the first recorded use of ‘regeneration’ in English is from the Wycliffe Bible of 1384, describing the kind of rebirth that Jesus’s disciples can expect upon reaching heaven. It was the perfect word for New Labour and the secretly evangelical Prime Minister: grime was old Labour, 1970s, strikes and coal, rubbish piling up in the streets, sin and concrete; regeneration was pastel colours and cheery post-modernism, IKEA urbanism that would make the city look like a kids’ play centre – and entice the middle classes to come and live in it.

The East End’s underdog mentality, marginality, poverty and history of industrial squalor are all interconnected. Macho resilience and physical and mental toughness have long been fetishised as traits specific to east London, and that kind of grittiness is prominent in grime’s vernacular. Dizzee Rascal’s single ‘Graftin’’ addressed listeners inside and outside the capital, and proposed grimy London as a more honest alternative to the scenes on the city’s tourist postcards:

Young hustlers, London city, stand up

L-D-N, they know us in the world

You know what time it is

I swear to you it ain’t all teacups, red telephone boxes and Buckingham Palace

I’m gonna show you it’s gritty out here5

Almost everyone involved in making grime since its early days has, at one point or another, said something along the lines of ‘I don’t know where the name came from, I didn’t really like it, but it just kind of stuck.’ Musicians will almost always do this anyway – disavow all genres and taxonomy, unwilling to let their free-flying creativity be pinned down behind glass and labelled. It’s understandable. But there is another (equally understandable) motive for rejecting the name. Unlike UK garage, grime wasn’t explicitly aspirational in its fashion or its ethos. But all the same, when it first emerged, the word ‘grime’ seemed to undercut a basic need for respect. What you can hear in the disavowals of the name is ‘We’re trying to push ourselves out into the world and show we’re worthy of respect, because we don’t get any – and this word marks both us and our work as unsavoury. Why would you be proud of being dirty?’

Legendary UK garage DJ EZ is thought to have – semi-inadvertently – named it on his KISS FM show, describing some tracks as ‘grimy garage’, until the word ‘garage’ eventually fell away. No one’s entirely sure. What is certain is that EZ wasn’t alone: describing the music that way was fairly normal among DJs and MCs in the early 2000s, before anyone agreed that grime was called grime – you can still hear it now, on classic recordings like Slimzee’s 2002 Sidewinder tape pack set with Dizzee and Wiley (often, correctly, hailed as the greatest mixtape ever made). ‘This one’s dirty, this one’s mucky,’ says Dizzee as Slimzee wheels in another tune – Dizzee, of course, named his label Dirtee Stank.

‘East London’s quite a poor area,’ DJ Trend, aka TNT, told a BBC Radio 1 documentary about the still-unnamed emerging scene, broadcast in 2004. ‘So a lot of the kids, they don’t find nothing else to do, so it just leaves one thing: MC and listen to pirate radio stations.’ The music being made by these young people was a reflection of ‘what you see when you wake up in the morning,’ he continued. ‘Most people that’s what they’re seeing: a lot of grime in the area, a lot of grimy things happening.’6

Throughout its history, the East End was the impoverished edge of a wealthy city; but it was also, as the twentieth century drew to a close, the home of the largest piece of urban regeneration in Europe – a project that would help set the tone for all development projects in London in the years that followed. After thriving for centuries, London’s docklands collapsed in the space of about two years in the late 1960s, when the work was moved further east down the Thames, to Tilbury docks in Essex. The standardisation of shipping containers ushered in a new phase of global capitalism – it suddenly became ten times as fast to load and unload ships, and could be done with far fewer hands. 83,000 jobs were lost in the docklands boroughs in the 1960s alone, and as people left in search of work, the area became a desolate post-industrial wasteland: the ‘wild east’ of classic British gangster film The Long Good Friday, filmed around what would eventually become Canary Wharf, during its long interregnum of abandonment and decay. The docklands were indicative of the ‘developing sickness of our society’ Conservative Shadow Chancellor Geoffrey Howe said in 1978, adding that ‘the dereliction is itself an opportunity’. Three years later, the Thatcher government set up a mega-quango called the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) to take charge of what was at the time the largest urban regeneration in the world. After more than a decade of urban planning tug-of-war, and substantial protests from parts of the local community, in the nineties Canary Wharf slowly began to take shape: a district of skyscraper-dwelling superbanks and legally dubious white-collar profiteering, patrolled by private security guards. A new kind of urban space for a new London and a new millennium.

One Canada Square, the actual name of the fifty-storey, pyramid-topped building often identified as ‘Canary Wharf’, was completed in 1991, and became the UK’s tallest building, the most visible legacy of Thatcherism, towering over London. It was not until the first years of the new millennium that Canary Wharf really fulfilled its destiny as ‘the second City’, and took on a life of its own, outstripping the old City of London (the capital’s traditional financial centre, around Bank and St Paul’s, with its antiquated heraldry, liveries and rituals), and becoming the home of the newer, much more dangerous unregulated financial speculation that would be instrumental in creating the global financial crisis of 2008. Peter Gowan called it ‘Wall Street’s Guantánamo’, a lawless bolt-hole where firms like Lehman Brothers could get away with complex debt-repackaging and trading they would never have been allowed to pursue in Manhattan.7

In a neat example of the laissez-faire capitalism which led to the financial crisis itself, the building of Canary Wharf itself benefited from special government exemptions on rates, tax and a speeded-up planning permission process. No questions and no regulations. It was to be the Big Bang of urban regeneration – creating not just the bankers’ skyscrapers that watched over the grime kids, the yin to the estates’ yang, but also a new airport aimed at business-class customers (London City Airport, opened 1987), the Docklands Light Railway (1987), the Jubilee Line Extension (1999) and the ExCeL conference centre (2000). The LDDC was the flagship of the hyper-gentrification that would follow across British cities, legitimising New Labour’s urban renaissance, of which the renovating and demolishing of council estates was also a vital part. Canary Wharf’s tower blocks were barely a couple of miles from the council blocks where the pirate radio aerials were going up, but ‘the second City’ was never designed to have a relationship with its neighbours: the attention was turned towards its rival and parent. Canary Wharf was deliberately laid out so its ‘central axis’ – a gap in the two tower blocks facing One Canada Square – looks out across a fountain, and lines of trees, towards the City of London.

The arrival of Canary Wharf coincided perfectly with changes in the financial world, as greater deregulation, coupled with new technology, created new markets for global capital and financial services. London was especially well placed to take advantage of these – not just because of Britain’s historic global and colonial power, and the corollary dominance of the English language, but also because it was in a critical time zone between New York and Tokyo. The likes of the Bank of China, Bear Sterns and Morgan Stanley moved into One Canada Square, while next door, the Lehman Brothers were housed in the 30-storey tower at 25 Bank Street.

It is largely forgotten now, but there were protests against the LDDC throughout the eighties and nineties by local people, especially in the Isle of Dogs, as well as alternative ‘people’s plans’ for developing the area in a way that benefited the communities who lived there, rather than itinerant hedge-fund managers who would move in for a couple of years, before going on to Hong Kong or Frankfurt. The locals were ignored. ‘There may well have been other ways in which the regeneration of the area could have been secured,’ admitted the LDDC in 1997, but these ‘would have perpetuated rather than solved the problems of east London’.

The ‘problems of east London’? Social housing and social housing’s fellow traveller, poor people, who unfortunately placed ‘added pressures on the resources of the local authorities’. Instead, the regeneration had transformed the area from somewhere previously ‘isolated both physically and emotionally from the rest of London’ and placed it ‘well and truly in the mainstream of metropolitan life’.8

The LDDC spent £3.9 billion of public money on the Canary Wharf regeneration, only to seal it off from its disproportionately sick, unhappy, overcrowded, addicted, jobless and impoverished neighbours.

For those Londoners too young to remember the area before the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, it feels like it’s always been there, with One Canada Square’s blinking top-light our city’s modern lighthouse. Canary Wharf is less than two miles from the notorious 25-storey, three-tower block Crossways Estate where Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder lived as children (‘the three flats’), and less than a mile from Langdon Park School, where the former wrote the beginnings of Boy in da Corner in music class. Interviewed in 2010 for a BBC London radio programme about ‘the best and worst of the capital’, Dizzee was asked to nominate his favourite building in London, and unhesitatingly chose One Canada Square:

‘It means the most to me, I could see it from all angles as a kid. That was the highest building I could see from my bedroom. And when I see it from south London, when I’m coming over from the Blackwall Tunnel, it always gets me excited, especially at night – it feels special. I love that and the buildings around it – you see a little mini metropolis being built up … It’s not quite as impressive as New York or Japan, but it’s ours, innit? I remember when we were little, we had a conspiracy, we thought that thing on the top of it was like aliens, and they were about to fly off – loads of little theories like that. We’d blink and think they had lasers up there.’9

It’s not a stretch to suggest that Canary Wharf was the source of grime’s unique incarnation of Afrofuturism; the African diasporic aesthetic that takes science fiction as a tool for discussing oppression and freedom – where spaceships might be a metaphor for slave ships, subverting the journey to make it one of escape, not damnation. It’s a futurism you can hear in the constant injunctions in grime to ‘push things forward’, to ‘elevate’, to make music – and to be – ‘next level’, and it dovetails with the competitive rhetoric enshrined in Canary Wharf’s giant totems to late capitalism. Contrary to American hip-hop’s rootsy rhetoric about being ‘real’ and knowing and respecting your history, grime is a year-zero sound, which – in its early days, at least – asked only what’s next, and sought to get there first.

You can hear this Afrofuturism most of all in the sonics of grime production – the stark, unfiltered minimalism of the kick drums, the interplanetary weight of the bassline, the sleek raygun zaps and zips of a synth, the way the whole edifice shines sleekly like a spacesuit. It’s the sound of the future kids have dreamed of for decades, even while grime’s lyrics describe with molecular detail the dirt of the MCs’ vividly quotidian lives; MCs who were not universe-traversing spacemen, but teenagers growing up in the poorest boroughs in the country. The real meaning of Canary Wharf, rather than its laser-shooting sci-fi potential, was not lost on Dizzee’s peers in the east London grime scene.

‘Canary Wharf is like our Statue of Liberty,’ Roll Deep’s DJ Target told the Guardian in 2005: ‘It pushes me on. It’s like all the money is there and it’s an inspiration to get your own.’

Target is now a BBC 1Xtra DJ, which might seem like a token victory for the twin myths of trickle-down economics and climb-up philosophy that Canary Wharf and Britain’s political classes so aggressively pushed. New Labour’s architect Peter Mandelson infamously defined what was ‘new’ about the party when he said, in 1998, he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. British politicians have long perpetuated fallacies about social mobility, the ‘aspiration nation’ (a favourite slogan of David Cameron when he was PM), or the £9-billion 2012 Olympics ‘inspiring a generation’ out of poverty, but there is no clearly articulated British equivalent of the American dream – for which US rap music has been such a strong shill. In the UK, the relationship is less overt than the familiar American alliance of multimillionaire ‘ghetto’ musicians and multimillionaire financiers: the kind crystallised in The 50th Law, the self-help book by 50 Cent and best-selling ‘power strategist’ author Robert Green. But it is there. For the teenage Dizzee, Canary Wharf’s blinking white light held the potential for an alien getaway, but it was also perhaps east London’s version of the green light at the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby, a symbol of ‘the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us’, the tantalising dream of escape into a brighter tomorrow.

Slimzee, perhaps grime’s greatest ever DJ, with his childhood friend Geeneus one of the founders of Rinse FM, tells me they had other dreams for the tower. ‘We always used to look up at Canary Wharf, when we were growing up, and I wanted to go up to the top and put an aerial up there.’ He pauses, amused at the obviously flawed teenage ambition. ‘But you couldn’t: it’s got that sloping pyramid roof, it wouldn’t work.’

Tinchy Stryder, who grew up in the Crossways Estate, says Canary Wharf dominated the skyline. ‘When I was growing up you could see it everywhere. We felt like, “Oh, wow, do we get to go there one day?” It felt really close, but far away at the same time; like, it wasn’t really anywhere for us to be. Everything felt fresher and cleaner than where we grew up; it felt like a different world. It felt like when you go there, you had to be on your best behaviour.’ And he was right – the paved terrain around the skyscrapers was a paradigm for what have become known as ‘POPS’, privately owned public spaces: where private security guards can ask you to leave just based on looking at you. If Detroit techno captured the metronomic industrial rhythms of the city’s car factories, grime’s sonic palette describes the dystopian scene in millennial east London: the view from the decaying tower blocks down onto the de-cluttered spaces and privatised plazas of Canary Wharf – gleaming, futuristic, and glowering with menace.

When the BBC filmed a short profile of Dizzee to be broadcast as part of the 2003 Mercury Prize TV show, they caught him looking out of the window of the Crossways Estate with a less light-hearted attitude to the second City than he would display by the end of a decade, once he’d reached a state of monied grace: ‘That is Canary Wharf,’ Dizzee explained to the camera. ‘It’s in your face. It takes the piss. There are rich people moving in now, people who work in the City. You can tell they’re not living the same way as us.’

