Dan Hancox - Inner City Pressure - The Story of Grime

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins..

Source ISBN: 9780008257132

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008257149

Version: 2018-07-18

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

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

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