Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. Dan Hancox
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
FOUR
The first few years of the new millennium were also the end of an era. Grime’s first flush of youth, before it took the name, took place in the last days of a wilder, rougher metropolis; before a swathe of council estate regenerations began and others were demolished altogether. The demographics in areas like Bow, Stratford and Lewisham would grow ever more affluent, as richer people moved in, and New Labour plastered London with CCTV – a change intimately connected to their Urban Renaissance strategy to bring the middle classes back to the inner cities.
Until that point, illegal and semi-legal economies, black markets, cottage industries and thriving sub-cultures circling around inner London were essential to the informal city. In east London in particular, coping strategies in the face of entrenched poverty had long been part of the fabric: ducking and diving, wheeling and dealing, while the proximity to the Thames and docks meant historically the black market was always thriving.1 There is very little left of the informal city now, and pirate radio in the grime era might be the last bastion of truly autonomous, urban working-class self-expression – autonomous in the sense that it is possible to make a living from it, without the approval, or profit extraction, of the whiter, wealthier established British culture industries.
Mostly, it wasn’t about making money at all. In fact, DJs would pay monthly ‘subs’ of £20 or £25 for the upkeep of their station, and broadcast to a narrow radius of only a few miles, for the sheer love of it – although, in return for their subs, equipment and dubplates, came rave bookings, record sales, and a just-about-sustainable living. It’s hard to overstate how vital the pirates have been to the incubation and growth of eighties and nineties dance genres, from acid house and soul through ragga, jungle, happy hardcore, dubstep, UK garage, bassline, funky house, and so much else of the UK dance family tree. Their proliferation had reached a high point by the early 2000s, and they were the lifeblood of grime in its embryonic period: a meeting point; a testing and rehearsal ground for new and established talent, live on the mic and on the decks; a place where hits and stars were made; a communication channel and a binding agent, for the community contained within earshot. ‘I came from nothing. I came from the underground, the pirate-radio scene,’ Dizzee Rascal said in his Mercury Prize acceptance speech in 2003. ‘If you don’t acknowledge it, it will creep up anyway.’
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