New luxury flats and gated residential blocks were sprouting rapidly in the foothills of Canary Wharf throughout the 2000s; like Target, Dizzee was under no illusion about the lesson to be learned from Canary Wharf, malevolent or not. He was asked in the same BBC Mercury Prize interview what motivated him. He stared straight at the camera. ‘Money motivates me. I’m motivated by money.’ A year later, on the B-side to ‘Dream, Is This Real’, he summed up the ethic of the age:

We was kids, we was young, used to love having fun

Now we look up to guns, and the aim’s only one:

Make money, every day, any how, any way

I tried to choose the legal way10

Those rich people who ‘don’t live the same way as us’ (and don’t always choose the legal way, either) arrived in droves, to the point that by the 2010 election, the Tory candidate for Poplar & Limehouse, Tim Archer, an HSBC banker on sabbatical from his office in Canary Wharf, was the bookies’ favourite to win. It would have been the Conservatives’ first victory in any Tower Hamlets seat in decades. Intrigued by this daring incursion of the banking set into their grimy new neighbourhood, I went on the campaign trail with Archer and his team. To the surprise of Conservative HQ, they failed to win Poplar & Limehouse. One of the main reasons for their defeat was that they couldn’t get access to the new blocks of luxury flats; there were so many entry-phones and security gates they weren’t able to canvass and recruit the very people who were supposed to be helping them win. It was almost as if the new arrivals didn’t give a toss about the area they’d moved into. One of those new luxury blocks for the international super-rich, a development called Pan Peninsula, promises buyers ‘a view that few will share’, and that unlike the teenagers gazing up at Canary Wharf’s blinking eye, residents will ‘look up to no one’. The spiel on their website promises you will:

Inhabit a private universe. Where luxury apartments combine with a spa, a health club and a cinema to create an urban resort. Where service is tailored to need, and bends to individual will, effortlessly and invisibly. Where business and play happen high above London. Live at Pan Peninsula, exist in another world.

It perfectly articulates the mentality of Canary Wharf: where everything – and everyone – bends to the will of those who can afford it.

‘Coming from where I come from, you didn’t feel a part of London,’ Dizzee told BBC London in 2010. This is the essence of what it means to be marginalised; on one level, your hometown brings you pride – there are numerous grime songs paying homage to London as a whole, rather than just the local neighbourhood – but you are excluded from its most famous parts, the parts the tourists see, the parts the middle classes negotiate with ease and confidence. In this sense, grime both is London, but also excluded from its official narrative, invisible in the face the city shows to the world.

To prove London wasn’t all ‘teacups, red telephone boxes and Buckingham Palace’ as Dizzee put it on ‘Graftin’’, its music video was shot on top of, around, and beneath the three tower blocks of the Crossways Estate. The estate had been nicknamed ‘the pride of Bow’ when it was built in the 1970s, but bad upkeep of the buildings, untreated poverty and overcrowding meant that the alias did not stick around for long.

The video is shot almost entirely at night time, on grainy analogue film, the Crossways blocks looming over Dizzee’s head, studded with occasional lights. It’s a classic US rap-style ‘hood video’, with Dizzee surrounded by members of Ruff Sqwad, one of the most identifiably ‘Bow’ of crews from grime’s golden age, and assorted other local teenagers. At times he delivers his bars with Canary Wharf’s light blinking in the background. Twice, towards the end of the video, the director splices in a brief, split-second cut-shot of One Canada Square, like a subliminal message – a suggestion that subconsciously, Canary Wharf is always there, when you’re living in and talking about ‘the grime’.11

When vines grow on a hill facing the ocean they pick up the brine on the wind, and the taste of the grapes is suffused with a salty tang. When black British music was pouring, melting hot, into the crucible of a new genre in the early 2000s, New Labour were polling 57 per cent to the Tories’ 25; it was the apex of the blind hubris that led to our current malaise: reckless, wild-west capitalism in Canary Wharf, and New Labour’s carefully controlled vision of modernity and unapologetic social conservatism. This is the tang in the air: tough love, zero tolerance, ever-growing inequality, CCTVs, ASBOs, and an ‘intensely relaxed’ attitude to what was fuelling the economic bubble they said would never burst. In Dizzee Rascal’s first ever interview, he described New Labour’s transformation of the inner city even as it was happening around him. He was only 17 years old in July 2002, sitting on a wall in Bow, with the third of Canary Wharf’s three towers still being finished overhead. ‘There has been bare change around here,’ he observed. ‘It’s all about adapting. Like all the cameras, sly little cameras everywhere, more police, drugs, crime … everything is changing.’12

‘There will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build,’ Tony Blair said in a photo call at London’s notorious Aylesbury Estate a month after the 1997 general election, launching the government’s ‘new deal for communities’. British cities were riven by intense geographical inequalities between rich and poor neighbourhoods. New Labour’s concern was that the latter were falling ever further behind the rest. ‘Over the last two decades the gap between these worst estates and the rest of the country has grown. It has left us with a situation that no civilised country should tolerate,’ Blair said in 1998.

Such estates had ‘become no-go zones for some and no-exit zones for others’, according to a government report published that year, which blamed this crisis of bad housing and social exclusion on mistakes by previous governments: in particular, the concentration of the poor and unemployed together in neighbourhoods where hardly anyone had a job. At the time, around 5 million households nationally were in council- or housing-association homes, and the maintenance backlog was upwards of £20 billion. New Labour’s response was to advise councils to seek PFI funding, and to demolish many of the blocks altogether – too many of them were ‘sinking ships’, Blair told the Daily Express:

‘Some estates are beyond rescue and will never be places where people want to live. That could mean moving people to new homes, levelling the site and using the land for something the public wants.’ The idea that the public might want – first and above all – decent, affordable new social housing did not seem to enter into the conversation.

New Labour set up an Urban Task Force, and appointed a Regeneration Tsar, the architect Richard Rogers (aka Lord Rogers, aka Baron Rogers of Riverside – a man with as many alter-egos as a half-decent MC), who delivered a report in 1999 which would shape the future of London: Towards an Urban Renaissance. The report found that one in four people living in urban neighbourhoods thought their area had got worse in recent years, compared with only one in ten who said it had got better; and that unemployment levels in Britain’s inner cities were more than double the national average. The Urban Renaissance strategy proposed to tackle inner-city poverty and ‘sinking ships’ by doing what has now become the norm, and a euphemistic byword for gentrification: they would ‘create neighbourhoods with a mix of tenures and incomes, including opening up council housing to more of the population’. Rogers’ report also called for faster Compulsory Purchase Orders (to get people out of blocks they wanted to demolish), ‘streamlined’ planning procedures, and greater access to PFI funds. Make it easier, make it quicker, and bring in the private sector.13

New Labour promised a ‘lasting urban renaissance’ to ‘stem urban decline’ brought on by the neglect of previous governments. They quoted Tsar Rogers: ‘People make cities but cities make citizens,’ which, like most New Labour slogans, sounded clever without saying anything of substance. The strategy was framed around the goal of arresting and reversing middle-class flight to the suburbs: ‘encouraging people to remain in, and move back into, our major towns and cities’ would be central to the Labour plan, said another report in 2000. These were complex, big government strategies – the Urban Task Force made no fewer than 105 recommendations: one of them was estate renewal, using the private finance initiative. From the outset, New Labour’s plan had been to ‘modernise’ (or indeed, dismantle) the welfare state as it stood, to introduce private finance into everything on the basis that, as the Home Secretary David Blunkett said in 2001, ‘government could never do it all’.

Not everyone was impressed. Two academics at the annual Royal Geographical Society conference called New Labour’s Urban Renaissance strategy a ‘gentrifiers’ charter’. Leading academic expert Loretta Lees agreed, and suggested the strategy might be called ‘the cappuccino cave-in’. The Blairite view was that government had lost control of Britain’s inner cities under Tory rule, who had made urban environments uninviting and unloved.14 Their proposed solution was to encourage the middle classes to move back into the inner city, ‘drawn by a lifestyle where home, work and leisure are interwoven within a single neighbourhood’. Rogers’ report envisioned new middle-class enclaves, populated by people with more time ‘to devote to leisure, culture and education’, wealthier communities that are more mobile and flexible – freer. ‘In the twenty-first century, it is the skilled worker, as well as the global company, who will be footloose. Cities must work hard to attract and retain both.’

Local and national politicians, when they talk about gentrification, often speak of the need to create ‘balanced’ or ‘mixed’ communities. Mixed communities sound good, don’t they? They sound diverse. They sound like they would welcome everyone, and that everyone would benefit from the mixing – by class, by race, by age. No fair-minded liberal would advocate for the opposite: because the opposite is an enclave, or a ghetto. And that’s exactly how – when you push them to reveal themselves – architects of gentrification characterise the inner London that is being rapidly dismantled: a series of social-housing ghettoes, holding back the people living in them – held back not because they are poor, but because they are surrounded by other people who are poor. They’re a bad influence on each other. Bring in the middle classes, and everyone will learn from one another, and thrive. The problem with all this, the deception buried in the rhetoric, is that urban regeneration is almost always a zero-sum game: for some people to ‘come back’ to the inner city, others have to leave.

A decade later, I asked a leading property developer whether building blocks of luxury flats in previously poor inner-city areas was the essence of gentrification. ‘Hopefully we are getting blended communities,’ he replied. ‘In the poor parts of London where we’ve been working in the past, they have been – and I use this term politely – but they have been social enclaves. No one buys homes there, because your money will probably depreciate. But that’s changing. It’s not gentrification, it’s just becoming a more balanced community.’15

In one sense, New Labour and grime should have been allies from the start. The elevation and intermingling of culture and business was integral to the Urban Renaissance strategy: regenerated, modernised cities would be created in part by monetising art and culture. The nature of work was changing faster in London than anywhere else in the country, as the last of the factories disappeared. Following the flag-draped nineties nonsense around ‘Cool Britannia’ that was synonymous with the early years of New Labour, their Cultural Manifesto for the 1997 election was called ‘Create The Future’. ‘Creativity’ became a crucial signifier of Blair’s entire political project, and the New Labour vision of modernity.16 Treating culture as a business connected New Labour to their Thatcherite predecessors, and this ‘creative’ enterprise culture was bound up with urban regeneration, in part by stimulating tourism. As Britain’s de-industrialisation rapidly continued, New Labour was determined to ‘modernise’ everything – from the Labour Party itself, to the NHS, to the workforce, to architecture – and free the party from its electoral reliance on the industrial working class, ‘a class rapidly disappearing into the thin air of the knowledge economy’, as Robert Hewison put it in Cultural Capital.

‘Most of us make our money from thin air,’ wrote Charles Leadbetter, a friend of Mandelson and Blair, capturing the spirit of the times – as music switched from heavy pieces of wax and shiny plastic discs to the intangibles of mp3s, and capitalism moved on from buying physical products with coins and notes to buying and selling complex, abstract ‘financial products’ like collateralised debt obligations, futures and derivatives. By 2007, the character Jez in the sitcom Peep Show would be summing it up in more day-to-day language: ‘I’m a creative. We don’t make steam engines out of pig iron in this country anymore, yeah? We hang out, we fuck around on the PlayStation, we have some Ben & Jerry’s, that’s how everyone makes their money now.’17

But even while New Labour were placing culture and creativity on a pedestal and garlanding it with £50 notes, other government changes were making it harder than ever for working-class people to develop careers out of their creative impulses and talents. In March 1998, changes to unemployment benefits that came in with the New Deal made it much harder for artists to live on the dole while honing and improving their craft – a part of the welfare state that had historically been a lifeline for working-class musicians. The NME ran a cover story about the threat to grassroots music, arts and culture these changes posed, with the banner, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ Inside, Jarvis Cocker recounted that, without the dole during the eighties, Pulp never would have made it as far as the nineties, and their vastly better and more popular albums. There were countless other musicians, artists and writers like him. Free education, a strong welfare state and affordable housing had given working-class creativity the space to breathe in the post-war years. For New Labour, it was too much like a hand-out: money for nothing.

The grime kids went without those state subsidies – but still never succumbed to the rampant individualism of their neighbours in Canary Wharf, or their political masters. For all that we should celebrate their independent, DIY spirit and sheer self-motivated perseverance – teenagers with nothing, making something more dazzling and millennial-modern than anyone could ever have imagined – they did so with the help of youth clubs, school teachers, and a collective, communitarian spirit that was being pummelled by a government determined to dismantle it, in the name of remaking the inner city.

Notting Hill Carnival, 1999

TWO

IN THE ROOTS

The irony of grime being derided as antisocial by its critics – all that clatter, hostility and bad attitude – is that it has always been community music: invented and developed collectively and collaboratively, by people whose lives and roots are deeply entwined, and who made music because it was the sociable thing to do. Community can mean a lot of different things, but whichever way you draw the diagram, grime emerged from a spider’s web of intergenerational influences, schoolmates, neighbours, friends, family, and people who knew people – from school, from the estate, from the local area.

The more you dig into its past, the more you realise grime’s social networks precede the music entirely, not just by years but by generations. Grime is black music (even if it’s not always made by black people), and its roots spread across London, and the world. While east London has for centuries been one of the most multicultural parts of the country, and a first port of call for new arrivals, the generation of Caribbean migrants who began arriving in Britain after the Empire Windrush docked in the Thames in 1948 tended to settle in Notting Hill in the west, and Brixton in the south. But with east London depopulating rapidly in the post-war decades, owing to decay, bombing, slum clearances and degeneration, housing became relatively cheap. Manufacturing jobs in places like the Dagenham Ford car plant, and Tate and Lyle, Unilever and ITT around the docks, encouraged newly arriving Caribbean nationals, now British citizens, to look to the east.

In the tightly bound geography of working-class inner London of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, many of the grime kids’ parents, and in some cases grandparents, knew each other before the kids even arrived – and as a result some of east London’s most important foundational MCs actually played together as children. D Double E’s dad went to school with Jammer’s dad. Jammer’s dad and Footsie’s dad were at Sunday school together. Footsie’s dad was in a reggae band in the 1980s with Wiley’s dad, and taught young Richard Cowie Jr how to play the drums.

