Let me start off by saying your Thank You EP, for me, is one of your best releases to date and easily one of the best grime sets of the year. You and I spoke about it briefly when Complex premiered it back in April, but tell me a bit more about the whole concept.



It came from the fact that I’ve been heavily supported throughout the years. There’s been so many different artists doing different things when grime was at its lowest point, when there was no commercial radio play or anything, but I was still able to continue killing shows around the world with my original sound. I was in Japan in 2014... I was doing shows everywhere. When I sit back and think about it, I’ve actually done a lot. When people were saying grime is dead, it definitely wasn’t for me. Even putting on my birthday rave recently, people were turning up in droves. It was mad! And there was no big machine behind me with that. Everyone was like, “Who was your PR? Who’s your team?” My Twitter and Facebook! When I realised that, I realised I definitely needed to give back to the fans and supporters. I just recorded those tunes with that in mind. When you say it’s one of my best, I kind of feel like that as well. I went back to the old me of listening to the first Money Over Everyone to hearing the kind of beats that are going on now. The beats that are going on now sound like the beats from 2009/2010. So I kind of merged the two within the space of six tracks. It’s like a mini album.

You’ve got a very personal track on there called “There For You”, where you talk about love, friendship and your newborn child. How important do you think it is for grime artists to show other sides to their life and a bit of emotion on wax?



I think it’s the most important thing in any artist’s career. We already have like 10 million MCs and they’re all saying the same thing. The scene will die out if there’s nothing more to it, and there are different personalities in every human being. Like, there’s girls out there who don’t understand what a skeng is [laughs]. So you need to have a tune where you just approach things differently. That’s what I always rated Jme for; he breaks down everything so that everyone understands and I think all MCs should consider that. Yeah, you can do your leng man tune but at least make it a story or make it more interesting. Even Jamal [Edwards], when he lets people freestyle on his channel, he’s stopped accepting just anything. He wants it to fully make sense. It’s more interesting if you explain the whole story. We’re not born as animals, but we take the mic and start acting like it. We need to tell them the journey and explain the ends is really like this and the reasons why. So I think it’s important to not only explain things, but definitely show you’re a human being as well. You fall in love or out of love. You have a life outside of music.

Grime’s quiet period—let’s talk about that. I always make a point to say the scene never died, but lyrically, it did have its down moment. What do you think it is that stopped the lyricism flourishing from 2010 to 2013?



What happened at the start was you had the top 10 MCs—this is before I was even popping—you had your Wileys, your Skeptas, your Devlins, your Wretch 32s. You had all of those guys but they all got deals. When they got deals, they got massive. I don’t know if they felt like it was too much. I don’t know what it was for them, but all the pirate radio stuff stopped. Just doing tunes because it’s what we do in grime—that stopped. “It’s not a single so I can’t do it. It’s not gonna be a Radio 1 single so I can’t do it.” That was all going on, and then pirate radio saw it and did the same. A lot of my generation and younger looked at that and started behaving the same way, too. So no one released anything; no one was releasing any grime vocals. Producers were releasing instrumentals EPs and whatnot, but not one artist was taking an instrumental and saying “I own this.” No one was doing that for a good few years. For me, that’s what made me think it’s kind of our fault why grime dipped. It never died but it dipped because all the champions went and did something else. The only thing that’s different this time round is the champions are now doing what they’re known for. They’re not changing. They’re doing tunes. Like Skepta; even though he’s just dropped his album, he’s going out and recording tunes and saying “This is my single and it’s hard.” He didn’t care if Radio 1 played it and it didn’t matter because they played it anyway.

The first time we properly worked together was in 2009, when I booked you for my ChockABlock rave. The good old days! How do you feel about the scene’s live element right now?



It can get back to those days, but we need more events. We need more grime events, and they need to be run by people who know what was going on back then. You know what you’re doing now, and you knew what you were doing then. You were in the scene, J. You were at every rave! Even if it wasn’t your rave, you were there as a fan anyway and not just there to document it. When you put on a grime rave, it always had the sickest line-up. Nowadays, you’ve got promoters who bring just anyone together. The line-ups are proper weird. One minute you’re hearing a slow ting, next minute it’s a jump-up ting. That’s weird to me [laughs]. That’s not what a grime rave should be like, and that’s why we need to bring it back to how it was in ‘09. We need to take more control. We need to stop letting any promoter come with their money and put on these nights and use us to sell tickets. Since my birthday rave, I’ve decided to put on a regular event called Originators. I’ve got my first night on July 22 at Fabric. Footsie as well, he’s got King Original; he’s been doing good things with that as well. And that’s what it’s got to be: more people taking it into their own hands and running it how we know it should be. Then, hopefully, it’ll be back to that vibe of ‘09. I remember we used to go Cable and only a few people would be booked, but everyone was in there. Every week without fail! But we don’t have that anymore.