Inner City Pressure. Dan Hancox

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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.’

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       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.

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