‘We’ve known each other before before,’ Footsie says.1 A ridiculous number of MCs, DJs, producers and key behind-the-scenes figures met as children, at school or a playscheme; or playing football, or in someone’s aunt’s house, or at a party, or night fishing in the Hertford Union Canal, between Wiley’s estate and Victoria Park. Roll Deep’s first paid job was working for Wiley’s dad’s patty factory (they were subsequently fired when Richard Cowie Sr caught them having a food fight). ‘It’s so deep,’ Footsie continued. ‘Sometimes I think I’m not doing nothing special, other than carrying on what was already done.’

Grime’s lineage is suffused with this sense of kinship that precedes any sense of desire to make music – of being mates first, and lyrical sparring partners second. It’s easy to romanticise, but not easy to romanticise well: Kano’s nostalgic 2016 album which signalled his return to grime, Made in the Manor, does so brilliantly, telling sincere and evocative stories about his youth in his childhood home, 69 Manor Road in Plaistow, E15. On ‘T-Shirt Weather In The Manor’, Kano vividly describes multigenerational summer barbecues where the kids are listening to UK garage titans MJ Cole and Heartless Crew, and ‘the olders want some [reggae singer] Dennis Brown’, a prelapsarian community idyll, before fame, beefs and adulthood came along and complicated everything.

That kinship was formed, in part, out of marginality. Crazy Titch says he knew brothers Mak 10 and Marcus Nasty when they were children because ‘there was like three black families in Plaistow when I was growing up, and theirs was one of them’.2 In parts of inner London with more substantial black communities, grime’s originators were bound through pre-internet social networks formed by geography and background, by a sense of being marginalised by poverty, or racism. ‘It was a nice little community here,’ Kano recalled, smiling, in a short documentary accompanying Made in the Manor. ‘There was definitely a feeling that we weren’t supposed to be shit, or have shit, or become anything great. An underlying attitude that people grow up with, from around here.’3 Those narrow horizons enforced by poverty keep people down, but they bind people together, too – and when the kids at those barbecues started making music, by themselves, for each other, those bonds provided the foundations for something powerful, and lasting.

Sometimes grime’s ancestral links didn’t become apparent till years later. Footsie recently told his dad who Wiley’s dad was, and he responded that they’d played together as children. ‘I was there with Will, running around as kids, I just don’t really remember it.’4

Sitting in a pub beer garden in Bethnal Green in 2017 with Roony Keefe, creator of the seminal Risky Roadz DVD series, he told a story about Devlin, who he first filmed for his DVD in 2006, when he was a teenage MC from Barking, still only 16:

‘I’ve known Devs all these years but … my dad went to this funeral last year, and he was talking to one of his old mates there, and he said, “Oh, how’s your boy?”, and he said, “Yeah all right, still doing the music.” My dad was like, “Oh yeah, what music does he do?” Turns out my dad grew up with Devlin’s dad in Hackney, they’ve been mates all these years. But we didn’t know that until last year. It’s a really tight-knit kind of thing.’ Devlin wrote lyrics to describe this story of their dads drinking together in their favourite Hackney pub, before its gentrification-makeover, in a freestyle for Keefe’s YouTube channel: ‘Oi Roony, do me a favour and let ’em all know we’ve been around from day: like mine and your old mans, down the Kenton pub before it sold grub, just beer and grams. Funny how it all turns out … damn.’5

Wiley would watch his dad’s VHS copies of famous Jamaican sound-clash events like Sting, where rival sound-systems (with a team of engineers, hosts and selectors) would compete by offering up their biggest dubplates – also known as dubs, or white labels, because the vinyl was freshly cut from a new recording, and specially made for the occasion, rather than released to the general public by a record company. These did not have a sleeve or any artwork, just the naked simplicity of the record, its title inscribed on the white label in marker pen.

‘I sometimes heard my dad listening to Sugar Hill and the Gang,’ Wiley recalled in 2016, ‘[there was] some American rap. But it was minimal compared to all the reggae.’

Wiley had already learned to play the drums, and began to try and copy some of his dad’s reggae jams, using a Yamaha CX5, ‘the one with the big stick-in cartridge thing on top. I would go on there and see if I could play what he had just been playing.’ Reggae suffused the general atmosphere that the grime generation grew up in, tracing direct ancestral links from Britain’s pre-acid house reggae culture, some of it imported from the Caribbean, some of it created by black Britons. South London grime and dancehall MC Doctor – known for his ‘yardie flow’ – was managed by one of London’s most famous sound-systems, Saxon. Dreadlocked grime icon Jammer – a stalwart behind the scenes, a pioneering producer and a zany presence on the mic – grew up in a house immersed in this culture: his parents ran the ELRICS (East London Rastafarian Information and Community Services), which helps Rastafarians with housing, and incorporates work with young people (Jammer himself has spoken at schools and colleges, and been involved in their mentoring programmes). Iconic black British dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah was a family friend. The connections go on: Spyro’s dad is St Lucian reggae singer Nereus Joseph, Scorcher’s dad is jungle MC Mad P from early nineties crew Top Buzz.

It’s not just a family connection, or an abstract component of the musical bloodline: grime echoes its Jamaican reggae heritage in its structure, in its tropes, in its slang, in the way it’s performed, and stylistically: particularly harking back to the ‘fast chat’ reggae style of the likes of Smiley Culture, a black British MC who made it into the charts two decades before Dizzee Rascal did the same. Grime is a direct product of Caribbean sound-system culture. The legacy is more implicit than explicit a lot of the time, but it’s there in so much of what is integral to grime: in the dubplate white label culture of exclusive new tracks, in the competition of rival sound-systems or crews, in the MC responding live to the selector or DJ’s choices of instrumental tracks, or riddims. It is there in the song structures, in the sense they often do not have clearly demarcated structures: rather than the verse-bridge-chorus-verse architecture of the traditional three-minute pop song, MCs begin their careers ‘riding the riddim’, usually a steady tempo from beginning to end, that only changes when the next one is faded in.

Academic Nabeel Zuberi makes the point that MCs are middle points between the music and the audience – they have to ride the rhythm but also ‘conduct the choir’ on the dancefloor, and move the crowd to respond. In this sense the MC’s voice is ‘a social voice that includes the voice of others’, Zuberi writes.6 The performance function is more complex than simply, ‘I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen’.

There’s a unique and productive cultural tension at the heart of grime that comes directly from its inner-London geography, of working-class cultures from the African and Caribbean diasporas intermingling with working-class London slang and culture, rubbing up against each other, borrowing, collaborating and adapting freely and fruitfully. It’s a tension familiar to fans of 1980s British reggae, where the duality is referred to as ‘Cockney and Yardie’, taken from Peter Metro and Dominic’s 1987 tune of the same name. In this song white reggae MC Dominic, born in west London, and black MC Peter Metro, born in Kingston (Jamaica, not Surrey), trade and translate slang from Jamaica (‘yardie’) and east London (‘cockney’).7 Smiley Culture’s 1984 single ‘Cockney Translation’ had performed the same ludic act of cultural elaboration, and become a surprise hit.

Grime has often been described as dazzlingly innovative, alien, groundbreaking, avant-garde, and it is all those things; one factor which explains its newness, perhaps, is not just the individual and collective daring of its creators, but the exact point at which it arrived: in a new millennium, from mostly second- or third-generation black Britons who were just estranged enough from their cultural roots in the Caribbean, or Africa, or both, and far enough along the lineage of unique British dance styles – acid house, jungle, drum ’n’ bass, UK garage – that they could draw from them all, while never being too in thrall to any of them. Just the right amount of respect for what had gone before, and just the right amount of healthy disregard for it, too – a mingling of conflicting and cooperating identities.8 ‘This is something new for your ears,’ runs the chorus of Roll Deep’s 2007 track ‘Something New’, ‘you ain’t heard beats or spitters like this: no American accents, straight English.’

Grime lyrics and vernacular – grime grammar, even – draws on a wide range of roots and influences, but Caribbean English is unsurprisingly prominent, along with grime’s own neologisms, cockney rhyming slang and other pieces of what is known to linguists as MLE (Multicultural London English). There is a minority of grime MCs who use what’s known as a ‘yardie flow’, a proudly Jamaican, often ragga-influenced, gruff, patois-heavy delivery, but a more musical one too – and some, like Riko Dan, who switch in and out of cockney and yardie as they feel the rhythm demands. Meeting cheerful Pay As U Go MC Maxwell D in a pub in Peckham recently, he lists off the MCs who would deliver ‘that extra bashment, yard vibe’ in the grime scene: ‘There’s Riko Dan, myself, Jamakabi, Flow Dan, Armour, Doctor, Durrty Goodz, God’s Gift … but the top MCs in grime were not dancehall, people like Wiley and Dizzee. My style, the dancehall reggae style, grime doesn’t sit on it, the way it’s meant to, because it’s an English way. It actually helped me develop another style, because I started doing less of the bashment style and more of the English style, because I realised the kids, the black kids, weren’t really in tune with their culture no more, it was like an English culture. In my opinion even garage was more dancehall-orientated than grime, it was still rootified. But when grime came along, Dizzee and Wiley, they changed the lyrical style.’ He barks an impression of Dizzee’s halting, staccato flow: ‘“Take that Nokia! Get that, what!” It was like rap, but an English vibe.’

While the roots of grime’s vocal style and a great deal of its slang and idioms travelled across the Atlantic with the Windrush migrants, it’s a telling part of grime’s unique flavour that its accent is so often London English – especially as ‘UK hip-hop’ (a genre in itself, distinct from grime) has often borrowed not just the genre tropes – turntablism, a fetishisation of ‘realness’ and roots – from the United States, but its accent too.9 ‘I thought it would be heavy to sound English,’ Dizzee Rascal told Sound on Sound magazine in 2004. ‘I listen to a lot of US hip-hop, and I know that is how they talk in real life, but a lot of UK hip-hop doesn’t do that. My influences are from jungle, and many of those artists still keep their English accent, and I respected that.’

Indeed, some of Dizzee’s biggest early singles, tracks like ‘Fix Up, Look Sharp’, ‘Stand Up Tall’ and ‘Jus’ A Rascal’ were not only the grimier precursors to hits like ‘Bonkers’, that made him Britain’s first black pop superstar, but in their boisterous, playful style, they also reproduced a kind of east London barrow-boy charisma, even perhaps music hall in its sensibility. How many Top 20 hits can claim to have opened with a battle-cry of ‘Oiiiiii!’ and a Carry On-style cackle? Too few, certainly. Dizzee’s delivery was so English, in fact, that it actually tripped him up on the road to international success. When he toured the US for the first time in 2004, appearing on Los Angeles’ famous rap station Power 106 with DJ Felli Fel, he spat his yelping, double-time flow over classic US rap beats from Brooklyn’s M.O.P. All was well until the end of the slot, when, chatting with Felli Fel on air, there was a telling obstacle: the DJ could literally not understand Dizzee’s accent. He asked Dizzee to repeat the name of his debut album no fewer than three times in a row. Eventually Dizzee, sounding slightly exasperated, just spelled it out: ‘B-O-Y …’

First-wave grime MC Bruza, also from east London, is the name that first comes to mind for ‘cockney grime’: for his especially boisterous delivery, frequent use of cockney rhyming slang, and proud claim that he is ‘brutal and British’. And then there are the white MCs: crews like OT Crew, from Barking, created what you could call ‘geezer grime’ – MCs like Syer B and Dogzilla, repping ‘Barking and Dogenham’, had some underground success with tunes charting their heartfelt quests for the finer things in life: ‘Where’s All The Beer?’ and ‘Where’s The Money?’. Dogzilla is one of those overlooked first-wave MCs who may not be to everyone’s taste, but he is evidence that, in the early days, distinctive voices, flows and vocal styles abounded on pirate radio. Dogzilla flipped the MC’s typical self-aggrandisement to a new level of lyrical honesty, too: ‘I’m obese, white, I smoke too much, I’m a bum, I’m a drunk … I live on strictly takeaways … I like girls in PVC, I support West Ham, UFC … here’s my fat white arse, I bet it makes you laugh.’ The pinnacle of white-boy geezer grime was a track called ‘Straight Cockney’ by an MC called Phenomenon, who it seems no one has heard of since, but whose legend lives on with over a million views on YouTube, where comments mock him to this day.

US rap has had numerous discussions of the phenomenon of the ‘wigga’, and the disproportionate media prominence and industry support given, Elvis Presley-style, to white rappers from Vanilla Ice to Eminem, by an at best cynical and at worst racist music industry. But grime has seen relatively little discussion of racial tension or cultural appropriation. It might be that the genre’s long languishing on the underground meant that, if you were a white DJ or MC taking part in the scene, your participation was implicitly understood to be out of authentic love for the music, rather than calculated profiteering or co-option – the same goes for Mr Wong, a much-loved first-wave MC and producer, the self-described ‘rude boy Chinese wigga’. It might be that the relative lack of racial segregation in Britain’s council estates and poorer areas, compared to the black ghettoised geography of ‘the projects’ in America’s big cities, had something to do with making race less of an issue. It might simply be that – while the likes of Geeneus and Slimzee were instrumental from day one – the biggest talents and crossover stars produced in grime’s early days, for several years, were all black British: Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Kano, Shystie, Lethal Bizzle. With the exception of Lady Sovereign in 2005 – always a bit of an outsider to the scene in any case – and some years later, Devlin, the few white MCs weren’t the ones getting record deals.

