“I’ve wasted too much time,” says D Double E, in an uncharacteristically sombre moment, between mouthfuls of sausage and mash in his local pub in east London. It’s 14 years since the self-professed Newham General – the MCs’ MC, the fans’ favourite – was first (and last) interviewed in the Guardian, and his impatience is understandable.

Back then, in grime’s breakout period, when the genre was only just acquiring the name, there was a tumult of hype, expectation and raw talent drawing mainstream interest. Even at that early stage, D Double E was seen as something of a veteran – like Wiley, he was a vital few years older than teenage crews like Ruff Sqwad and Meridian, from which Tinchy Stryder and Skepta would emerge respectively. After leaving the legendary Nasty Crew, following a falling-out with Marcus Nasty, he was ready to graduate from a thriving if chaotic underground scene. “I’m not a little kid any more,” he said in that 2004 interview, “I wanna be an artist, man.” He has not stopped making music, or performing, in the intervening decade and a half – which makes it pretty extraordinary that D Double is only now releasing a debut album.

Born Darren Dixon, his status on the grime scene is difficult to overstate. He is the one who inspired Dizzee Rascal, originally a DJ, to pick up the mic. In 2015 Skepta called him, without hesitating, “the greatest grime MC of all time”. Wiley recently recalled that “the root of all this grime business” was him and D Double performing at house parties in east London in the 90s. Chipmunk referenced D Double’s classic early material on his first single, Fire Alie (“back in the day I’d lock into Deja, hear D Double spit birds in the Sky”). The 38-year-old MC personifies grime’s evolution as a genre born of pirate radio and rave culture – where the MC is a host in the Jamaican sound-system tradition, responding spontaneously to the DJ’s live selections, rather than a polished, managed artist laying down pre-written pop songs in a studio, playing the (white) industry game.

In those early days, grime was not a visible genre, and to distinguish themselves from the clamour on a multi-MC pirate radio show, an idiosyncratic vocal style, memorable ad-libs and a verbal audio-logo were invaluable parts of the MCs’ armoury. On these terms, D Double’s charisma soon made him a pirate legend. The “D Double signal” was an immediately recognisable announcement of his arrival at a rave or on a radio set, like a music-hall performer peering his head around the side of the curtain, before stepping out on to the stage. Written non-phonetically, in standard English, it looks comical – “Ooh, ooh! It’s me, me!” – but it’s spread out over about nine or 10 syllables, a visceral vocal exorcism from somewhere deep in the lungs. (“That’s very original: never heard that from another individual,” runs an old school D Double lyric, commentating on his own style.)

D Double grew up in Forest Gate in the 80s and 90s, surrounded by reggae and American hip-hop. He would write out Snoop Dogg lyrics while simultaneously falling in love with pop music: classics by the likes of Neneh Cherry and Dawn Penn – he sings the latter’s No, No, No to me, screwing up his face in mock-emotional tribute. He clearly loves making people laugh, an entertainer whether the mic is in his hand or not: doing silly voices, impersonating a subwoofer, and doing theatrical renditions of everything from jungle MCs to CeCe Peniston. He gets that gregarious “dapper Dan” style from his father, he says: “You look at photos of him from back in the day, it’s like Eddie Murphy in Raw: full leathers, V-neck with the hairy chest – when my dad walks down the road, everyone knows him, you know?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest D Double E on Wanstead Flats in east London. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

There was a lot of togetherness in the early grime scene, he recalls – they’d travel from Newham to Bow to meet Wiley, or to south London or Hackney for raves and pirate radio sets. “It felt more like a community, it felt a bit closer,” he says. “We had to work our way out of certain conditions – it used to be quite racist back in the day in east London.” That spirit was forged by “guys linking to make music in bedrooms and youth centres, and most of all in radio stations. That gave us the platform, it helped so much.” After a decade in which grime has come to dominate pop culture, and where the illegal stations have been largely replaced by the likes of BBC Radio 1Xtra and Rinse FM, the pirate era seems like a lost world.

“The stations felt like traps man,” he laughs. “Some of them never had proper doors, they were just abandoned houses, you could just push the door open and walk in, and so then when you’re on air spitting, you’re looking around thinking, ‘Who’s going to come in?’ Or sometimes it would be in a normal household, so you walk in, see the kids playing, mum’s cooking dinner, you say hello to the uncles and then you go upstairs to the bedroom, and it’s a radio station! It wasn’t always about recording what you were doing, sometimes it was just that your mate’s got some decks in his bedroom, so let’s all have a mix.”

Those teenage experiments are where his hilarious ad-libs come from: the D Double signal, but also other catchphrases like “bi-di-bup-bup” or “bluku bluku”, lyrical idiosyncrasies traceable back to both his and grime’s origins in jungle and drum’n’bass in the 90s. “Those echoes come from spraying in that freestyle way – that spur-of-the-moment energy, that’s where the magic is. We had to create grime, because we needed it for our spirits, as spitters – because we’re coming from drum’n’bass, which is so open, like, ‘Spray your heart out G, spray your lungs out!’”

After Dizzee was signed and won the Mercury prize, he wanted to bring through his teenage hero, and approached D Double about joining his new label, Dirtee Stank. D Double agreed, on the condition he signed his new crew, Newham Generals, which he had formed with fellow local MCs’ Footsie and Monkstar. Touring as Dizzee’s support act in front of new audiences unfamiliar with their pirate fame was a learning curve, he says. “It was an eye opener, it was the first time I got to see what living the real life would be, outside of the clubs, sweating in the small raves. It put us in a spot where we had to learn how to entertain differently.” In the best part of a decade signed to Dirtee Stank, the crew only released one album, Generally Speaking, in 2009, and a smattering of classic solo singles, like D Double’s Streetfighter Riddim – there was a sense among fans of constant postponements, and that the releases weren’t capturing the brilliance of the MCs’ live performances.

“That whole period was just frustrating,” he says now, adding that there is another Newham Generals album “in the tank”, which will see a release at some point. “I had too many people telling me different things. But I think it had to happen – and the freedom I have now, with my independent label, Bluku Music: I run the label myself, and I handle the artists myself. It’s all coming from the right organic corners … and I’m in control of what’s happening. It’s like grabbing a hold of the horses yourself. I’ve always just been sitting there, waiting for somebody to tell me when, but I want to tell myself when. I don’t want anyone telling me what to do, that’s the way forward.”

His debut solo album, Jackuum!, features guest spots from fellow grime originals Wiley, Skepta and younger MCs AJ Tracey and Littlez, but the sound is distinctively D Double – the skippy flow and cheeky persona shines through. He’s so taken with his newfound independence, he’s already making his next one. It feels like an overdue epiphany, and an opportunity to take two decades of free-flowing lyrical brilliance and spontaneity, and canalise it into something widely accessible, and lasting. Most of all, he seems happy.

“I’ve won people over with entertainment, but I haven’t been able to prove myself. People say ‘D Double’s the best, he’s the best!’, but what is there to prove that? There isn’t even an album, there’s just verses and bars. I want to give the people my music – they don’t want those 16 bars no more, they want a product. I’m doing what I should have been doing years ago: being a free spirit.”

• Jackuum! is out now on Bluku Music. Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime by Dan Hancox is published by William Collins.

