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.