There is something utopian in grime’s collectivist origins, of ‘kids hanging out together making something they enjoy’, as Jammer described it to me recently, and this is a rich part of its musical roots too. Academic Jeremy Gilbert has said that the relative weakness of neo-Nazi street thugs in British cities in the nineties, while such groups were on the rise elsewhere in Europe, owes a lot to the ‘cosmopolitan hybridity’ blooming (and booming) out of the speaker stacks and pirate-radio aerials where hardcore, jungle and UK garage were created. State-led multiculturalism takes the form of abstract government initiatives and directives, more progressive school curricula and better community and arts funding – and these things are all essential, and should be done right – but in terms of creating a more harmonious society, its impact looks fairly tepid compared to what young, working-class people of different ethnic backgrounds cooked up together on London’s council estates. In fact, to tweak James Meek’s pessimism about our class-riven, divided city, where the ingredients are laid out side by side, not touching, not mixing, perhaps the solitary demographic where multiculturalism is an organic, lived experience, rather than an idealised illusion, is in young, working-class communities where schools, youth clubs, estates and later workplaces make a shared and convivial culture not just realistic, but the unforced reality.

‘I was one of the only white kids on my estate growing up,’ recalled Nyke from white UK garage and grime duo Milkymans (humorously named, they explain, by a Caribbean bouncer, surprised to see them at a mostly black nightclub). ‘The Irish community had moved out, and me and Nikki grew up in the Afro-Caribbean communities in Peckham and Stockwell – so I lived between Ghanaians and Jamaicans; if I couldn’t smell fufu, I could hear Capleton blasting. My radiator used to shake off the wall! And even if I didn’t know what some of the artists meant, in a kind of black culture context, I was still feeling the vibrations of the music from young. I remember I used to wash my mum’s car, and I’d be blaring Kool FM – if I think back to it now, I’m lucky it was a noisy estate, because I love jungle, but that was noise. Like that was not easy listening.’ He laughed. ‘But when you’re a 13- to 14-year-old obnoxious, rebellious kid, that’s all you want to hear. It’s kinda the equivalent of someone listening to really dark heavy metal. That was our version of that.’

As with punk’s extensive late-seventies love affair with reggae, and the ‘two tone’ ska of the early 1980s, jungle saw urban multiculturalism manifested in youthful conviviality. It channelled a mixture of cultural influences into a novel, fiercely experimental form, created by a rich ethnic mix of producers, DJs and promoters, and enjoyed by a similarly diverse assembly of ravers. It transcended the difference in junglists’ backgrounds, but it did not forget those origins – something you can hear in the music, with soul and ragga samples and fierce basslines high in the mix.

In a 1994 BBC jungle documentary, UK Apache, the MC behind the superlative jungle anthem ‘Original Nuttah’, highlighted the power these styles had in forging a sense of belonging for second- or third-generation immigrants. Growing up as a working-class child of an Indian-South African mother and Iraqi father in Tooting in the 1970s and 80s, when the National Front were a menacing presence on the streets of south London, Apache made friends with kids of Jamaican heritage and went to reggae sound-system dances with them in some of the same estates in Battersea from which So Solid Crew would later emerge. He told the BBC documentary crew:

‘Jungle, because it’s from England, I can really relate to it, it’s important to me because I’m born here. I’m from England, and London, and nobody can tell me I’m not from here. Once I was ashamed of being British, but it’s like the jungle’s drawn me back into my roots, where I’m from. Although my parents are – I’m half Arab, half Asian, African – I can relate to those countries only up to a point. When I talk to my children, I say, “You’re born in England, be proud of it,” and don’t let nobody tell you different, no BNP or anything like that.’

There is another key cultural lineage to grime that is too easily overlooked. Long before Afrobeats (with an ‘s’) and its rap, R&B and bashment hybrids made their way into popular consciousness in the UK, the children of African migrants to the UK, in particular from Ghana and Nigeria, were making grime, and slipping in references to this heritage. Among others, Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder and Lethal Bizzle all have Ghanaian parents; there were musical links from London to West Africa too – genre-hopping producer, singer and MC Donaeo and grime-adjacent rapper Sway were performing big shows in Accra and collaborating with Ghanaian rapper Sarkodie in the late 2000s. Skepta, in particular, made it clear in his most well-known early radio and rave bars, that he was ‘Joseph Junior Adenuga, from Nigeria, not St Lucia – big lips, African hooter’. This didn’t preclude an upbringing in which he obsessed over Ninjaman and Jamaican sound-clash culture, but it coexisted with the West African music he heard at home. By the time I interviewed him for a second time, in 2015, black British youth culture was changing – a diasporic shift in emphasis away from Caribbean dominance had been slowly taking place in the UK. ‘When I was a yute, to be called African was a diss,’ he recalled, sadly. ‘At school the African kids used to lie and say they were Jamaican. So when I first came in the game and I’m saying lyrics like “I make Nigerians proud of their tribal scars/my bars make you push up your chest like bras”, that was a big deal for me.’

Even saying his full name in his lyrics was an act of defiant pride with a very personal context. ‘In school, when a teacher would try and read my name, as soon as she goes to try and say it, I’d be trying to say it first, to stop the embarrassment of her not being able to pronounce it. Eventually I grew up. I remember one day when I was about fifteen, my mum told me, “Junior, your name means something – just because your name isn’t some standard English name.” I remember going back into school and it started to power me up. Bare self-hate vibes was pushed into me as a kid at school, trust me. That’s why it makes me happy to see all these kids today just love Afrobeats, because since the start I’ve been trying to fucking fight this ting, for them to be able to stand up.’ He mentioned ‘Sweet Mother’, his single released in 2007 for Mother’s Day, a reworking of Prince Nico Mbarga’s 1970s hit of the same name, an early pointer to the way black British music might be going next, with Nico’s sweetly sung, Nigerian-accented chorus sitting alongside Skepta’s grimy London beats and MCing.

The ‘Black Atlantic’10 pathways between Africa, Britain, America and the Caribbean have seen cultural exchange, revision and refinement in numerous iterations, but it should be no surprise, given their histories, that black British MC culture has evolved along very different lines to American hip-hop culture. South London rappers Krept and Konan, schoolmates of Stormzy, are situated very much on the rap side of the rap-grime divide, in terms of the slower, hip-hop tempo of their beats and rhymes: and yet, they explained to me, there wasn’t that much of a divide at all – that just as black Britishness embraced its diverse roots, it also produced a family of different, coexisting genres. I’d been sent by the Observer to ask them what separated British microphone culture from its American equivalent. Konan didn’t hesitate in saying that it was essentially ‘everything’ – fairly or not, he viewed American hip-hop culture and identity as monolithic in a way black British culture never was:

‘What’s different? Our accents, our lifestyle, our culture. When we was in America we’d say “Where are you from?” and they’d say “America”. But over here if someone said where are you from you might say “Jamaica”, or “Africa” or something else – maybe “British” and adding something else. We bring different cultures to our music, and different slang, a different way of doing things. And there’s different-sounding beats: in their clubs there’s a lot of just hip-hop, in our clubs you’ll have house, dance, Afrobeats, bashment, you’ve got a blend of styles.’

Jungle was the teenage apprenticeship for the pioneers of grime. They snuck into the raves while still underage just to hear it, persuaded mums and dads to let them go with older brothers or sisters, obsessed about it on pirate radio (usually Hackney’s Kool FM, the leading jungle station), made tapes in their bedrooms and swapped them at school and college, and through that shared community forged friendships that would last into the end of the nineties, to the evolution of 2-step garage and later their own sound. The family tree is robust enough that many of grime’s first wave of MCs started out in music spitting over jungle – it was their first experiences in writing rhymes, performing in a dance. D Double E started out MCing at jungle raves aged only 14. Wiley did too, and Riko Dan. There are recordings now on YouTube of the three of them spitting at jungle’s frenetic tempo – these items themselves a beautiful low-fidelity chronology of the last 20 years of technology and urban music: an illegal and unofficial pirate-radio broadcast, recorded onto a tape cassette, stored in an attic somewhere presumably, and then years later linked up via a cable to a computer, the audio converted to mp3, then uploaded to YouTube. Many of the personnel playing jungle at house parties, raves and on radio in SS (Silver Storm) Crew – the likes of Wiley, Maxwell D and Target – would go on to form seminal garage-into-grime crew Pay As U Go Cartel.

I remember listening to a Ruff Sqwad show on Rinse FM a few years later, in 2005, in which, for the first hour and 45 minutes of their two-hour set, they followed their usual formula: DJ Scholar beginning with a few US R&B and hip-hop (vocal) tracks, followed by half an hour of the biggest grime vocal tracks of the day, and then around the hour mark, switching to brand new grime dubplates and instrumentals, for the gathered MCs to spit their bars over. And then, for the final 15 minutes, the MCs, still only around the age of 20, MCs who would have been about ten when jungle was in its prime, switched up the pace for a final, hectic flurry of junglist ske-be-de-bi spitting. The overwhelming sensation you get from listening to them passing the mic to have a go is just sheer, infectious joy, as they fall about laughing.

The affection most of grime’s foundational figures have for jungle, then and now, is something to behold. Grime may have come directly from UK garage, and have mutated from it, but its creators speak of jungle like a first love, or a first high, an experience that will be refined, but in some wistful sense, never bettered. ‘Jungle,’ Wiley sighed fondly, when I interviewed him for the fifth time, in 2016. ‘That’s my favourite. You know jungle, it’s the only genre that didn’t get exploited? Because the people weren’t dumb – they just didn’t care! A few went to labels, got money, and realised, “You know what? Majors are a waste of time – I was earning more money on the white label.” They learned that trick, very early. But then it wasn’t an MC-led thing, from the point of the business. It is in the rave, but when it came to the records it wasn’t MC-led; it was more producer-controlled. So that’s why they wasn’t gassed [carried away].’ The implication is that the purity and community of the underground scene were never sullied by the ego of MCs-turned-superstars – never capitalised on unduly by the suits from the industry, or the biggest names from the scene.

For Skepta, his musical youth had been primarily ‘reggae in abundance’ – the likes of Barrington Levy, Gregory Isaacs and Half Pint – and that was followed by an instinctive and deep-rooted sense of connection, or ownership, to the frenetic ragga jungle playing out of cars and pirate radio stations in nineties Tottenham. ‘When I first heard jungle, I understood it immediately,’ he recalled in 2015, as we sat parked in his car in Palmers Green, his eyes glazing over with stoned awe. ‘To make something this bless sound this hype was just sick. I think it resonated with me because of the reggae basslines, but also because I’m British and I’m around dancey music – in Europe our ears are set towards like, high synthy sounds and fast speeds. We’re accustomed to that.’

It’s not a controversial point that deep in its spirit, jungle is grime’s true antecedent. Its aesthetics – a hard, scowling, dark side that is counterpointed by ludic, transcendent expressions of joy – were essential to the mutation of UK garage as it became grime. ‘Coming from jungle, you’re always going to be a little more into the darker stuff,’ recalled Troy ‘A Plus’ Miller, describing the garage days as a kind of stylistic interregnum. ‘Even though you like the light and the happy – you and your crew out in a rave, all the girls are here, we’re all having a nice time – you’re still going to lean towards things that are a bit darker.’

A Plus’s friend and founder of Rinse FM, Geeneus, is unequivocal about the power of that junglist passion; that passion would lead them to a collective mistake that would help change the course of British music. He told a podcast in 2016 about the influential UK garage instrumental ‘Cape Fear’, a welcome (re)turn to the dark side, which the Pay As U Go MCs could spit over with the speed and aggression of jungle lyricism. It wasn’t the way things were done in UK garage. ‘I was the last person to get involved in [UK garage], because I loved jungle so much,’ he recalled. ‘We started getting involved in it, but we was bringing along what we learned from jungle into the garage. But we got it completely wrong. And because we got it completely wrong, we ended up with grime. We thought we was making garage: getting garage beats like Cape Fear, and putting MCs on them, and they were spitting their heart out.’ On other occasions, to fit the Bow boys’ lingering passion for super-fast jungle with the contemporary 140bpm sound of 2-step, Slimzee would play Mampi Swift’s jungle track ‘Jaws’ at the wrong speed, at 33 instead of 45rpm, and the MCs would spit on it.

They had, Geeneus continued, ‘railroaded’ the UK garage scene ‘into something completely different. Where they’re bubbling along having a nice time in the party, looking nice, we’ve come in with tracksuits on, spitting lyrics everywhere, MCs everywhere, me and Slimzee just DJing for the MCs really.’11

As summaries of UK garage go, ‘bubbling along having a nice time in the party’ is pretty spot-on. The subject matter of the tunes – love, sex and relationships – narrated in smooth, soulful vocals from an even balance of male and female singers, reflected a much more grown-up, stylish swagger and refinement than had been seen in the wild days of British rave music previously, from acid house through jungle and drum ’n’ bass. It was as if, with the nineties drawing to a close, rave itself was moving beyond adolescent zeal and striving for a kind of adulthood. Garage as a form did not begin in the UK, but the US, and as Simon Reynolds records in Energy Flash, to begin with, in the mid-nineties, garage in the UK had ‘slavishly’ followed US production style. Then the junglists ‘entered the fray’, and created a ‘distinctly British hybrid strain that merged house’s slinky panache with jungle’s rude-bwoy exuberance’. The UK underground brought that edge, even as it was swapping a tracksuit for smart shoes and an ironed shirt.

Indeed, maturity was reflected in the aspirational dress codes in UK garage clubs, where shirts and shoes (no trainers!) would often be a compulsory component of the door policy, and where the narcotics of choice were champagne and cocaine – even while the music’s primary creators and ravers were from the same humble inner London backgrounds as the junglists before them, and the grime kids who would follow. No hats no hoods! Only two school children may enter the rave at any one time.

It’s a tension that was a rich seam for British underground dance music more than once: the wicked and the divine, the debonair and the scuzzy, rubbing up against one another. In the first two years of the millennium, UK garage was being stretched in two directions at once – a process which is always likely to make something break in the middle. On the one hand, the poppy, commercial end was thriving, and producing numerous hits: singer-MCs like Craig David, Ms Dynamite and Daniel Bedingfield became stars, and tunes like Sweet Female Attitude’s ‘Flowers’ and DJ Luck and MC Neat’s ‘With A Little Bit Of Luck’ were ubiquitous.

