Inner City Pressure. Dan Hancox
– 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.
That neighbourhood scene in the nineties thrived via word of mouth, pirate-radio broadcasts, and one critical performance arena: ‘The root of all this grime business, of grime MCing, was house parties,’ Wiley said to me in 2016, while recording The Godfather, his eleventh album (or fortieth, if you count all the mixtapes). ‘Proper house parties, with a proper system, all across Bow and Newham when we were teenagers. We’d go and jump on the mic, and clash each other.’ SS Crew would get invited to perform at any house parties around E3; they’d be walking around Bow carrying their decks and boxes of records.
‘That was the first taste of when you get that energy back from the crowd,’ Target recalled. ‘We couldn’t believe it, like, “Whoa, this is sick!” At that stage we didn’t ever think we could get paid, there was no future plan: just the excitement of participating. It was a sense of community, definitely, it was. At the time we wouldn’t have used words like that, but that’s what it was. We were all from the same area, loads of us were into music, DJing or MCing, and when Rinse started we actually had a base, and the chance to be heard by people who didn’t already know us. Going on Rinse and having a text from say, Stacey in East Ham, felt incredible – it was like going international. It was like having your track go Top 10 in Spain or something, it was that exciting.’
As London’s millennium wheel first began to turn, the sun began to set on UK garage, its glossy pop moment cast in shadow. The younger generation of MCs and DJs had had years of training on the mic and on the decks, but if they were being pushed out by their elders, the response was to turn their outcast status into something they could be proud of and control. Before it had acquired a genre name, grime’s young talents, those too young or too angry to feel UK garage was theirs, began creating a new sound, riffing on some of that weirder, darker garage, the kind with broken beats instead of 2-step’s shuffle and swing: the kind that was too awkwardly shaped to wear designer-label shirts and smart shoes to the club. They would eventually overwhelm British pop, doing so with the barest minimum of equipment, and in most cases with almost no formal musical training. They taught themselves and each other, and used software like Napster, Kazaa and Limewire to downloaded illegal ‘cracked’ versions of simple music production software like FruityLoops Studio. To begin with, that was the closest grime’s pioneers would come to a studio.
Grime, in its first years, sounded as if it had crash-landed in the present with no past, and no future – a time-travelling experiment gone horribly, fascinatingly wrong; a broken flux capacitor glowing amidst the smouldering wreckage, a neon light pulsing in the mist. While on one side of the A13, Canary Wharf’s tenants enriched themselves to dizzying new heights, the sounds emanating from the tower blocks barely a mile away declaimed through the airwaves that there was more than one east London. There was an alien futurism to a lot of the computer-generated aesthetics – the reason why some of the bleeps and bloops sounded like noises made by spaceships from computer games was because they were in fact made on games consoles: most famously a piece of software for the first PlayStation, called Music 2000. A lot of So Solid Crew’s first album was built on this very elementary software; as was Dizzee’s ‘Stand Up Tall’. Producers like Jme and Smasher made their first tunes on it, recorded them to MiniDisc, and then had vinyl dubplates cut straight from the MiniDisc – without going anywhere near a recording studio.
Mixdowns are usually seen as a crucial stage of the recording process even for the most entry-level producer, where the elements created are refined and balanced out to create a clean and coherent whole – but with grime they sometimes didn’t happen at all, before the tunes were cut to vinyl and released, either as dubplates or for general release to record shops. This applies even to the instrumental frequently cited as the first proper grime tune, Youngstar’s ‘Pulse X’. The spirit of the period echoes the famous punk mantra, ‘Here’s a chord. Here’s another. Here’s a third. Now form a band.’
DJ Logan Sama, for one, was happy enough with the devil-may-care approach to technical proficiency. ‘I don’t give a shit if a record is mastered well or not,’ Sama said to me back in 2006, then a new graduate from the pirate-radio scene to the legit world and new sofas of KISS FM. ‘All I care about is the reaction it gets when I play it in a club. How technically well-made art is doesn’t matter: it’s art. Why would you want to analyse it on its technical merits? It’s not an exam. My white label of