Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. Dan Hancox
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William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
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.
Contents
PROLOGUE: DON’T HOLD HIM BACK!
FIVE: THE MAINSTREAM AND THE MANOR
SIX: GRIME WAVES AND THE RESPECT AGENDA
SEVEN: NEIGHBOURHOOD NATIONALISM
NINE: DIY AND REDEMPTION SONGS
ELEVEN: GENTRIFICATION AND THE MANOR REMADE
TWELVE: A TRUE URBAN RENAISSANCE
THIRTEEN: THE REAL PRIME MINISTERS
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