But something was pulling hard in the opposite musical direction – to the dark side. On this side of UK garage’s personality split, mostly male MCs dominated instead of crooning singers; the instrumentals conjured not a glitzy VIP area but a low-lit council estate. It was inner London’s millennial aspiration and promise versus the grim reality that persisted when those aspirations failed to materialise. Darker garage that was built around breakbeats and accompanied by jungle’s hectic lyrical energy was thriving on pirate radio, while the more established, soulful tracks dominated the charts and high-street clubs. When catchy, sample-heavy novelty records like DeeKline’s ‘I Don’t Smoke’ started to take off in the garage clubs, and the likes of Heartless Crew, So Solid Crew and Pay As U Go Cartel started to have hits themselves, the divisions deepened. For the old guard, there was a ‘last days of disco’ feel to the new millennium: the resplendent purity of one of the greatest periods in British music history having to come to terms with its own looming mortality – these were the best days of our lives, and this is how it ends? With some hyperactive teenagers chatting about guns and drug dealing, instead of a smooth, 2-step shuffle and some sweetly sung love songs? With a song that samples the Casualty theme tune and a Guy Ritchie film? No wonder they were upset.

Bizarrely, the tensions between the old guard and the new wave came to a head in the unlikely context of the UK garage committee meetings. It sounds somehow reminiscent of the kind of sit-down familiar from The Sopranos, where representatives of the mafia families would thrash out their differences, negotiate and cut deals. A similar thing had happened in the jungle scene too, when prominent figures had attempted – in some cases, successfully – to blacklist General Levy’s raucous party-starting anthem ‘Incredible’, after he had claimed to be ‘runnin’ jungle’. The substance of the tension at the turn of the millennium was that the new guard were sullying garage’s grown-up reputation, both musically and in terms of the rebellious gangster pose they sometimes presented to the world; they didn’t like the chat about gats and violence, and they didn’t like the exuberant use of novelty samples either. The straw that broke the camel’s back was Oxide and Neutrino’s ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ going to number one in May 2000, and ‘I Don’t Smoke’ following it in to number 11, after months as an underground smash. Prominent gatekeeper DJs like Norris ‘Da Boss’ Windross and Radio 1’s The Dreem Team refused to play either record. ‘I don’t like many of those records of that style,’ DJ Spoony from the Dreem Team told the Guardian at the time. ‘I like music with more soul and groove in it.’ When So Solid Crew appeared on their Radio 1 show that winter, the atmosphere was frosty to say the least: ‘Give the youth of nowadays a chance to bust through that barrier,’ Romeo told them, ‘cos you lot have been there for so long, and it’s our time now.’

In the meetings, there was some discussion of whether the darker, ‘breakbeat’ garage would also attract more undesirable elements to the clubs. ‘I was always bearing the brunt of it,’ recalls Maxwell D. ‘“Who’s this crew, Pay As U Go, talking all this gangster stuff? We don’t want them in the dances, they’re thugs, they’re this, they’re that …” They really didn’t want to give us the mic.’ (Unfortunately for him, Maxwell found himself on the sharp end of exactly this kind of condescension and obstruction again, years later, when he made a light-hearted funky house tune about his mobile phone called ‘Blackberry Hype’ – the kids loved it, the grown-ups, less so.)

For Matt Mason, editor of RWD magazine from 2000–05, who also DJed on garage station Freek FM, the combative, transitional period was exciting, even if the end result was inevitable: ‘There was a real sense the new guys were doing something different, that a chasm was opening up in garage. It’s interesting because it really crept up. First there was just some really weird records, I think from about 1999. There was the Groove Chronicles tunes first, like okay, that’s different, and some MJ Cole records, like … all right, some different thoughts have gone into this. And then there was a record by Dem 2, under the alias US Alliance, called “All I Know”, and “Da Grunge” remix of it was this fucking mutated thing, that had mutated out of garage, and I remember hearing it at Twice as Nice and just thinking, “What the fuck is that? That’s not garage.”

‘At first I really didn’t want to see garage splinter, because I liked that you could play a weird breakbeat record into a Todd Edwards record, into an old school, Strictly Rhythm house record, into a DJ Zinc record at 148bpm, I felt this was such a good thing, don’t let it break into a thousand pieces and die. But obviously it did, and that was great too.’ Mason attended the UK garage committee meetings, which were hosted and coordinated by the old guard, with Norris Windross as chairman, Spoony as spokesman, and well-established DJs such as Matt Jam Lamont and MCs such as Creed on one side; positioned against them, the likes of Mason, Maxwell D, producer Jaimeson and MC Viper:

‘We went along because we wanted to give the new generation a voice,’ Mason tells me over Skype from his home in California. ‘I really liked all the guys on the other side, but at the time I butted heads with them, especially Matt Jam; I remember him having a go at us for putting a grime artist on the cover of RWD – it was one of the MCs from Hype Squad, this young crew who were on Raw Mission FM. This was still only 2001, it was a kid sitting on a bike and he was making gunfingers. And they all said, “You’re promoting violence, you shouldn’t be promoting these artists, this isn’t garage,” and I said, “Well, look: they’re playing it in garage stations and garage clubs, and they’re buying the records in garage shops, from the garage section. And I think you’re right, I think maybe this isn’t garage, and it’s becoming something else – but, we absolutely should be fucking covering it, of course it’s going to be on our front cover.”’

Oxide and Neutrino, as members of So Solid Crew and also a very successful duo in their own right, responded to the ire sent their way for their scrappy, cheeky ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ tune with an appropriately punk follow-up, called ‘Up Middle Finger’, describing the garage scene’s jealous whining about their success, and bans in clubs and radio stations on playing their songs. ‘All they do is talk about we, something about we’re novelty, cheesy … did I mention we’re only 18?’ They had sold 250,000 copies of ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’, and ‘Up Middle Finger’ became their third Top 10 hit in a row. That record scratch was the sound of the old guard being rewound into the history books. ‘Garage didn’t really want us involved in their scene,’ as Lethal Bizzle said years later, ‘so we started making our own thing.’

That’s not to say there wasn’t some fluidity between the two camps, or some overlap in taste and affection from the kids for the old guard: just that in that intense moment, the Oedipal urge to shrug off your elders and gatekeepers requires a bit of front, if you’re going to claim the stage. Even within Pay As U Go – really the critical proto-grime crew, in terms of its personnel – there was a slight difference in aesthetics. You can see it in the video to ‘Champagne Dance’, Pay As U Go’s one proper chart single, where Wiley and the rest of the crew are dressed in tracksuits, and Maxwell D, who, following a tough upbringing, wasn’t about to let the opportunity to dress like a star pass him by:

‘I had money from the street from selling drugs, and then I went straight into music, and was living like a drug dealer, legally. That’s why I stood out a lot in the crew. That’s why when people saw me they were like, “Rah he’s dressed in all these name brand, expensive clothes.” Even in my music videos I’d say to the stylist woman, “Look, I want a fur jacket yeah? I don’t want to wear what I wear in the street.” The rest of the crew were all like, “Why are you wearing a fur jacket?” and I’m like, “Because it’s a music video! I’m going to go all out, I’m going to make myself look like a pimp.” That was the garage style thing: dress to impress.’

During their brief time in the limelight signed to Sony, Pay As U Go were given the major-label rigmarole to promote ‘Champagne Dance’. Wiley was given the surprisingly high-profile job of remixing Ludacris’s ‘Roll Off’; they appeared on CBBC with Reggie Yates, and on Channel 4’s Faking It programme, advising the lawyer-turned-UK-garage-MC George on how to be less of a ‘Bounty’ (black on the outside, white on the inside), and get a bit of street cool. The most unlikely of these promotional activities was a tour of school assemblies around London and beyond, in Birmingham and Reading too; Flow Dan and Maxwell D took the helm, and the other MCs, including Wiley and Dizzee, would join them too. On one occasion, the disjunction between urban stars in the hood and a pop-friendly, public-facing crew reached a nadir. ‘Sony made them go out on a schools tour,’ Ross Allen told Emma Warren. ‘I was like, “Nick [Denton, their manager], how’s the tour going?” He was like, “I just had Wiley on the phone and they’re well fucked off,” and I was like, “Why?” They’d been sent to this school and they were playing to five-year-olds – they’re on the mic and these little kids are doing forward rolls in front of them.’12

There was a baton being passed, and in spite of the £100,000 advance the crew received from Sony, and ‘Champagne Dance’ reaching number 13, Maxwell D was in a minority with his inclination for a fur coat. ‘I wouldn’t ever have said, “Take that Nokia!”’ Maxwell reflects, referencing the Dizzee lyric, as emblematic of the new generation’s hunger, ‘because I could already buy five Nokias if I wanted – it wouldn’t have made sense. But Dizzee, he’d just come off the street, he had that mentality.’ And of course, if you’re a 15-year-old, especially a poor 15-year-old, there’s no financial barrier to becoming an MC – you’ve seen Pay As U Go, Heartless and So Solid do it and become stars, why not do the same? The same was not true of DJing: several hundred pounds on a pair of Technics, a couple of hundred more on a mixer, more on some decent headphones, and then, after that, all the records: £5–10 for each new 12 inch, and about £25 to cut a dubplate. DJing isn’t cheap. MCing is free. ‘Everybody wants to be an MC, there’s no balance,’ as Wiley’s Pay As U Go-era bars observed. The posing, luxury brands and pimped-out stylings of the UK garage scene were being replaced by something much less aspirational, more raw, more hungry. In his autobiography, Wiley describes some of the few, frosty meetings in this transitional period between his rising east London crew, and south London’s reigning kings of UK garage:

‘Imagine seeing So Solid with all that fame, all that money, and then these bruk-pocket half-yardie geezers from east turn up with an even colder sound. There was no champs, no profiling, no beautiful people. Just us raggo East End lads in trackies and hoods, hanging out in some shithole white-man pub on Old Kent Road. We were realer in a way. We were just about spitting and making beats, that’s it. South must have thought we were on some Crackney shit.’13

Those bruk-pocket geezers from east would change everything. ‘I do sometimes wish more people respected what Pay As U Go did for grime,’ Maxwell D says. ‘Because Pay As U Go, that’s the grime supergroup. That’s like a grime atom bomb, exploding into all those little molecules.’ You can see what he means. Even though their album was never released, and ‘Champagne Dance’ was their sole official release, the personnel involved would go on to transform British music. Geeneus made piles of stunning instrumentals (under his own name and as Wizzbit) and was the chief architect of UK underground super-pirate Rinse FM, stewarding sibling genres dubstep and UK funky along with grime, signing Katy B and creating an ever-expanding collection of related businesses. Slimzee would become grime’s biggest and most respected DJ, the dubplate don par excellence. Maxwell himself would go on to join East Connection and later Muskateers. Target would make a number of sterling instrumentals for Roll Deep, and become an influential DJ on BBC 1Xtra. And then there was Wiley, the godfather of grime, who sprang from the short-lived excitement and disappointment of Pay As U Go to start Roll Deep, bring through Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder, Chipmunk, Skepta and create his ‘Eskimo sound’, perhaps the sonic palette most identified with the genre.

‘Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t there in isolation,’ Maxwell continued. ‘So Solid Crew were a big part of influencing the grime culture, but they were already superstars, and they were garage superstars. And Heartless Crew, they were doing garage and sound-system stuff, playing a bit of ragga, a bit of darker stuff – but for me, Heartless were always happy, they were about love and peace, whereas we always used to bring a lot more street lyrics. And underneath us, you’ve got all of east London immediately turning over to grime music. Because after us, who was next? East Connection, More Fire Crew, Nasty Crew, Boyz in da Hood, SLK. All these crews started emerging.

‘After Pay As U Go, that was when it all went dark,’ he smirks. ‘We turned out the lights.’

Pass the mic. Chrisp Street Youth Club, Poplar, 2005

THREE

THE NEW ICE AGE

If it takes a village to raise a child, it definitely takes a village to raise a scene. It’s one of the fallacies of the bedroom-producer trope in grime’s origin story, that a wild and pioneering auteur creativity was born out of solitude. Grime was created in bedrooms – but not alone, or in isolation: it didn’t allow for eccentric hermits, because the London it came from didn’t either: boroughs of densely populated flats on densely populated estates, where a tower block is itself a kind of vertical community, and both in it and around it, everyone knows everyone’s business – and their bars. The inner-city kids who came up through jungle and UK garage in the nineties learned how to DJ it, how to MC on it and how to dance to it together.

When they were ready to make their own sound, they taught each other, vibed off each other, and absorbed each other’s ideas and idioms, hanging out in vital if unglamorous hubs like Limehouse basketball court and Jammer’s parents’ basement. Shystie only started to write lyrics because her friends at sixth-form college pushed her to. ‘They taught me how to put words together, which instrumentals to spit over, and I’d spit in front of them. There was no YouTube, no Twitter, no SoundCloud, there was nothing – instead it was word of mouth: it was about getting big in your own area, your friends bigging you up, practising at sixth form with them – then you have other local schools, they would kind of support you too, because you’re seeing them on the way home; you’re building up your local fanbase, really. I started performing locally at parties, and my name got around more. I’d do little local raves, and it just spiralled and domino-effected and spread like wildfire. Those practice hours were so important man – I put in so many hours, it’s not a joke.’

School outside of classroom hours was instrumental – it was a key location, a vital node in the network, in an embryonic scene populated largely by teenagers and exclusively by under-25s, where local connections were everything. In a sense, it might be said to be the last truly local scene: these were the final years before social media and web 2.0 collapsed distances between strangers, and forged brand new kinds of instant networks across geographical boundaries. In grime’s formative years, it was the people who you knew from the area – neighbours, schoolmates, brothers and sisters – that created the platform on which a scene was built. Crews like Ruff Sqwad were formed through school in the first place, and MC practice took place in a group, in the playground – after school, during lunch break, whenever there was time. There’s a reason all those hood videos and ‘freestyles’ show the MCs with their crew and their mates gathered around them, whooping and popping gunfingers: because that’s how the bars are written, refined, practised and improved to begin with: it’s not so much a gathering for a performance, to camera, as an – albeit slightly exaggerated – mirror on the day-to-day reality of where the music comes from.

The story of grime in east London in particular is a dense family tree of friendships that initially preceded music, and then as the protagonists’ teenage years proceeded, developed because of it. When I asked Target about the lineage that led him to Wiley, and the rest of Roll Deep, it went back to primary school: by the age of ten, they were playing with the vinyl decks in Wiley’s dad’s flat in Bow, ten minutes from Target’s childhood home. ‘We literally didn’t leave the bedroom all weekend, we were just playing on these decks. We couldn’t mix or anything, but we were just having the best time ever.’ By the final year of primary school they’d formed a new jack swing meets rap group called Cross Colours, inspired by Kriss Kross and Snoop Dogg, and Wiley’s dad was taking them to meet an A&R.

By the mid-nineties, still only in their mid-teens, they were already veterans, and Target and Wiley formed SS (Silver Storm) Crew with Breeze, Maxwell D and others. They would hang out on Limehouse basketball court and practise their jungle bars, or go to each other’s houses to record tapes, streaming up the stairs of Slimzee’s mum’s house, where Geeneus and Slimzee were for a while broadcasting Rinse FM, illicitly – the authorities didn’t know, and nor did Slimzee’s mum. ‘She kept saying to me, “What’s going on up there?” Them times I was only young, so they didn’t really want me to go out – it weren’t a bad area, but … things was going on, you know? So they’d rather me stay in, than go out, taking drugs and all that stuff.’

More than one MC or DJ has recounted that, as much as grime would soon lyrically reflect the trials and tribulations of petty crime, drug dealing and violence, many of their parents supported their teenage musical experiments for the very reason that, if they were all making a ruckus in the bedroom, they weren’t out on the street getting up to no good. Tinchy Stryder’s older brother was a DJ and had turntables in the bedroom they shared in the Crossways Estate. ‘We all used to come back to my mum’s house and practise there. I’m always grateful to my mum and dad, because I don’t know if many people would’ve let loads of boys come in the house and make that noise,’ he laughed. ‘Because grime ain’t nothing calm, and it wasn’t a big house.’ So much was developed in childhood bedrooms with hand-me-down decks, or even less. In Shystie’s case, her mic skills were developed as a teenager with a karaoke machine and a £9.99 microphone from Argos.

That neighbourhood scene in the nineties thrived via word of mouth, pirate-radio broadcasts, and one critical performance arena: ‘The root of all this grime business, of grime MCing, was house parties,’ Wiley said to me in 2016, while recording The Godfather, his eleventh album (or fortieth, if you count all the mixtapes). ‘Proper house parties, with a proper system, all across Bow and Newham when we were teenagers. We’d go and jump on the mic, and clash each other.’ SS Crew would get invited to perform at any house parties around E3; they’d be walking around Bow carrying their decks and boxes of records.

‘That was the first taste of when you get that energy back from the crowd,’ Target recalled. ‘We couldn’t believe it, like, “Whoa, this is sick!” At that stage we didn’t ever think we could get paid, there was no future plan: just the excitement of participating. It was a sense of community, definitely, it was. At the time we wouldn’t have used words like that, but that’s what it was. We were all from the same area, loads of us were into music, DJing or MCing, and when Rinse started we actually had a base, and the chance to be heard by people who didn’t already know us. Going on Rinse and having a text from say, Stacey in East Ham, felt incredible – it was like going international. It was like having your track go Top 10 in Spain or something, it was that exciting.’

As London’s millennium wheel first began to turn, the sun began to set on UK garage, its glossy pop moment cast in shadow. The younger generation of MCs and DJs had had years of training on the mic and on the decks, but if they were being pushed out by their elders, the response was to turn their outcast status into something they could be proud of and control. Before it had acquired a genre name, grime’s young talents, those too young or too angry to feel UK garage was theirs, began creating a new sound, riffing on some of that weirder, darker garage, the kind with broken beats instead of 2-step’s shuffle and swing: the kind that was too awkwardly shaped to wear designer-label shirts and smart shoes to the club. They would eventually overwhelm British pop, doing so with the barest minimum of equipment, and in most cases with almost no formal musical training. They taught themselves and each other, and used software like Napster, Kazaa and Limewire to downloaded illegal ‘cracked’ versions of simple music production software like FruityLoops Studio. To begin with, that was the closest grime’s pioneers would come to a studio.

Grime, in its first years, sounded as if it had crash-landed in the present with no past, and no future – a time-travelling experiment gone horribly, fascinatingly wrong; a broken flux capacitor glowing amidst the smouldering wreckage, a neon light pulsing in the mist. While on one side of the A13, Canary Wharf’s tenants enriched themselves to dizzying new heights, the sounds emanating from the tower blocks barely a mile away declaimed through the airwaves that there was more than one east London. There was an alien futurism to a lot of the computer-generated aesthetics – the reason why some of the bleeps and bloops sounded like noises made by spaceships from computer games was because they were in fact made on games consoles: most famously a piece of software for the first PlayStation, called Music 2000. A lot of So Solid Crew’s first album was built on this very elementary software; as was Dizzee’s ‘Stand Up Tall’. Producers like Jme and Smasher made their first tunes on it, recorded them to MiniDisc, and then had vinyl dubplates cut straight from the MiniDisc – without going anywhere near a recording studio.

Mixdowns are usually seen as a crucial stage of the recording process even for the most entry-level producer, where the elements created are refined and balanced out to create a clean and coherent whole – but with grime they sometimes didn’t happen at all, before the tunes were cut to vinyl and released, either as dubplates or for general release to record shops. This applies even to the instrumental frequently cited as the first proper grime tune, Youngstar’s ‘Pulse X’. The spirit of the period echoes the famous punk mantra, ‘Here’s a chord. Here’s another. Here’s a third. Now form a band.’

DJ Logan Sama, for one, was happy enough with the devil-may-care approach to technical proficiency. ‘I don’t give a shit if a record is mastered well or not,’ Sama said to me back in 2006, then a new graduate from the pirate-radio scene to the legit world and new sofas of KISS FM. ‘All I care about is the reaction it gets when I play it in a club. How technically well-made art is doesn’t matter: it’s art. Why would you want to analyse it on its technical merits? It’s not an exam. My white label of “Pulse X” still has the hiss from the AV-out cables from the PlayStation they took it off to record it onto CD, when they took it to master it.1 You can hear it! The ‘bawm’s are all distorted. That record sold over 10,000 copies; it was fucking massive. Half of So Solid’s first album was produced on Music 2000, they then took it into the studio on a memory card to re-engineer it. That album sold over one million copies. A lot of people loved jungle when it was shit – when the quality of it was shit! Personally I like “jump up” stuff, and if I get that out of a technically well-made record, then cool; if I get that out of a record that’s been made on FruityLoops and not mixed-down properly, so be it.’

Grime’s canon of cult classics is full of music made by producers who were unwilling or unable to do things ‘properly’. One of Ruff Sqwad’s most famous instrumental productions, ‘Functions On The Low’ by XTC, took on a life of its own when, 11 years after its release, Stormzy used it as the instrumental for a freestyle recorded in his local park. That freestyle, ‘Shut Up’, would go on to take the charts by storm and propel him to pop superstardom. XTC is one of many of grime’s ephemeral geniuses2: for most of the crew’s existence, he was barely even in Ruff Sqwad; more just a mate from the area who made a few tunes and spat a few bars, and the older brother to MC Fuda Guy. XTC finished only a handful of tracks, and only ever released one 12 inch of three tracks with ‘Functions’ on the B-side – it just happened to be a masterpiece. It’s a breathtaking five minutes of longing, like a fleeting glimpse of the love of your life disappearing into the Hong Kong night – neon lights seen through a torrent of tears. It’s so heartbreaking, and yet so addictive, so humane, that the moment it stops, you’re desperate to have it back. It took him half an hour to write, on FruityLoops, one morning before college, while the rest of his family were still asleep. He used the computer keyboard in place of an actual keyboard, never got it mastered, rendered the audio file, burned a CD, and took it straight to the vinyl pressing plant.3 And that was that.

Other more prolific producers, like Dexplicit, who made the instrumental ‘Forward Riddim’ that would be used for Lethal Bizzle’s ‘Pow!’, an underground smash and later a Top 10 hit, began writing music on even more basic equipment: a pre-app, pre-internet ‘brick’ of a mobile phone. ‘When I was in secondary school, everyone used to get me to create ringtones of their favourite songs on the old Nokia 3310’s,’ he laughed, when I interviewed him for a piece about ‘sodcasting’, the much-maligned mid-2000s phenomenon where people (usually young teenagers) would play music off their phones on public transport. Grime’s birth coincided with the popularisation of new kinds of cheap, low-end, unsophisticated audio technology. Of course there had been TDK cassettes and home-taping off the radio in previous decades, but the explosion of rapidly evolving mobile-phone technology, mp3 players and cheap ear-bud headphones skewed a lot of listening towards treble-focused audio – a paradox for grime, with its ‘bass culture’ lineage through reggae, jungle and UK garage. I asked Dexplicit if the technological and consumer changes were conditioning how he made tracks. ‘My primary focus is how it’s going to sound on a club system,’ he replied, ‘but I am aware there are sections of the frequency spectrum that won’t be picked up well via iPod headphones, TVs and phones. I make “heavy-bass” music. And listening to a 50–100hz, very low bass on a iPod is like trying to hear ants walking. I’ve always tried to create a balance in my music, and often have “pretty” melodies going on upstairs, the treble, accompanied by a kind of nasty low end.’

Ask 20 different grime fans what they consider to be the first grime tune, and you’ll get, if not 20 different answers, probably about ten: a good half of them will either say ‘Pulse X’, or Wiley’s ‘Eskimo’. I actually carried out this test, entirely unscientifically, on Twitter. Other answers included a smattering of late-garage crew cuts: More Fire Crew’s ‘Oi’ (2001), So Solid Crew singles ‘Dilemma’ and ‘Oh No’ (2000), as well as one shout for Danny Weed’s ‘Creeper’ (2002). Rinse FM founder, grime svengali and long-standing producer Geeneus, who ought to know, maintains that the first grime track is Pay As U Go’s ‘Know We’, the crew’s underground anthem released in 2000. ‘Wiley was the one who was like “we’re going to put the MCs on the songs”, and I was like “MCs on songs, that’s a bit mad innit? No one does that,”’ Geeneus said in 2016. The aggressive tone of the MCs, and the unsettling, urgent momentum of the keyboard riff all mark the track out as grime, but most of all it was the structure which shifted the paradigm: tracks like ‘Know We’ created clearly demarcated space for MCs to fill with complex rhymes – to tell stories and to dominate proceedings, rather than merely accompany an instrumental. They weren’t hosting the rave for the DJ/producer anymore: this was their show. The Pay As U Go MCs brought the track straight from the studio to Rhythm Division on Roman Road, where it was played out at top volume to the two dozen people hanging around there. ‘I was like “What is this music?”’ Geeneus recalled. ‘It was 16 bars, then chorus, 16 bars, a chorus. We just went off on one. Every tune was formatted like that after that. That’s grime! That was the template. And it’s still going now, same format.’4

Youngstar’s ‘Pulse X’, released in January 2002 but on the airwaves for some time before that, offered its own template: it was arranged in functional 8-bar segments, switching quickly and with little variation – which briefly led to ‘8-bar’ as the designated genre name for this new, untested mutant strain of UK garage. The format was vital for grime’s evolution as an MC-led genre, in that they would write lyrics in either 8, 16, 32 or 64 bar sections, with the style varying for each of those lengths. ‘Your 8s are your reload bars,’ Shystie explained to me recently, ‘or it can even just be a 4, repeated twice’: they had to be memorable, crowd-pleasing and catchy – held in reserve for when the DJ brings in a particularly brilliant instrumental. These are your silver bullets, your punchlines, powerful and simple shots of lyrical adrenaline – the bars that could make you underground-famous. 16s and 32s are for your more detailed or thoughtful content, ‘for spraying’, and they need more space to breathe: they’re better suited to slower burning, less sugar-rush hectic instrumentals – but because they’ll take longer, you need to start them at the right time, too, early on in a track, unless you’re confident about continuing them over the hump of two tracks, during the DJ’s blend. Judging the mood, and the rhythm, and anticipating the DJ can be fiendishly difficult, especially when you have to make split-second decisions about switching up the pace while also in the middle of spitting. It requires a pretty remarkable level of mental dexterity, the more you think about it. Eighteen-year-old MC Streema from latter-day Lewisham crew The Square explained the challenge to American podcast Afropop Worldwide: ‘There could be a hype beat coming in, and you’re already spraying a 32, and not really know what 8 to spray … The person listening is going to think, “All right, cool, this beat coming in is gassed, this beat is a hype tune, I want to hear someone do a madness on this,” so if you’re on your own at the [radio] set, it would be good to draw for your 8 … but sometimes it’s better to wait, to get into the beat, to then drop the 8, because it doesn’t always work instantly as the beat comes in.’

It’s an under-explored facet of grime’s playful theatricality that as well as a canny knack for inventing its own slang and idiolects, often the MCs would push the boundaries of language altogether – although this has its own history too. Simon Reynolds, describing pirate-radio MC patter in the early nineties, points to the sensual thrill of hearing ‘an arsenal of non-verbal, incantatory techniques, bringing spoken language closer to the state of music: intonation, syncopation, alliteration, internal rhyme, slurring, rolling of ‘r’s, stuttering of consonants, twisting and stretching of vowels, comic accents, onomatopoeia.’5 It’s a legacy carried down the continuum of pirate sounds into grime’s cast of players – especially in the early years when their faces weren’t so well known, and MCs had to make their voices stand out on crowded pirate sets, with familiar bars but also stylistic tics, accents and affectations. Like characters in computer games, most MCs developed their own overblown catchphrases to help identify themselves, bat signals beaming from the pirate transmitters into the night sky over Bow. Scratchy had his self-described ‘warrior charge’ (‘brreee brreee!’), Jammer a range of absurd and playful nonsense poetry (‘are you dhaaaaaaauum?!’ [dumb] ‘Seckk-kulllll – draw for the neckk-kulll’), Jme the comically over-pronounced ‘Serious!’ and ‘Shhhhut Yuh Mouth’, and in a category of his own was Flirta D, whose extraordinary rhythmic sound effects and imitations took in computer-game noises, explosions, snatches of sweetly sung R&B, jungle-style trilling and more – somewhere between scatting, beat-boxing and a malfunctioning sample pack.

We’ve already heard about D Double E and his ‘D Double sig-a-nal’, the immediately recognisable announcement of his arrival, like a music hall performer peering his head around the side of the curtain, before stepping out onto the stage. Written non-phonetically, in standard English, it looks camp and comical – ‘Ooh! Ooh! It’s me, me!’ (where, we might ask, is D Double E’s washboard?) – but it’s spread out over about seven or eight syllables, a visceral vocal exorcism from somewhere deep in the lungs. ‘That’s very original – never heard that from another individual,’ runs another old-school D Double bar, in meta commentary on his own idiosyncrasy. ‘At raves, sometimes I don’t even have to MC,’ he told the Guardian in 2004. ‘I just go on stage and hear the echoes coming out the crowd. It’s a deep signal.’

Skepta (pirate radio catchphrase: ‘Go on then, go on then!’), by contrast, very deliberately chose the most clear-voiced, discernible flow he could – ‘put me up against gimmick, sound effect or skippy-flow man,’6 he taunted (and I’ll merk all three of them). On diss tracks ‘Swag MC Burial’ and ‘The End’, he took on several rival MCs in sequence, mocking them by imitating their flows and quoting their catchphrases. A pre-planned live MC clash on Logan Sama’s KISS FM show in 2007,7 with Skepta facing down the super-fast skippy flow and ‘technical’ lyricism of Ghetts, highlights an interesting tension between different styles of MCing. Speaking about himself in the third person, Skepta goes after Ghetts’ technique specifically: ‘Skepta how did you kill him like that, when he’s skipping all over the riddim like that? You will never hear me spitting like that … I like the basic shit, I don’t like too many words in a sentence,’ he announces. Skepta is punk trashing prog rock: why is long and convoluted inherently better? ‘Go on then, spit a 32-bar lyric, I’ll rustle up an 8-bar lyric, to dun your lyric,’ he tells Ghetts, dismissing his crew The Movement’s fondness for complex lyricism, punning and wordplay. He castigates this kind of borrowing from US hip-hop (and Kano) – it’s foreign, and intrinsically inauthentic for a London grime MC: ‘I make the best grime music: some man run up in the booth and lose it, start spitting like Dipset, D Block and G Unit/Kano brought a new flow to the game, now I look around: 10 million MCs in the grime scene want to use it/It’s my job to make them look stupid.’ The counterpoint is put by a fan in the YouTube comments on the audio clip, who prefers Ghetts and his crew: ‘Skepta just has basic one-line flows.’

For all grime’s non-verbal and semi-verbal vocal dynamism, the significant break in the tradition of rave-based British MC culture was the grime generation’s turn away from the functional role of (party or radio) host towards storytelling. And as the MCs developed their voices, producers began their own world-building, too – sketching out new rules, and changing the entire emotional register of what had gone before. (Significantly, in the beginning, there was a huge overlap; in fact the overwhelming majority of MCs have recorded and released at least one instrumental record as producers, at some point.)

Alongside transitional darker garage instrumentals by the likes of So Solid Crew, in 2001 and 2002 there were also beats being made that sounded like nothing that had gone before.

After learning the drums as a child, experimenting with copying his dad’s reggae jams on the keyboard, and dabbling – quite excellently – with making the sweetest of straight-up vocal UK garage on ‘Nicole’s Groove’, under the pseudonym Phaze One, Wiley moved on to making his own sound. Geeneus and Slimzee had bought a Korg Triton, a new synthesiser that went on sale in 1999, a piece of equipment that would become synonymous with the quintessential grime sound, and Wiley would pop around and use it. In the first years of the 2000s, he created a sound, ‘eskibeat’ or ‘eskimo’, that was characterised by its sparse arrangements, futuristic, icy cold synths, devastating basslines and awkward, off-kilter rhythms. Like UK garage before it, it was generally 140 beats per minute – the consistency was important for DJs to be able to mix records seamlessly. (Dubstep and grime producer Plastician is not the only one to have observed that FruityLoops’ default tempo is set to 140bpm, which ‘may have a lot to answer for’.) But the world it conjured – the same city, from a totally different perspective – had a completely different atmosphere.

In this crucible moment, around 2002–03, the taxonomy of what would become ‘grime’ was greatly contested – and even debated on one of Wiley’s first label-released singles, ‘Wot Do U Call It?’. (‘Garage? Urban? 2 Step?’ he speculates derisively, without providing a definitive answer.) Eskibeat quickly became a one-man sonic empire, a distinctive sound all branded with an arctic theme: the track titles from that era include Ice Rink, Igloo, Ice Pole, Blizzard, Ice Cream Man, Snowman, Frostbite, Freeze, Colder and Morgue. ‘Sometimes I just feel cold hearted,’ he said in 2003, by way of explanation. ‘I felt cold at that time, towards my family, towards everyone. That’s why I used those names … I am a nice person but sometimes I switch off and I’m just cold. I feel angry and cold.’8 The narcotically-enhanced, loved-up bliss of the eighties and nineties rave predecessors, and the giddy utopian place-making that made raves ‘temporary autonomous zones’ had been wiped off the map. Wiley offered another explanation in 2005, which pegged the claustrophobia, emotional dislocation and rage of his and his peers’ music to the city around him: ‘The music reflects what’s going on in society. Everyone’s so angry at the world and each other. And they don’t know why,’ he told American magazine Spin. ‘As things went bad, away from music, the music’s just got darker and darker.’9

‘Eskimo’ was the first of his eski-oeuvre, the most game-changing, and the most enduring: a few minimal drum skirmishes, some artificial synth stabs, and the sound of a hollow metal pole rolling around a construction yard. Docklands after the docks, and before Canary Wharf – just a wasteland – but maybe with a hint of the bankers’ blocks’ futuristic glint, too. During the Pay As U Go school tour, they would play ‘Eskimo’ as an instrumental bed, and the kids would come up and freestyle over them. ‘The kids were going mad over that beat,’ Maxwell D recalled – this alien soundtrack was appropriate to the mood of the age. Its sheer newness is startling, and unsettling: it is easily situated in the context of millenarian anxiety, with all the apocalyptic fears that had accompanied that mystical calendar change, made worse by an ambient sense of dread about the new era that lay ahead. The frosty wastelands and open space reaching out ahead in the twenty-first century provoked a kind of psychic agoraphobia, triggered by the seismic jolt of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and the rush to war that followed, with the growing likelihood of unavoidable climate catastrophe ahead. Wiley wrote one of his formative eskimo tracks, ‘Ground Zero’, on the day of the attacks. ‘Imagine travelling through the streets, through all that dust. I want [Americans] to understand that I understand. I felt it,’ he told Martin Clark in 2003. ‘If we were in West End and the BT tower fell down and we were on that street. The fear – you can’t imagine the fear that would be in someone. “Am I going to die? Am I going to live?” Your heart would pop out of your chest. I’ve had that feeling: where you feel like death.’10

There is a case for saying that grime’s sonics are grounded in the material experience of east London life, that grime sounds like its environment; as Hattie Collins says in the documentary Open Mic11 – producers sample snippets of police sirens and gunshots, and perhaps in some of its clanking metallic sounds we can hear the heavy security gates on council flat front doors closing. But beyond this quotidian, literal testament to urban claustrophobia and noise pollution, is a sense that a historic rupture is happening, and that is audible in the music. You can hear it in some of Dizzee’s instinctive ad-libs on radio sets and Sidewinder mixes with DJ Slimzee in the 2001–03 period, his off-the-cuff reactions to the year zero tunes being faded in by his DJ: ‘two thousand and slew … this is the new ice age’, ‘playing all these end of the world beats … all these tunes sound like judgement day’, ‘this is divine intervention stupid … now we’re going to start getting space age’. Embracing those unknown frontiers was a mark of pride for the grime generation: ‘Millennium time!’ one of the Diamond Click MCs announces as the tectonic bass drops on Jammer’s 2003 classic ‘Don’t Ya Know’ – millennium time for those brave enough to be ready for it, even though ‘nuff man still stuck in 1990s’.12

There is a kind of shlocky horror show melodrama to many of grime’s formative instrumentals, often reflected in the naming as well as the sonics: Danny Weed’s seminal and irresistible ‘Creeper’, a kind of prancing Halloween ghoul lurking in the shadows, Target’s ‘Poltergeist’, tracks by Macabre Unit, or Terror Danjah’s work, tracks like ‘Creepy Crawler’ and ‘Gremlin’, stamped with his trademark sinister chuckle. The same goes for much of the sublow sound of west London’s Jon E Cash and his crew Black Ops, where, on ‘Spanish Fly’, a 1950s B-movie quality is granted by an unnerving tickle of Spanish guitar, before the glowering bassline kicks in. Other pioneering producers like Waifer and Young Dot created maximal, militaristic instrumental assaults, turning strings, hiccups and other sound effects into deadly weapons – anthems like the former’s ‘Grime’ and the latter’s ‘Bazooka VIP’ left little space for the MC; or at the very least, demanded a huge effort and big lungs to keep up.

What is unnerving and uncanny and which differentiates grime’s sonics from darker garage, is the sheer alien newness of the bass sound (dark bass was not invented by grime, as any junglist will tell you) and frequently off-kilter arrangements, all jolts, awkward gaps and juddering surprises. Wiley’s eskimo creations were perhaps the pinnacle of this: taken to the extreme on his ‘devil mixes’. These were remixes of tracks like ‘Eskimo’, ‘Colder’ and ‘Avalanche’ made even more sinister by stripping the drums out, inspired partly by the dub versions his dad’s reggae sound system had created, but so named because they ‘sounded evil’. As if to highlight the ungodly power they had, the devil mixes sold really well, and Wiley used the proceeds to buy a car, which he then crashed. Convinced that his creations were cursed and too powerful to control, he insisted on calling them ‘bass mixes’ after that.

Before it hardened down into the fabric, Jammer, Dizzee, Danny Weed and Wiley drew another strain of futurism into this creatively molten moment: what’s come to be known as sinogrime, a glitch of Chinese instrumentation in grime’s normally stable sonic geography (the UK and Jamaica, with a bit of US rap swagger, house from Chicago and syncopation from West Africa). Grime’s instinctive (and functional) tech-positivity is what always helped it feel like sonic futurism incarnate: rejecting the organic clutter of live instrumentation in favour of empty space, dehumanised synths and cyborg basslines. I was unlucky enough to see Roll Deep play a one-off show with a live band at the Stratford Rex in 2005, and it was all kinds of wrong – the wholesome twang of the live bass guitar the antithesis to grime’s aesthetic (let us not even deign to discuss Ed Sheeran’s strumming collaborations with grime MCs). Grime is situated in the future aesthetically, and perhaps embedded in sinogrime’s Chinese elements is a sort of intuition about where the future lies, geopolitically. In looking east beyond the blinking light of One Canada Square, sinogrime producers were offering a kind of accidental socio-political prophecy, taking grime’s acquisitive tendencies and sending them east on a journey beyond Britain’s pre-2008 bubble.

Following the history of slum clearances, Luftwaffe bombing, empty warehouses and managed decline, by the early 2000s east London had become the archetype of the post-industrial city. The future had gone to China, and grime instinctively followed. You can hear it in the delicate sino scales on Dizzee’s ‘Do It’, a minor lament, as the rough and tough drums try and put a brave face on the poignant instrumentation and deeply depressive lyrics (‘Feds don’t understand us, adults don’t understand us, no one understands us’, he mumbles, forlorn, on the intro13). On the stunning ‘I Luv U Remix’, what might be a MIDI (digitised) version of a guzheng or guqin – Chinese stringed instruments – is used to play out a light but intensely melodic bed for the MCs’ heartfelt lyrical sketches, accompanied only by the sparest, subtlest snatches of bass and drum. Wiley and Danny Weed’s ‘Blue Rizla’, Jammer’s ‘Weed Man’, and Kode9’s ‘Sinogrime Minimix’ are all in this category. Of course, there is a direct influence from the staple teenage boy’s cultural diet of Wu Tang Clan, kung-fu movies, and video games like Mortal Kombat: indeed one of Dizzee’s best teenage productions, ‘Street Fighter’, was lifted directly from the game’s theme tune.

Another pinnacle of emotive sinogrime built this connection in a more direct way. Watching a video of the 1993 Jet Li film Twin Warriors with his dad, Jammer was struck by the heartstrings-tugging theme music, in particular one ear-worm of a snippet. He was determined to sample it, and after playing around with TV leads and Scart plugs, he managed to wire the VHS to his mixing desk. ‘It came straight off the VHS,’ he told me, justifiably proud of his teenage ingenuity. ‘That’s why it sounds so grainy – but it kind of adds to the emotional power of it. Now music’s very digital and very focused, and cleaner – but in those days, that’s what you had to do, to improvise to build the sound you wanted, and it was rougher, but had a lot of heart too. Like a lot of the records I made at that time, it was emotional, orchestral stuff – when that underground sound was flourishing.’ The MCs didn’t miss an opportunity to respond to the emotional vulnerabilities in the instrumental, ‘Chinaman’, built around a beautiful, elegiac flute loop – there’s a clip from Deja Vu in 2003 of MC Stormin spitting: ‘Where do I go from here? Shed a little tear for my friend that I lost this year, back in the day we used to go everywhere/Same things that make you love make you cry, everybody that you seem to love seems to die.’14 ‘Chinaman’ became the instrumental to Sharky Major’s ‘This Ain’t A Game’ – the perfect partner for Sharky’s soul-searching lyrics. ‘I feel like I’m not as good as people say I am, I know I can spit ten times better than I’ve ever done – see me rise with the morning sun,’15 he pleads. He’s surrounded by criminals, cops and people who’ve ‘never seen a day’s work’, and the dream of ‘superstar status’ is his only possible option. He never did get there, or even very close, but he did make one of the greatest reflective grime tunes of all time.

Swept up in the creative ferment of the early millennium, other young producers who had grown up on jungle and UK garage started making music that sounded nothing like them. Skepta’s first release, more than a year before he ever picked up the mic, was a reworking of ‘Pulse X’ and ‘Eskimo’, released in 2002 on Wiley’s label as ‘Pulse Eskimo’. It’s an utterly ferocious instrumental track, and accompanied by an appropriately grimy conception story. It was built with Music 2000 on the PlayStation One (at this stage Skepta and his brother Jme were even making beats using the game Mario Paint) – and before Wiley signed it up, Skepta was playing it on his show on a pirate-radio station in Tottenham, Heat 96.6 FM. ‘I gave it to a few DJs in the hope they’d start playing it,’ Skepta recalled, ‘and one of them, I don’t know if it was Mac 10 from Nasty Crew, or Karnage from Roll Deep, well they played it at Sidewinder, and when they played it, on the drop, someone started letting off gunshots in the dance.’ Chaos ensued, mercifully no one was injured – and ever since, the tune has been known by the nickname Gunshot Riddim. It’s an appropriate testament to the sheer power of a grime instrumental.

While these new creations were honed by more experienced former junglists like Wiley and Geeneus, a younger generation, still in their mid-teens, were just starting out with making music, developing the new sound and their mic skills in schools and youth clubs. Grime as a genre, and a scene, was built on an astonishing level of youthful autonomy and self-sufficiency – but for all its entrepreneurial, DIY vigour and self-starting rhetoric, the state played a little-noticed role in some of its earliest developments. For one thing, there was the youth clubs. Dizzee describes an informal circuit of them as his apprenticeship on the mic, ‘going from youth club to youth club, it started there’ – they would travel to youth clubs in Canning Town (east London), Deptford (south-east) and further east to Beckton, Kano’s local. It was at Lincoln Arches youth club in Bow (long since closed down), part of the Lincoln North Estate, where Wiley, Dizzee, Nasty Crew and Ruff Sqwad among others would hang out, play table tennis and pool, and then sometimes be allowed to have raves, where they’d practise spitting over garage and proto-grime. ‘Friday night after school you’d think, “Yes, I need to go to the Linc, I need to go clubbing, I need to impress everyone and the girls there,”’ Tinchy Stryder recalled a few years later.

Another youth club, across the other side of Canary Wharf in the Isle of Dogs, was responsible for financing Ruff Sqwad’s first ever release, the squalling, punky ‘Tings In Boots’. ‘Obviously you needed money to put out a song, and we were still in school. Jeff and Jo, who ran that youth club on the Isle of Dogs, they were sort of the unsung heroes of grime,’ Rapid said. ‘They saw our talents, they sort of managed us, they thought yeah we’ll put a couple of hundred quid into actually bringing this out.’ Other times they’d pool their dinner money to fund their early vinyl releases. And the elders on the nascent local scene were always there to help them too, with advice, practical hands-on tips and financial support: ‘When we got further down the line with our productions, we used to go down to Jammer’s basement and give him the parts, I remember he was like, “Raps, Dirt, your tunes are banging, but you have to get mixdowns,” and we were like, “What’s that?” We didn’t know what that was! We were like “What do you do?” – by then he was already well into making grime and releasing records. From people like Jammer and Wiley we got a lot of energy around then.’

And then there was school, as a meeting point for practice, socialising and developing musical skills. Shystie’s transformative experience, taking her from hobbyist MC with a 9–5 job she hated, was the decision to study sound engineering at FE College, ‘[where] I realised: I could really do this!’ – after a whirlwind year, she signed to Polydor, and didn’t go back for the second year of the course. The most famous example of the importance of school comes from Dizzee Rascal’s teacher Tim Smith, who garnered some press attention after Boy in da Corner won the Mercury Prize in 2003; the story resonated as a redemptive one, of the singular faith of a mentor who refused to abandon hope – Dizzee had been expelled from two secondary schools already, and was placed at Langdon Park in Poplar, where Tim Smith was Head of Arts; he gave him the space to get on with his music, even after he had been expelled from all his other classes. Sent home from school one day for misbehaviour, angry and frustrated, Dizzee wrote some of his most well-known rave bars: ‘lyrical tank, box an MC like my name was Frank/going on dirty, going on stank.’16 ‘You could vent, I think that’s why I loved MCing,’ he told Radio 1 recently. The school was, like most state comprehensives, chronically short of resources, and the music department’s PCs had been donated by Morgan Stanley, and some of the other major banking corporations in Canary Wharf – via the LDDC, in fact.

On Dizzee’s first day, Smith left him to his own devices, sitting at a PC playing with Cubase. ‘After about 20 minutes, one of the pair of teachers said, “You’ve got to come over and see this.” Most kids are happy to have got a few bars down, but he had already zoomed ahead. He could quickly get information down, but what was most unusual was he would then spend a lot of time refining it – a lot of youngsters wanted to create music, but weren’t as interested in total refinement of a sound. He could string quite a complex rhythmic pattern together, in 20 to 30 minutes, but then be quite happy to spend a week refining and editing.’ On Monday evenings after school, a drop-in session funded by Tower Hamlets Summer University gave him a further opportunity to work on beats; Smith loaned Dizzee Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams CDs, minimalist composers and favourites of his – there was some connection there, in the use of space, he thought. (Hyperdub founder and musical and academic polymath Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman once said of dubstep that you should ‘dance to the gaps’, a sonic architecture which was shared with some of the more sparse early grime instrumentals, when neither had ‘taken the name’.)

Towards the end of Year 11, Dylan Mills was excluded from all his lessons, after more misbehaviour – but a forgiving headmaster knew that three expulsions, statistically, would most likely lead to a bad downwards spiral, and asked Smith if Dizzee could just sit quietly in the music room with him. So Dizzee would sit alone and work on his music for those last months, and occasionally help Smith teach Cubase to the Year 7s.

‘The music was awesome,’ Smith told me, who has retired from teaching, but now sits on the board of Rinse FM. ‘Nobody else had written music like that, with those really sharp, intricate beats, but sometimes just dropping out to nothing. And that is the hardest thing in music, to create space. And that showed particular talent, especially for someone so young, and you can hear it on Boy in da Corner, to know that you shouldn’t overload it. In Cubase you get quite a visual image of what you’re going to hear – and he would colour code, so you can see when something’s going to be repeated.’

Boy in da Corner was a significant development from the music he made at school, but those basics of creating space were definitely learned there. ‘The giveaways were the very very sharp beats,’ Smith told me. ‘He would compose at about 80bpm – most youngsters were into about 120 – but he would have a deliberately slow beat, so that you could sub-divide each beat, not into 2 but into 4. That’s where you get the really sharp, interesting sound. He would draw it in, so it was filled, and erase certain bits of it, so it had a gap. That’s where that unexpected break in the music came from.’

Many of Dizzee’s instrumental creations in his mid-teens were unfiltered, unvarnished beats, breaks and synths. He spun gold from the most basic and unadorned of sound palettes: the songs he wrote in Langdon Park School were constructed from their kit of a small mixer and Cubase software on the second-hand PCs, using the Cubase sound pack. Simplicity, and the idea of having the beat already ringing around his head, seemed to lead to a very methodical, straightforward composition process. It was the least of experimental techniques to achieve the most ‘experimental’ of sounds – an inborn tendency to the avant-garde, no oblique strategies required:

‘I was always fucking about with some weird noise,’ he said to me a decade or so later, in a break from rehearsing the Boy in da Corner revival show. ‘All the samples were just lined up on the keyboard, I never used an MPC, so each key is a different sample. Those times I would usually start with the drums. “I Luv U”, I definitely started with the drums, and then built around it.’ On both Boy in da Corner and Showtime there are moments that reject not only simple pop structures and sensibilities, but any ‘songiness’ at all – part of his desire to move London electronic music on from UK garage, Dizzee once said, was because it was ‘all too nice-sounding’. Even the regularity and order of a simple 8-bar grime track is absent from tracks like ‘Knock, Knock’, on Showtime, a beat that constantly splits off at awkward angles and refuses to settle down. On ‘Brand New Day’, from his debut, Dizzee juxtaposes the most desperately depressive, real-world lyrical narratives with production of breathtaking otherworldliness. It is almost indescribable: effortlessly light, like someone running their finger around the rim of a glass, but it also makes you queasy, like you’re spinning down a plughole, out of control. In Dizzee’s teenage hands, the Japanese three-stringed shamisen becomes something between an earworm and an inner-ear infection.

‘I think it’s really important that you shouldn’t be afraid to use something if you like it, no matter how fucked the sound,’ Dizzee told Sound on Sound magazine in 2004, explaining his use of the shamisen. ‘Some people process sounds too much, but to me, that defeats the object … I felt that it was a really interesting sound, which didn’t remind me of anything else. I like using sounds that are about as “out there” as they come.’

Tim Smith noted that when Dizzee arrived in his GCSE music class at 14 he was already very comfortable with creating clear structures, and balancing rhythm, bass and melody – that he knew what the song sounded like in his head already, and the only challenge would be making it a reality. Tellingly, and unusually, many of the vocal recordings on Boy in da Corner were first takes: Dizzee’s pirate-radio training – as well as the street hustle of practising in the playground or around the estate – meant he could just walk in and get it right first time. But that one-take skill also helps explain the album’s vocal rawness, and its freshness. ‘I’ll never forget da way you kept the faith in me, even when things looked grim,’ he wrote in tribute to Smith on the album sleeve. Smith casually mentioned to me that he still had 33 tracks Dizzee composed back then. ‘I couldn’t pass them on to anyone,’ he said, seeing the glint in my eye, but reassured me they were at least fully backed up (many classic instrumentals have been lost over the years in hard-drive meltdowns). We agreed maybe some kind of donation to the British Library sound archive would be in order.

It takes a village to raise a scene, and it gives that scene an extraordinary power and coherence when everyone in the village suddenly becomes obsessed with it. Appearing on Commander B’s Choice FM show in 2002, Wiley was asked about his ongoing beef with Durrty Doogz (later Goodz) – who did the fans think was winning, of the two of them? He told the radio host he ‘wasn’t really interested’ in what listeners in the world at large thought – there was only one audience which counted. ‘Home is where it matters,’ he said. ‘I care about my own area, I’d rather be the top boy in my own area – I want to be the top boy in east.’

MC Griminal, one of the younger of several members of the Ramsay family to become a key figure in the grime scene (older brothers Marcus Nasty and Mak 10 were founders and legendary DJs with Nasty Crew), tells a story of being an 11-year-old at St Bonaventure’s School in Forest Gate, when Tinchy Stryder, several years his senior, and already well known on the local scene, approached him, handed him a CD of his tracks, and a £10 note for his troubles, telling him to make sure Mak 10 got it. ‘None of my mates could believe that Tinchy was coming up to me, or that Dizzee was at my house,’ Griminal told local paper the Newham Recorder eight years later, in 2010. It was the era of hyper-local celebrity, even while almost all of the celebrities in question were living in cramped council homes with their parents, or sharing bedrooms with their siblings. When Slimzee’s gran went to the Woolworths on Roman Road, five minutes walk from their house, to buy his Bingo Beats CD, she saw two teenage girls enthusiastically pawing it. ‘That DJ Slimzee is my grandson,’ she told them, much to their excitement.

‘We started to become local-famous,’ Kano recalled in the Made in the Manor documentary. These years of dedicated community-based underground music making, in youth clubs, pirate-radio sets and house parties, made for a unique kind of apprenticeship, and a quietly confident mindset, once the stage unexpectedly became much bigger a few years later. ‘What helped when we broke through,’ Kano continued, ‘was the practice hours that we put in, performing in front of like, 20 people.’ When he was signed to 679, and was booked to do his first proper gig outside the manor, opening for The Streets, he wasn’t overly worried. ‘It was my first time performing in front of that many people, but I had put in so much hours, and made all my mistakes behind closed doors, that it was cool. We got to make our mistakes in someone’s kitchen, on a pirate radio.’

‘Let us know you’re locked.’ Rinse FM aerial, 2009

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